Deus Ex: Human Revolution Review

I only played the original Deus Ex once. Unlike, it seems, most people, I prefer to play a story-based game once through and then pretty much never go back, barring a, say, Witcher 2 scenario when so much of the plot can be changed depending on your alliances. But for Deus Ex, only once did I step into JC Denton’s shoes.

So I’ve probably missed a hell of a lot of the references contained within Deus Ex: Human Revolution, which contains about 10,342 different easter eggs or references to the first game and popular culture. You can hear the first game’s music playing in various places, apparently, but I don’t remember what it sounds like. There’s loads of stuff like this, certainly enough to amuse even those who never even played the original once.

"F**king hell, why do these augmented eyes make everything appear yellow?"

It also helps that this is a prequel, set in a world before men wore leather trench coats and crawled around in the sewers of Paris. A world before the Statue of Liberty became such a focal point for international espionage and before the word ‘greasel’ was ever uttered.



This is a different world with a few key similarities, namely the use of augmentations to ‘boost’ or ‘destroy’ humanity, depending on your viewpoint. Curiously, they seem more prevalent than in the original (and Invisible War) but that could be a symptom of my not having played them both more than once - and such a long time ago at that.

In this, you walk down the street in one of the city hub areas and you see a guy with robotic legs and weird tinted eye lenses implanted in his face. In the first game, this wasn’t so obvious, probably due to the technology of the time. It is slightly strange to feel ‘more’ in the future than a game set afterwards, but let’s leave debate for another day.

You play a cool-as-f**k goateed hero named John Jensen. No, wait, he used to play for Arsenal. You actually play Adam Jensen, who is a recipient of augmentations because he (start plot spoiler) and then he (end ploit spoiler). So with his newly acquired ability to press the TAB key and see just what bio-mechanical junk he has clogging up his system, he embarks on a quest to find out what happened to (additional plot spoiler).

He works for Sarif Industries, who are a leading bio-tech company specialising in augmentations. Presumably they do a good trade in producing underused fonts too, but that’s never mentioned. He’s the chief of security and has a lovely office overlooking the lobby of the Sarif building, though it’s not as lovely as his boss’s and lacks the cluttered of Pritchard the Tech Guy’s one.

Like his beard, Jensen’s office is pristine, which is probably because he spends virtually no time in it, instead choosing/being ordered to undertake the missions that obviously make up the meat of the game. Like the original, you can approach each mission in a variety of different ways, using violence or making like a ghost and sneaking in without being detected.

As you earn the obligatory experience points and level up, new augmentations become available to further expand your tactical options. One lets you punch your way noisily through walls, another allows you to fall from any height without taking damage. There’s a lot of scope for developing your own style here, approaching obstacles in one way then reacting to a surprise entrance from a guard and changing tack on the fly. You’re not stuck on one path, which is the most important thing.

A lot of upgrade points - called Praxis points here - will be shoved into hacking abilities, as it’s pretty much the most vital thing to boost, as you’ll be doing a lot of hacking. Doors, terminals, alarms, lots of things to hack. The mini-game that you go into when you attempt to bypass some security is fairly simple and isn’t as fun as, say, the pipes thing in BioShock, but it at least manages the feat of not being annoying.

"Maybe if I adjust them a bit, I can fix it. It's driving me bonkers!"

To ‘win’, you have to either ‘capture’ a specific node on the network or overwhelm the security node. Other non-vital nodes provide rewards if you are nimble enough to get them before being detected. It’s a minor diversion in the end, and not one you’ll be hoping comes out on mobile devices as a spin-off game, but it’s reasonable enough not to get on your tits.

What’s more annoying is trying to describe just how much there is to see and do in Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Some PC elitists out there (cough) had their doubts when it was announced for the major consoles as well, but it’s safe to say this hasn’t led to a... narrowing of the scope or complexity, shall we say (stories of the cutting of a number of major city hubs notwithstanding). Just glancing at the notepad in front of me is proof of the myriad of options and noteworthy elements.

One could go on forever about being criticised for searching the ladies’ restroom (even I remember that bit from the first game), how the stealth really feels fluid or how the visuals have their very own unique (for games) flavour, even if everything’s far too constantly yellow-hued for my liking. And let’s not forget the fact that my fledgling learning of Mandarin came in useful when everyone suddenly started speaking it. Brilliant.

You’ve probably read all that sort of stuff elsewhere by now, so let’s examine some of the things that might not have been mentioned, or may have been swallowed up in the hyperbole elsewhere.

It’s not the second coming, it’s not the best game ever, it’s certainly not a 10/10. As you can see from the score, it’s still excellent, but there are issues that prevent a more generous one. For example, why can’t I stack some objects in my inventory but not others? Why is the sprint so ridiculous feeble, or does Jensen have asthma? Although the game makes a joke about it, why are there no mirrors?

Boss battles, of which there are a couple, seem very out of place, especially as you’re forced into them and you may well have been attempting to go ‘all stealth’, leaving yourself weaker than you might otherwise have been. Taking the Personality augmentation makes every ‘tricky’ conversation impossible to fail, unless you decide to not look at the visual cues.

The cut-scenes, at least on the PC, seem very low in quality when compared to the main game, making you wonder what the point in them was when doing it in-engine would have been far more effective. After all, didn’t the first game have them in-engine? Yes, I believe it did.

There are lots of other little niggles, but don’t get the wrong impression here. DE:HR is pretty great. It won’t have the same impact on gaming as the first, but it never had any chance of that. Things are different now and just to be delivered a top quality game on all three platforms without any noticeable ‘dumbening’ or other made-up words to indicate a significant lack of real ambition.

So yeah, it’s good on the PC, it’s good on the consoles, though just for reasons of more fluid controls and crisper, higher resolution visuals. It shouldn’t be hard to put the minor niggles mentioned above behind you, as they are just that. There’s nothing that is broken or borked or crippled in terms of the mechanics.

"Ah, there we go. Some nice, soothing reds. Much better."

The only thing one might criticise is that it can get a bit samey after a while. Around two-thirds of the way through, you may well be feeling a bit fatigued by the whole yellowness of your surroundings, and be yearning for something to change, even just for one level. That’s the only real thing, but even that’s nothing major and could well be attributed to just being a personal reaction.

So, if you haven’t bought it yet and were waiting for this definitive (re: rambling) reaction, consider yourself authoritatively told: buy it. Unless you’re allergic to the colour yellow.