I just finished Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I've been holding back a lot of thoughts, so forgive me if I just splurge for a while.
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The game is really good! Definitely worth checking out if you're into the stealth genre. Obviously, it's not as groundbreaking as the first game, but this is a refinement of the formula and as such it works really, really well.
Some aesthetic stuff first - the game looks gorgeous, although it helps if you're a fan of black and gold, because it's pretty much everywhere. It's really
nice looking though. (This is where my lack of artistic vocabulary begins to show.) The game still has visually varied environments, and they try to be creative with the colour scheme, using it as a kind of persistent theme that ties the game together in interesting ways. It's nice that the game has its own visual identity, although I can imagine it gets a bit dull on multiple playthroughs. That said, the game never truly looks dark, which is kinda weird since that was the entire first game's schtick. You usually started your missions outside in the dark overworld before sneaking your way into cramped, well lit buildings. It helped build the atmosphere and added depth to the gameplay, but that seems to have gone over the heads of the developers.
Character designs are surprisingly good.
Malik and
Adam Jensen were the standouts for me. It does get a bit
wannabe anime at times.
The voice acting is much improved over the first Deus Ex. Which isn't saying much - the first Deus Ex had the worst voice acting I've ever heard, in anything. Human Revolution isn't so bad, but it's not great. David Sarif hams everything up and often puts an emphasis in the wrong place, it gets irritating. I didn't even recognise Hugh Darrow's accent - apparently it's supposed to be British. The actor behind Adam Jensen is clearly trying to do his best JC Denton impression so every line comes out as gravelly as possible. Malik and Pritchard were spot-on, though.
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The plot has its ups and downs. Decisions you make have actual consequences, which is nice, it reminds me of Alpha Protocol a little. Character motivations are a little unclear, though. For instance, Adam's motivation is ostensibly to investigate the murder of his girlfriend, but you only meet her for about 10 minutes in the opening and it's not exactly riveting stuff. He barely ever shows any emotional connection with another human being throughout the rest of the game, unless it's to manipulate them to do something. What do the two of them even have in common?
The various villains are often glossed over. The twist that leads to the final level comes out of nowhere and the reasoning behind it is about as deep as you'd expect from a saturday morning cartoon villain. The aforementioned final level gets very silly too - I think they were going for horror, but to give just one example, the final boss looks like something out of a Lady Gaga video.
A big theme of the game is human augmentation through technology, and the game offers perhaps too great a soap box for the anti-science, pro-natural movement. At first I chalked this up to having an American development team who would naturally be stupid and fat, but it turns out it's made by Eidos Montreal so I guess making generalisations based on race isn't as foolproof as you might expect. Again, to be fair to the game, it does raise
some valid issues. For instance, at one point in a sidequest you're asked to help a prostitute who is being forced to have augmentations done ("for his pleasure") against her will and through an underground surgeon. This is a not-as-subtle-as-they-thought-it-was attempt at making a point about plastic surgery. But most of the time the issues are just kind of silly. We already have prosthetic limbs, so pretty much none of the augmentations presented in Human Revolution are really that controversial.
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Gameplay is where it all really shines. It captures the spirit of the first game and exceeds it in many ways.
Stealth gameplay is tense and exciting with enemy placement that varies from clever to
astonishingly clever. Cover, a controversial addition, actually works well, largely because it's integrated into both stealth and gun fights. Cutaway finishing moves are less welcome. They look cool (unless they bug out, which happens every once in a while) but each one is a solid blow to the kneecaps of game flow. It gets painful to watch. The ability to instantly kill an enemy with a single button is also a little unbalanced, but to be fair, it's arguably more balanced than the Dragon Tooth from the first game, since you either have to wait for the cooldown or chow down on an energy bar (I'm not making that up) before you can do it again.
There also isn't much motivation to kill a target rather than just knocking them unconscious. Dead targets can't be woken up, obviously, but the noise is much more likely to alert nearby patrols, which is a high risk for a small reward. There are a few situations where it's easier to kill people than sneak past them or knock them out - mostly involving hacking security robots and hiding in total safety - but they're few and far between. It would make more sense to have the non-lethal killing moves make more noise, but that would also make life harder for pacifist runners. (Strictly speaking, shouldn't a pacifist abhor all violence, including nonlethal?) I'm guessing this is a response to tranquilisers and gas grenades from the first game being widely considered as useless, but I think Eidos may have gone too far in the opposite direction.
I liked the boss fights. Apparently they rubbed a lot of players up the wrong way, but I think I can guess why. All the bosses push the player out of their comfort zone. The first boss, for instance, forces the player to use cover, and can't be one-hit KO'd with a takedown. Which isn't to say the fight doesn't reward stealth - it does,
you can sneak behind him and nab him with an explosive - but you HAVE to fight him head on at some point, and the game doesn't necessarily prepare you for that. But they're much better designed than any of the original Deus Ex boss fights, except possibly the last one. In that game, you could flat out skip most of the boss fights by just running past them or one-shotting them with an explosive - people talk about that like it was a point in the game's favour, but I don't really buy that argument, it just lets the player skip playing the game. Human Revolution only really does 2 things wrong for the boss fights - first, not offering a non-lethal option (for the sake of consistency), and secondly, failing to develop any of the boss characters in any meaningful way. Even the final villain - the only one you have an actual conversation with before they're in the throes of death - is a two-dimensional stereotype.
The game is shorter than the original Deus Ex, but the pacing is spot-on to the point where I think you could argue it was better. The side quest system is a little too BioWare to be comfortable, but it doesn't disrupt things too badly. The game also has a slightly annoying tendency to mark everything on your map to the point of hand-holding, which kind of goes against the spirit of things, but thankfully they take the training wheels off towards the final missions. The goals are still marked, but the level design is complicated enough that it doesn't feel like it's much of a guide.
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Now for the little stuff:
Human Revolution gets the dubious distinction of being the first game to make me barf. Well, ok, it wasn't the only cause, but Human Resources and its stupid little head wobbling was definitely a contributing factor. I guess they couldn't make it third person or they'd be accused of ripping off Metal Gear, but why did they make the camera rock about so much?
It turns out that everybody smokes cigarettes in the future. Because substance dependency is edgy, I guess. To be fair, there's a lung augmentation you can pick up that filters out toxic gases, so maybe smoking in private is supposed to be less of a health risk? Whatever.
I haven't had a chance to play the DLC but I'll definitely be checking it out. Apparently Adam spends a good chunk of it shirtless, so I'm sold.
This is the first game I've completed since coming from Skyrim and I like this game's approach to first-person role-playing much better. Skyrim's approach is to funnel the player into a specific playstyle as they specialise deeper into it. Human Revolution broadens your abilities as you accumulate more Praxis points. It also made me realise why I hate the Bethesda trope of making it possible to pick up literally everything you see. It means the player has to manage their inventory themselves and search through the environment for the stuff that actually matters. It's pointless busywork not helped by Bethesda's inability to make a workable item interface.