Deus Ex: Human Revolution
I've been putting about as much time as I can into Human Revolution since Monday night, and there are a bunch of things I want to talk about. Most of my thoughts regarding the game are still pretty unorganized. In a nutshell, though, I would say that I'm having fun, but there are a million little imperfections that keep it from being really great. And while I'm not all that disappointed in the game, I am (yet again) pretty disappointed in the publishing-critical complex.
Particularly, there have been several reviews for the PC version which state, quite assuringly, things like "the PC version does nearly everything right." Well, that's a lie -- I would say it's a stretch to call this PC version anything more than adequate, and even that's only in the context of today's AAA PC games being ported from console versions. Loading times are always unreasonably long -- even on my 6-core 3.7 GHz machine, where the game is installed to a SATA-3 SSD. Both myself and a buddy who have ATI graphics cards have had a huge issue trying to change video settings: once we changed the antialiasing or texture sampling at all, the game refused to run until they were turned down to the lowest possible values -- the game complains that our video hardware can't handle it, even when the settings are returned to their defaults, which were running just fine.
And perhaps most fundamentally, mouse controls in menus and other point-and-click situations (like the hacking minigame) are undeniably broken. Hovering over a button is rarely enough to put it in focus; I usually need to hover out and back on again, or click on it a first time - like a pre-click - to make the button selectable. And as a result of this focus problem, clicking on a button doesn't always click that button, which can be especially frustrating when I'm trying to hack a node, but the game ends up using one of my special items on it instead.
The depressing point about all this is, it's really no worse than, say, Mass Effect. That is: while the PC version was very clearly not well-taken care of, and the PC experience does suffer somewhat as a result, it is something that the modern-day PC gamer has become accustomed to. Publishers can say with a straight face that they paid special attention to the PC controls, but it doesn't matter, because we stopped listening to those assholes a long time ago.
Anyway -- I'm going to be complaining about nit-picky issues like this a lot more over the next few days, but the game is still basically fun. I spent my first several hours in Detroit just exploring the city and breaking into people's apartments, and now as I'm progressing in the city's missions, my challenges of finding information on this guy, or locating this gang's secret hideout, are practically already done. That's pretty cool.
Progress: Dilapidated factory