Not Quite a Revolution: Deux Ex: Human Revolution Review

Let’s get the history out of the way. The original Deus Ex game, published in 2000, was a flawed masterpiece, a revolutionary video game that took the context of a first-person shooter game and added elements of role-playing games, open world sandboxes and cinematic narrative to create a truly original game. It’s 2003 sequel, Deus Ex: Invisible War, was not and the less said about it, the better. While the story of the original game did carry the gentle scent of hackneyed plot, the game allowed the player a freedom to create one’s own unique experience with the plot that it transcended its genre trappings. Multiple endings and multiple branching points in the plot really shaped a very customized experience for the player, regardless of which ending the sequel decided to establish as “canon.”

Deus Ex: Human Revolution tries very very hard to live up to the original, and it does – though that achievement is not such a positive thing a decade later.

First, the good. The game’s musical score is top notch, a mixture of ambient techno and driving beats that stuck with me even after I exited the game. The atmosphere, both in ambient sound, artistic style and textures also succeeded, establishing a high bar. Even though my next few paragraphs are going to eviscerate the game, overall, the experience was a positive one, and I can recommend the game to fans of the original.

However, the game has some serious flaws. The most glaring one is the boss battles. Though there were only four (4) bosses to defeat, these fights were TERRIBLE. On normal difficulty, they were frustratingly bad – death was almost instantaneous if you happened to tread one millimeter the wrong way. Apparently, the developer felt the need to outsource these battles to another development house, admitting that was a mistake. I ended up turning the difficulty down to the easiest level in order to get through the bosses, then turning it back to normal level afterwards. On easy level, they were too easy, but at least they weren’t that frustrating. There seemed to be some interesting ideas in the battles, but with very lousy execution. Part of the problem was that combat throughout the game was built around two concepts: you weren’t going to fighting things straight on (without cover) and you were much better off using stealth to get in proper position to end any combat with the fewest shots possible. Cover often didn’t help in the boss battles because the bosses either used grenades and overwhelming force, or they stealthed behind your cover, or both. In short, your character really wasn’t prepared for 1v1 combat, yet that’s exactly what the bosses required.

The combat gameplay, besides the flaws mentioned above, also had another problem. While the game presents a wide variety of weapons to you, for most of the game, you really only need two, maybe three weapons. Once uprgaded with a laser sight, damage upgrade and silence, the standard pistol will do for most of the game. The number of weapons you are offered is a source of frustration because the inventory system is incredibly frustrating. This is 2011, why am I having to use an inventory system that wouldn’t feel too out of place in Ultima VII? If you wanted to restrict how many weapons I could carry, why not just limit me to 4 or 5 weapons – say a pistol, a rifle/smg and a heavy? Having to manage differing types of ammo alongside different weapons, and having to perform a puzzle game to make sure it all fits was a constant source of frustration that wasted precious minutes on tedious tasks instead of enjoying the story.

The best description I can give for the story is muddled. While there are clearly elements taken from the original game, this prequel story throws a lot of elements at the player that really don’t amount to much. There is a plot thread involving your character Adam Jensen being the most important guy in the world because his DNA allows him to take augmentations without needing damaging, addicting anti-rejection drugs. As part of that, there’s a subplot involving Jensen’s parents not actually being his parents and somehow he’s older than he should be… but I have no idea how those things fit together, because in the end, none of those things means anything to the game’s resolution. Either I missed some conversations that made all that make sense or it got thrown in but not fleshed out enough to make any sense. The final “villain” if one can really call him that gets introduced about midway through the game, and at no time did I NOT expect him to turn out to be crazy. He might as well have been wearing a placard that said “You will struggle against my machinations by the end of the game.” Subtle the game was not.

I finished the game without about 27 hours played, and I felt the game vastly overstayed its welcome. Between the wasted time fucking about with the horrible inventory system and the useless sidequests, I think the game was about 10 hours longer than it should have been. The sidequests were a particular annoyance, not for their content but their context. At least four times during the game, I was presented with a sidequest that, while doing nothing to advance the main plot, nevertheless were almost mandatory based on the context of the story. The first example was in the Hengsha area. Jensen has tracked down a hacker behind the attack on his boss’s factory earlier in the game, and is entering the building where the hacker is holed up. This hacker has been on the run from both Jensen and his employers and is likely very squirrely according to the plot. However, your friend and pilot who flew you to Hengsha stops you before you enter and drops a sidequest on Jensen that based on how I’d been playing him, I felt compelled to complete. So instead of taking care of the very urgent and time sensitive mission I was supposed to be dealing with, my pilot gets me to go on some wild goose chase to get justice for her murdered girlfriend. The quest itself didn’t bother me, but the timing completely threw me out of the plot. It broke my suspension of belief immediately. And this happened multiple times, every quest coming up at the worst possible time. It felt more like the developers thought the game was too short, so they padded it with useless sidequests that they shoehorned into the timeline without thought to the context.

Finally, I have to note that this game felt very restrained by the fact that it was built both for the consoles and the PC. Most of the levels felt very tiny, especially the city levels like those in Detroit and Hengsha. One could forgive that if the missions didn’t constantly have the player traversing the levels multiple times, back and forth across about two city blocks. Particularly irritating was the lack of a fast travel option to some of these places. Running from my apartment on one side of the two-zone Detroit area to the police station in the other zone and back works for immersion once. After the fifth time, it becomes an irritant that only pads the game time for no benefit. Another limitation I blame on the console design is the inconsistent level of quality in the character models. Main characters like Jensen, David Sarif and others get the full polygon, high-res texture treatment. Minor characters, however, often show up as looking very low-poly, low-res cutouts and it’s quite jarring to see cutscenes that go from Jensen’s very detailed look to the not so detailed cardboard cutouts. It’s almost as if their detail level symbolizes their importance to the plot. This lack of consistency really broke immersion.

Even with all the flaws mentioned above, I still enjoyed the experience, though by the end I just wanted to finish it. If the developers do make a sequel, I’d be inclined to play it as well, with the hope that they fix some of the game’s obvious flaws. While it certainly wasn’t the revolution promised, at the very least, it was a worthy addition to the Deus Ex family. I’d give it 3 out of 5 starts, which in a sane world, is a positive score.

January 21, 2012 at 7:46 pm | Video Games | No comment

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