Deus Ex: Human Revolutions is an action role playing game developed by Eidos Montreal and published by Square Enix. It is the third installment to the original Deus Ex game that was released back in 2000.
Released on August 23, 2011 for Xbox 360, PS3, and PC.
You follow a character named Adam Jensen, a man who has his luck turned for the worse when a terrorist organization breaks into Sarif Industries. Sarif Industries is a leading manufacturer of human augmentations and research, the main star at the industry is Dr. Megan Reed who has discovered something “amazing” that will alter the course of man.
The terrorist group easily dispatches Adam, a man with little to no augments against fully augmented super soldiers. After a final gun shot to Adam’s dome, you hear the sounds of Megan screaming. After a long surgical process Adam returns to work with a new set of hardware, or body I should say. Now with a whole new set of equipment Jensen is ready to figure out what happened 6 months ago and uncover the dark secrets behind augmentation.
Functionality:
The controls for this game operate the same was as most first person shooters, movements and looking is done by joy sticks and firing by the right trigger. The main difference is that not all guns can be iron sighted, and those that can are done by pushing the right thumb stick down. Along with that the game has included special abilities, all which are based around your chosen augmentations.
One main issue I ran into with this game is the non-existence of a melee button. Granted you can do an instant melee attack to dispatch someone but this costs a battery charge to do. This coupled with the fact that you are only provided with two batteries at the very beginning makes it a bit more of a hassle than an awesome take-down. What should have been done is the inclusion of a melee button and the option to instant kill, that way you can still punch someone when you run out of batteries.
Another main mechanic for this game is hacking. And by main mechanic I mean the one you should always always always do, any time you see a locked computer you should hack it! The main reason is that you gain the most experience points from hacking.
Now let’s look at the important stuff, Augmentations. Deus Ex has allowed you to augment certain aspects of Jensen’s body, like his ability to jump or pick items up. The main concept in this game is that you need to acquire Praxis kits to boost your augmentations, to better deal with certain situations or your overall fighting style. You gain Praxis kits by leveling or buy purchasing them for 5000 credits, this is supposedly the discounted rate that Sarif set up for you.
A big issue that arises with the Praxis kits is how they chose to allocate the points. Mainly that it takes 2 Praxis kits to initiate a new augmentation, after that you can use one to upgrade it slowly. This just seemed really weird to me, seeing as most games would allow 1 Praxis kit to initiate and further ones would take 2. Along with that you just never seem to have enough Praxis kits to fully augment Adam, or the ability to get enough.
Along with Praxis kits, another area I feel is wasted potential was the inventory. This game has the inventory set up that, for lack of a better word, sucks. You are only given a certain amount of space to use and to gain more you have to waste a Praxis kit to do so. But the main issue is the fact that your inventory is filled by weapons, ammo, weapon upgrades, grenades, health kits, and energy packs. All this combines to mean that you really never ever have enough inventory space for new weapons or upgrades.
This could have easily been remedied by separating the ammo from the weapons, so you can carry ammo without worrying about it taking over your inventory. That or allow you to put weapons in a storage container (like dead space!), where you can easily access it whenever you find a storage terminal. This just makes a lot more sense when you have a concept of weapon upgrades to allow the player to not have to give up a weapon when they need more ammo or a new one.
Another big big thing that Deus was advertising was that it allowed you to approach a situation in a few different ways. Like you could be stealthy, bold and headfirst, or a turn an enemies equipment on them. Now while you can do this in a way, it is not defined as three separate paths. In reality you will most likely want to be stealthy, that is if you like to live, and after you dispatched a couple guys you can chose to turn their equipment against them with a quick hack. From there you can continue on stealth or go guns blazing. But the choice doesn’t matter with the overall game. Although, I will say that this game wants you to play its way so be prepared to go into stealth mode alot.
Now the overall interface for the game is pretty well designed, it looks like what Jensen would actually see. Your health is placed on the top, not that it matters since any sort of trouble that leaves in you the open means certain death. Your weapon and ammo are shown in the bottom, with the radar to the left. A cool feature with the interface is the ability to see through walls, an augment you can choose to purchase or not. This is more of a novelty augment but does have a really cool effect when you are trying to move super stealthy through an area.
Presentation:
The graphics were a mix of good to mediocre… Here is where the game really has some issues. There are instances in the game where it just wasn’t conceived very well. A main example is how light effects walls and doors, it ends up looking way too pixelated and never seems to smooth out very well. A lot of the time you just get a boxy light effect that just makes it feel last gen.
Along with that there is a very big issue with depth in shelves and containers. The game just can’t render its environment very well. Occasionally you will open a locker and see an item floating in mid-air with occasional lines in the background, instead of having the proper rendering to place it on a shelf. This is just one of the main issues in the game that seems to reoccur.
Another huge issue in game is the transition between cinematic cut scene to an in game conversation. The cinematic scene has a darker, more gritty, feel than the same locations convo scenes. What happens is that you go from a well done dark scene to an all of a sudden light bright scene, all within a matter of seconds. This destroys the entire flow of the game and decimates any point that it was trying to make with the story.
It was a very distracting effect that just seemed to be a very noob move by the developers. All they had to do was to either paint the cut scene the same as the in-game, or vice versa.
Other than that the overall feel of the game sorta stays in tack and if you can manage to ignore all of that it is still a fun game. I mean the in-game environments look great, it is just the transition between the cinematic and the in-game that is really wrongly designed.
One main thing with this game is the character design for Adam Jensen, who takes a more Christian Bales batman approach. Not just in the feel but the voice acting. The gruff sounds of Jensen are just a few words away from being batman, if only he would say “do I look like a cop to you”…
Atmosphere:
The soundtrack for Human Revolutions was excellent; it has a perfect blend of mystery and blade runner with it. It is able to provide the best feel to the environments as you explore Hengsha and Detroit.
The sound effects are great as well, all guns match their sounds or at least to the degree you need them too. And although the wall punch sounds can seem a bit unrealistic, there is nothing better than that neck snap after you smacked down a wall behind an enemy.
In all honesty there are no complaints on the games sounds or feel.
Plot:
The plot is pretty good, there are a couple good twists to the game and an interesting progession with some of the characters. But it suffers from one big thing, the inclusion of decisions when they don’t actually matter with the ending of the game. Throughout the game it will occasionally allow you to make a decision about how to handle a person or a situation, alluding that this may be a deciding factor later in the game, well let me let you know that it does not!
There are only occasional, small moments, that have that this is your choice effect. One of the few is when you have a choice to allow a purist terrorist run away or kill him, if you let him run away he will give you some more information later. But here is the kicker, that does not change his overall feel in the game. He will provide that info but later in the game he will end up a minor npc villain in a scene where you are dispatching purists, no cutscene to talk he just opens fire.
Another big issue this game has is the overall scripting of conversations. Now this may be nit-picky but when you are making a game that is based around convincing someone to give you more information or not to kill a hostage, make it seem like there is actually conflict and change within them. Too many times this game pulls a 180 decision change with the characters. Times when they will look at Jensen yelling “you don’t know how I feel” and you decide to appeal one last time and they go from angry face to sad and mind changing with a “I never knew it would be this bad”. It just feels unnatural and leaves you feeling unsatisfied by the cutscene.
All of this ends up making me feel like there were ideas being tossed around by the development team but none were done to its full ability. It was all half assed, which pains me to say because this game has a lot of promise. It just does not fulfill what it should, it feels rushed and last gen. If this game released like 2 years ago it would be incredible but since it is releasing now it just feels bland and minor when compared to what is coming out this year.
(Warning: this may be considered a spoiler, read with caution)
Besides the scripting there is also a big problem with the end. Now you set a game up with some great cut scenes, or concepts of great scene, and then you get to the end and there is basically a four choice option ending. And after you chose your option it just shows a small slide show as Jensen questions everything that has happened with humanity and his experience during the game. I mean come on! This game needed an epic, in your face ending but instead we got some mediocre slideshow with a few words from Jensen. Disappointing!
And after the ending you can choose to sit through a long credit sequence with the development team’s party photos, just to get to the final video at the end. What the video means I do not know since it is just a black screen with a few people talking and a quick image of a character from the original Deus game. Are they going to make a new one involving that character? I don’t know, hopefully time will tell.
Endings are important and when companies (game and movie) don’t recognize that this is the last thing the fan will see after the hours they put into playing it, it just pushes them away from having that great experience they wanted. The ending of a game can make or break it in the eyes of the fan and Deus Ex: Human Revolutions skates that fine line between wasting an entire game and providing a mediocre experience. For me it just didn’t make me interested to play it again, which really disappointed me because I was looking forward to this game for a long time!
Legacy Rating:
Will this game last through time? I think it is a game that had a lot of potential and if the development team decides to make a new one hopefully they will fix some of the running issues. But it just doesn’t add up to its processor. That is why people will always remember the first Deus Ex game and not the Invisible Wars or Human Revolutions.
How does it compare with other games? This is a hard game to truly compare to others, I mean it has its own unique merits and I wouldn’t say it should be compared to the first game. But the main thing is that it offers an FPS experience that is strongly based around stealth and exploration, so if that is your thing than you may enjoy this game. But let’s say you want the option to go crazy and just start killing everyone, well for this game you will have to play a couple hours in before you can do that. SO… it may not be for you, although in that situation I would recommend Crysis 2 or Resistance 3 (releasing today!).
Buy or rent? Now the final question, do I buy or rent? I would say rent it and try it out first, if you enjoy it then consider buying it. But in reality if you have a gamefly account than you can just rent it and beat it and then decide how much you liked it. It has moments that are great and entertaining but at the end it may not leave you wanting more. And the length of the game doesn’t make the trip any better.
