Playing A Game Deus Ex: Human Revolution PC

I'm going to rattle through a few bullet points:

  • A broad and ambitious production
  • It is pretty cool how open-ended the mission structure is
  • The narrative, with all its player-choice twists and foibles, is interesting but comes across as incomplete
  • The melee system is begging for some added depth
  • Making my initial accuracy shitty, and keeping it shitty unless I invest in it, isn't okay
  • The enemy AI is a little baffling
  • The mouse is beyond the comprehension of most of the game's menus
  • The hacking minigames ... are pretty neat
  • Boss fights ... [are] retarded

All of these things are true about Deus Ex: Human Revolution -- but I actually wrote them back in February, regarding Alpha Protocol. I found myself recalling Michael Thorton's adventure frequently throughout DXHR. In many ways, the games are extremely similar: generally speaking, because they are both broad-reaching games with great potential, which is fulfilled enough to make the game fun - under the right circumstances - but is also obvious in its deficiencies.

More precisely, both games purport to give the player complete choice over how a mission is tackled, while at the same time leaving many mechanics (specifically, gunplay and melee) unbalanced and underpolished enough that it isn't really much of a choice. Stealth works okay in Human Revolution, and upgrades throughout the game make it work better, but straight-up shooting is almost never a good idea; even with his Dermal Armor fully upgraded, Adam Jensen is no better at taking bullets than Batman is. And unlike the Dark Knight, Adam Jensen has a pretty difficult time escaping once he's been spotted.

Also unlike any other video game protagonist, Jensen is really not built for melee combat. He's got a pretty sweet takedown, to be sure, but it uses a full bar of energy each time -- energy which maxes out at five bars; and once a bar is depleted, it won't regenerate unless it's your last one. So the energy economy makes Jensen's robotic arms mostly useless.

As for non-metaphorical guns, weapons like pistols, shotguns, and rocket launchers are upgraded not with character/experience points, but with upgrade kits which you'll find and purchase throughout the game. Without a laser sight, most weapons are atrociously inaccurate; this especially hurts in the game's introductory mission, before Adam has any augmentations, where you must take on a strike team using only an assault rifle that is basically incapable of hitting anything from range. As the game goes on, you can upgrade and get better weapons (a fully-upgraded pistol, with armor piercing and a silencer, is almost game-breaking); but early on, it's depressing how ineffective your armaments are.

So the stealth is alright, but doesn't become really impressive until it's upgraded; gunplay is terrible at first, but warms up later on; and melee isn't an option at all. There are a great deal of alternate paths in each mission area, between multiple entrances and exits, secret tunnels and vents, and safe rooms that skirt patrolled hallways -- so there are a lot of ways to accomplish a task, even if there aren't a lot of different mechanics to exploit in that process. I would say that, in terms of how you play the game, the choice of route is more meaningful than the choice of augmentation or load-out.

On that note, while some of the augments are pretty cool, too many of them function only as keys. That is, if you want to hack high-level consoles, you need to invest points in your hacking "capture" level, or it won't let you. If you want to finish a side-mission that blocks your progress with a gas-filled chamber, you need the lung augment that makes you immune to the gas, or you'll simply die trying. If you want to reach a high ledge and there are no crates around, you need the leg augment to increase your jump height. This is sort of like a choice of playstyle, but too often it's not a choice of how you tackle an objective, but a choice of whether you tackle it or don't.

Of course, if you go to the effort to do side-quests, and uncover secrets which yield experience rewards (e.g. by hacking), you'll end up getting almost all of the game's upgrades before you're done. And many of them, maybe a third or as many as half, are so situational that they're borderline useless. Increased sprinting speed and duration are convenient, but don't help the gameplay at all; the social-skill aug to peer into an NPC's personality is not really any more helpful than just reading and listening; there is an augment to use a takedown on two adjacent enemies at once, but this only happens a handful of times throughout the entire campaign. I only got these augments because I ran out of better things to spend points on.

What I would like would be for the starting augments to be more powerful, so you can see more of the game's mechanical diversity in the beginning; and for experience-based upgrades to go deeper into these mechanics, so that a player could become a master ninja, or a master soldier, or a master brawler, depending on how Praxis Points are allocated. But high-power augments that would support the idea of "mastery" don't really exist in the game.

One thing that Deus Ex really knocks out of the park (especially as compared to Alpha Protocol) is the overworld, in the sense that it kind-of has one. Although the serpentine pacing of the game's story makes their "hub" nature somewhat debatable, Human Revolution's two big cities of Detroit and Hengsha (near Shanghai) are big, complicated, and dense -- filled with interesting environments, hidden items, shops, and side-quests. There is so much to do in Detroit, especially; I suspect that I spent more time exploring the city than I did in the story missions set alongside it.

I do wish that there were one or two more cities, and although it may sound a little ungrateful given how rich the existing ones are, I think some of the level design resources allocated to the game's later missions could easily have been taken for it. Mission maps late in the game are, frankly, excessive -- if your goal is to explore every nook and cranny - since most of the game's nooks and crannies have hidden items to collect - these missions can take hours. Setting aside alternate paths, most of this geography just seems wasteful.

As for the story: it starts slow, builds up some intrigue, takes a retarded twist halfway through, and ends somewhat ineffectually, regardless of which of the game's four endings you select. The stupid twist isn't really the game's fault, except in that it had to build itself into the existing Deus Ex mythos; but the ending, while not exactly bad, doesn't feel impactful at all. It doesn't give further insight into the game's world, and it doesn't make any profound point. At the same time, it isn't offensively preachy or a brazen sequel setup, so at least there's that.

There are a few other nitpicks I want to mention: character animations are awkward, and clearly came from a time before ubiquitous motion capture; voice acting is pretty good for primary characters, but variably dismal for the supporting cast; the game's handling of variable dialog selections is admirable, but still imperfect; handling inventory space is pretty ridiculous, with some big items (like the rocket launcher) taking up entirely too many slots, and some unstackable items (grenades) being too difficult to keep around to really be useful; the automatic saving frequency is far, far too low for how often you'll really want to reload a checkpoint.

Ultimately, though, what I want to say about Deus Ex is this:

  • It's initially disappointing that you don't really have that much freedom in the game;
  • It's fun -- once you learn how the game wants to be played;
  • It's lengthy -- most reviews quote about 20 hours, but having done all the side-quests I could find, I came closer to 40;
  • The premise shows a lot of room for improvement, which I can only hope is used in future iterations;
  • If you really want to go nuts and start pulverizing civilians, you can absolutely do that.

Better than: Alpha Protocol
Not as good as: Batman: Arkham Asylum
If you enjoyed this: I really think you should try Alpha Protocol, because it does some things much better than Human Revolution does

Progress: Finished on "Give Me a Challenge" (normal)

Rating: Good