Deus Ex: Human Revolution

            I want to put this out there right at the start, Deus Ex is one of my favourite games of all time and I have been waiting for this release since I first laid eyes on the eyegasmic trailer. Think kid at Christmas excited, you know that kid in the YouTube video who goes mental over his new N64, just a little less than him. It’s been 10 years in the making but a sequel to this gem of a game is finally here, ‘Invisible War’ doesn’t count, because it was rubbish. After getting rather annoyed that the disc I bought early apparently just opened Steam and I had to wait til midnight, then download it all night and have to wait til after I finished work to actually play the… sorry, tangential rambling, let’s get on with this shall we?

            You take control of Adam Jensen, ex-SWAT, gravel throated protagonist who gets brutally mutilated at the end of a brief tutorial which sets up the rest of the plot. Now we come to the first of the very few problems with his game, the plot is… convoluted to say the least. I expected this to some degree after all this is a Deus Ex game and as such is required to have a conspiracy theory to complicate matters. In this it seems more like it was just added to the initial idea to needlessly complicate things. It all boils down to; the attack on Sarif Industries (Adam’s employer) that left him in the aforementioned mutilated state and his girlfriend (among others) dead. Cue Adam’s boss sending the newly augmented soldier on a mission to find out who attacked and why, with a spattering of revenge thrown in. This would have been fine with a few twists here and there to keep it fresh, unfortunately everything gets bogged down in confusion and you sort of lose track of the specifics and focus on the core I outlined already.

            Thankfully the gameplay is fantastic and help make up for the slight plot issues. Each and every mission can be approached in a number of ways, the main variants being stealth or frontal assault. You can choose to take either of these options and also whether you want to take a non-lethal or lethal path both of which net slightly different rewards. Obviously you have an array of weapons at your disposal, inventory permitting, which can be upgraded to improve their potency. You’ve also got a lot of different augmentations to choose from which can improve all sorts of things for your character. These range from simple things like a radar or in built cranial com device to personal cloaking and the Tempest explosive launcher which sprays little bombs all around you taking out everyone in the area. You have to pick and choose which of these augments to buy and upgrade using Praxis points which you get from gathering experience points from completing objectives, taking out enemies and finding secret areas. This is where you can really diversify your game as you upgrade yourself to play how you want. My personal approach was to quickly upgrade my computer hacking abilities, my max energy and the personal cloaking to help with my plan of sneaking around in air ducts, easily hacking security systems and taking people out silently and non-lethally where possible.

            We now reach the second problem which is to do with how the augments are set up and the energy cells you have to power them. I appreciate that some of the ones the game gives you at the beginning are completely necessary to the game and therefore fine to start the game with. The radar, the com link, level 1 hacking and strength were all fine, I take issue with the game providing the health recovery system from the get go. I was expecting this aug as it was in the first game and was welcome, but you had to buy it. As it is here they’ve thrown it onto the menu simply to placate the people who have forgotten what med-kits are for and have come to believe hiding behind a wall has magic healing powers. My second issue with the augments is the energy cells. You start with 3 and can have a maximum of 5 if you spend some points on them but if you want to be using your take down moves, Typhoon attacks, punching through walls or the hugely draining cloaking device you have to use an item to refill them. So far that’s not the worst thing in the world, indeed it’s entirely expected but unfortunately there is no other way to charge them up and the items to replenish the cells are quite scarce. Now for me this was a huge problem thanks to now I planned to play, and I understand there would be balance issues if I could run around silently and invisibly as much as I wanted but the drain on the stealth made it a last resort thing rather than something that was fun. Your last cell will always recharge but the others only will if not fully deplete, and most things cost 1 full cell. I don’t think it would have been too game breaking to put recharge points every now and again or something like that. Finally and somewhat superficially there are whole trees of upgrades that are basically useless, the stealth enhancer adds some things like vision cones on the radar but you won’t need that and the lung upgrade to stop poison gas hurting you is a total waste of points.

            This aside the combat is very well managed, the cover system works much better than I was anticipating and is actually pretty vital to surviving fights, you take damage fast and the first attempt at the first boss will show you quite how easy it is to die very quickly. All guns blazing will end very badly if you aren’t carful and even if this is your desired approach it’s often best to at least sneak into a good position first and take down a guy or two quietly before the alarms go off. One thing I don’t really understand is how Jensen is entirely proficient with handguns, shotguns, assault rifles and heavy weapons but as soon as he puts a sniper scope to his eyes it wanders about far more than it should, if there was an upgrade to help this I could forgive it but there’s not. So I won’t. You need to be careful with what weapons you carry round with you too.  You have a finite inventory and each item has a certain size it takes up, big weapons may be powerful but once you’ve got say, a heavy rifle and a case of ammo you won’t have that much space for other stuff, especially if you haven’t upgraded your inventory space.  I relied mainly on my super upgraded 10mm pistol for the times when the game forced me into situations where my tranquilizer rifle or stun gun wouldn’t do.

            A final word on the sound and visuals, both are outstanding. The music is never intrusive but certainly aids the atmosphere; the soundtrack from my Augmented Edition is now happily placed on my iPod to bring some pleasure to my commuting life. The graphics, speaking here for the PC version with everything turned up to 11, are sublime. Everything is bright and well defined and the textures are a nice change from the fuzzy concrete from the original, which hasn’t aged well at all and even at the time wasn’t exactly cutting edge.

            This game is awesome; a serious contender for Game of the Year though I think Valve’s Portal 2 might just edge it. It has a few problems and I do wish the RPG element was more prevalent in the augmentations like it was in the original but it’s a refreshing change of pace from all the other FPS games out there at the moment, for this is much more an action game with RPG elements rather than it’s older brother which was an action RPG. One of the rare games to live up to the hype generated it does the original justice, although it doesn’t surpass the original it certainly does it justice. You should pick this up and experience it for yourself, you won’t be disappointed.

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