This may come as a surprise to many but I never played Deus Ex. Despite many proclaiming the it to be one of the best PC games of all time, it was just never something I picked up as I was playing Diablo 2 at the time and as anyone who played that game will know, it’s a gigantic time suck. Whenever I did try to play Deus Ex several times over the past few years but I could never get past the first hour or so of gameplay thanks to the graphics that looked like a patchwork quilt over lego blocks and a guns that had the same accuracy as a drunk man with three fingers. So if Human Revolution is anything to go by, I’m somewhat annoyed that I didn’t pick up the original at a time when I could have forgiven if for looking and acting like shit.
Human Revolution tells the story of Adam Jensen, a former swat member and now head of security at Sarif Industries, a company that develops human augmentation technology when one day the company is attacked, several scientists are kidnapped and Adam gets his ass kicked literally through a wall. Several months later with his ass back in place, he is pulled out of recovery early in order to deal with the global hissy fit between those people who want augmentations to benefit humanity, those who want to make money and those who have an unnatural attachment to their body parts and fail to see the potential benefits.
One of the key things that allowed reviewers to lavish this game’s predecessor with endless amount of praise was the fact that you were never forced into one way to play the game. You could walk straight through the front door and take down everything that has a desire to reproduce with only your pecs or you could stealth your way through the building, becoming very intimate with the ventilation system and pleasuring every robot and turret you can find with your electronic fingers and convince it to come over to your side and Human Revolution continues this in fine form but you might not think it when you first start of considering the amount the game bangs on about stealth and making sure the enemy doesn’t see you lest one glance from their eyes will cause you to implode. Even side missions in which you had to take someone out would either result in killing them or setting them up to go to jail with the latter always being the one in which you get the greater rewards. Never is this more evident that when you actually start shooting more than one bad guy at a time as the whole game degenerates into a modern cover based shooter.
But don’t worry, stealth is not going to miss out on being beaten with the criticism stick oh no. The aforementioned ventilation systems put in place for the character to crawl around in….
Ok I’m going to speak directly for a moment. Why is it that every game that consists of a character crawling around in air vents, you only have to kneel down to enter the vent and can crawl through it at lightning speed like you wearing a combat suit made of melted butter. I don’t think that when scientists were designing combat armor they had one of the three ingredients of a cheese sandwich in mind but anyway..back to the point
Anyway back to the point, despite ventilation systems being included in every building of every city, no one other than you seems to be aware of them. You slip into one of those things and it’s like slipping into a crack in the wall with everyone forgetting where you are or that you even existed, (try and guess that obscure reference) and it’s not like you can’t tell someone has entered them. You have to open up the grate each time you enter or come out of a closed vent and it’s difficult to the point of near impossible to close them so you don’t bother. There was one level when I had to face off against about 12 bad guys and I spent the time going from one floor to the other picking off enemies one by one and dashing into the vent whenever they got suspicious about the fact that their brother in arms hit the floor faster than the panties of a girl when any member of any boy band walks into the room no matter how obviously homosexual they might be.
Continuing the theme that guards have about the same intelligence as a lemon custard tart, they can never seem to recognise when one of their own goes missing. The game harps on about how you should never leave an unconscious guard out in the open in case someone walking past happens to discover it but I never had that problem. The only situation in which a guard was going to be seen lying on the ground unconscious was when there was enough of them in close enough vicinity to see the bastard drop in the first place.
And despite the game’s insistence that sneaking around with a enemy never ever seeing your face is the best strategy to take like bringing an RPG to a sword fight, the boss fights are very unforgiving for those who specialise in stealth because they take more shit than a toilet at a rugby ground and can kill you with one touch of their pinkie finger.
Unfortunately despite any challenge that came before it, the last level and final boss is the biggest joke since Kevin Rudd became Prime Minister when the difficulty curve stops and plunges right down into the centre of the earth. The level has no cameras, no turrets, and most of the people who get in your way have the sanity of an ice cream sandwich. Even the final boss fight was done on the first try by hacking a computer, shooting some turrets and hiding in a cupboard until a cinematic kicked in. Hardly a final challenge when the previous boss fight involved fighting a permanently cloaked bad guy with none of your augmentations working.
Augmentations are surprisingly varied with you being able to put points into stuff like increasing your athletics and strength, hacking skills and moving unheard and unseen but answer me this T1000. How is it I can move a vending machine, jump onto it and catapult myself over a fence and land silently without costing myself any energy yet punching someone in the face uses a whole block of it. Bull…fucking…shit…I know these guys might have some augmentations but I don’t recall having a skull encased in titanium being one of them and knocking someone out with metallic arms should required all the strength of squashing a soggy ham and cheese sandwich. But it’s small issue in the long run with all the abilities being incredibly balanced to the point I easily spend several minutes trying to figure out which one to put my precious point into.
It’s nice to see however that the conversation choice system that every RPG within the past few years has to have by law is made more usable with bit of dialog indicate what direction you’re response is going to take. If you read my LA Noire review, you’ll remember that the lack of context when it came to player responses was one of the biggest complaints I had about the game and if it had what human revolution does, I wouldn’t have bitched as much.
But for all my criticisms and complaints, this game has to be one of the best I have played in a long time. One that made me spend night after night not getting enough sleep ahead of the next day at work and it’s something that this year desperately needed because for the most part this year has been completely shit for games.