Review: Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Deus Ex: Human Revolution is an admirable prequel to Ion Storm’s critically-acclaimed Deus Ex. It’s been eleven years since the original, and eight since the last entry, the uneven Invisible War. Of course, Ion Storm has come and gone, and Warren Spector now makes games for Disney. But even though Human Revolution was crafted by Eidos Montreal, it retains the spirit of shooters of a bygone era. Though it’s not a complete and utter success, there’s more than enough here to make it a title to recommend.
What Human Revolution does impressively well, much like games such as Thief or BioShock, is present multiple ways to solve every scenario thrown at you. You can choose to equip an assault rifle and gun down every single enemy, or you can go a stealth route and sneak and hack your way around everything. There’s even an achievement for completing the game without killing anyone at all (other than bosses). However, I’ll warn you that if you’re gunning for that achievement, any enemies you kill in the tutorial do count against you.
In any event, the interesting aspect of this dynamic is that the completion time will wildly vary; if you run and gun through the game, you can probably complete all the campaign and side missions within 15 hours or so. However, if you methodically inch through the game via stealth, as I did, you can expect to add on at least an additional 10 hours. So your choice is not only how to play the game, but additionally how long you want to spend finishing it. However, it is worth noting that if you play through 100% stealth, the pacing of the game does feel too slow; I wouldn’t be surprised if many players stealth some way through before they just end up shooting everything to speed things up.
Cleanup on aisle six.
Much like the original Deus Ex, there are some RPG elements thrown into the game to separate it from just a straight shooter. As you progress through the game, you will earn “Praxis” points, which are similar to talent points in other games. However, instead of having a handful of deep skill trees, Human Revolution has many shallow ones. So for example, there are some skill trees which only have one or two enhancements, and no tree has more than five or six.
Essentially, you can choose to upgrade or add new augmentations, which are the series’ trademark cyborg-like enhancements. For instance, there is one augmentation which allows you to cloak for a brief period of time, and there are others which allow you to lift heavier objects such as vending machines. This provides a decent amount of decision making; for example if you want to hack more secure computers, you will have to invest more Praxis points into said hacking skills. However, as you progress further through the game, you end up with so many points that you can likely get at least 2/3 of the overall skills, if not more. So the decision making is really only important early on; at the end even a stealth character will have spare points for combat upgrades.
Hacking allows you to read up on the backstory...or sift through Nigerian spam emails.
On the point of combat, one thing that is frustrating is the way the boss fights are constructed. It doesn’t matter if you’re a stealthy player or a run-and-gun one; when you get to a boss fight you’re required to straight up kill the enemy. Sure, your cloaking is somewhat useful, but as a stealth player the first boss fight especially can be pretty jarring. I went through most of the game to that point without killing anyone, and actually when I made it to the first boss I had no lethal weapons whatsoever. Well, trying to kill that first boss with only a stun gun didn’t really cut it. Granted, there are weapons available in the area you combat this boss, but the problem is that to that point I had only really focused on the art of stealth. Because of this, my character certainly wasn’t prepared for the rigors of battle. The lesson learned was that you should also carry lethal weapons, but I wasn’t happy with how a game built on decisions forces the combat upon you.
The story of Deus Ex: Human Revolution takes place roughly 25 years prior to the original Deus Ex. In the year 2027, humans are rapidly adopting augmentation technology. Your character, Adam Jensen, is the head of security of one of the leading companies in this cutting-edge field. Some mysterious mercenaries attack your company headquarters, and you must spend the rest of the game trying to determine who ultimately is responsible.
Inventory Tetris, how I miss thee. (The game does auto-sort for you when you pick up an item, if you're scared.)
One problem with the storyline is that the plot is somewhat labyrinthine. The purpose of this was perhaps to provide some mystery as you progress through the game, but in my case I wasn’t particularly surprised by the reveals. What’s disappointing, however, is that even by the end of the game the motivation of several of the major characters remains unclear. Perhaps in a way this was intended, to leave the door open to a second prequel, but I couldn’t help but feel disappointed by this.
The other disappointing aspect is that while the game does provide you a litany of options as you progress from mission to mission, in the end those choices are somewhat irrelevant. At the tail end of the game, you basically make a single decision which effects what ending you get, and that’s about it. It doesn’t matter whether you were a homicidal maniac, or you were a pacifist. In the end, you make your one decision and get a monologue from the main character. You don’t see how the different story threads resolve based on your actions. This was disappointing, but at the same time, this is a prequel so it’s in some ways boxed in by the previous games. The story can’t go in dramatically different directions without invalidating subsequent storylines. That being said, I still feel like there could have been a design that made your actions ultimately feel meaningful.
There are quite a few easter eggs and little tidbits you can glean from the environment details.
On the technical side of things, the PC version was relatively solid. While the graphical engine isn’t cutting-edge by any means, the strong art design means that the game still is visually attractive. I initially had some problems with the lengthy load times, but a patch was released on the second or third day of release which dramatically reduced said load times. But perhaps what’s most impressive is the technology behind the gameplay; for example the AI feels fairly respectable, and for a stealth game I think it strikes a good balance between fairness and believability.
Overall, there definitely was quite a bit I enjoyed about Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I felt like the pacing could have been better, but my primary complaint lies in the realm of its storyline. Had the presentation of the story been more refined, Human Revolution would likely have made a “Singing Canary” rating. However, it ultimately ends up a game I’d definitely recommend, but not one that makes that final leap to an instant classic.
VERDICT: HAPPY CANARY
Deus Ex: Human Revolution is available now on PC, Xbox 360, and PS3. Review was conducted on PC. Reviews appear every Friday on Game Canary. The Game Canary review system is detailed here.
Categories: Reviews
Tags: Deus Ex, Happy Canaries, PC, PS3, Xbox 360