Deus Ex: Human Revolution–A Player’s Review

Having finally completed Deus Ex: human Revolution, here is my review in short form:

“Wait until it’s out on budget and they fixed the bugs.”

And now the longer version, under a cut…

Good

• For £10, a satisfying game
• Large choice of Aug upgrades.
• Rapid XP aquisition.
• Variable gameplay styles – Run n’ Gun, sit n’ snipe, stun n’ evade.
• Upgrade weapons.
• Health and power regeneration handled sensibly.
• Difficulty levels are:
  • Tell me a story.
  • DeusEx how it was meant to be.
  • Challenge me.

Bad

• It cost £35.
• A lot of the Aug upgrades are pretty damned weak and ineffective.
• Prepare to either sink a lot of your upgrades into expanding your inventory or get used to throwing away the weapons you spent thousands of credits upgrading because you ran out of ammo, and then a minute later, really wishing you’d been able to bring that Sniper rifle/silenced pistol/rocket launcher/pointy stick along.
• Plot is pretty much exactly the same as the last two Deus Ex games.
• The plot twists are pretty much telegraphed in the first five minutes of gameplay and confirmed quite soon. There are no big surprises in this game.
• Some levels force you to toss away weapons you’ve sunk a lot of time and money into in the form of upgrades – It’s nearly impossible to fully upgrade any single weapon because the upgrade kits just aren’t available. And then you find the level designers are dropping hints that you should toss them by removing ammo from gameplay.
• Despite quitting me out of the game and telling me I didn’t have enough resources to turn on Anti-Aliasing, this game continues to be both breathtaking in it’s design and scope and also, fugly.
• No Windowed mode.
• Item Highlighting is a toggle, but it’s advised to keep it on because some things can be interacted with and others which are very similar cannot be, and frankly there’s so much damned clutter that you’d never find what you’re looking for without it. But you cannot alter the colour (yellow) to make it stand out from the background (Mostly yellow).
• All in-game characters suffer from Parkinsons. They constantly jitter, quiver, shake and twitch.
• Adam Jenson apparently is either severely bow legged, massively overweight or spent the last six months on a boat because he walks and runs in an incredible, eye straining rolling gait that suggests he’s swaying side to side dramatically. There’s no option to turn this off.
• ‘Pocket Secretary’ items often vanish from your log list. This is slightly problematic as they most often  contain the access codes or mission continuation info. I picked up one from a downed enemy, read it and was told I should read it some more before it’d update my waypoint. No matter how many times I read the entry the waypoint would not update. Fortunately like most of the plot points in game it was ham-fistedly obvious.
• At least one mission cannot be completed by any means other than having a stupidly high hacking skill.
• Boss fights: Oh dear.
• Boss fights are often a dramatic way to end a story sub arc and allow the player to test out that special superweapon they’ve been dragging around for the last hour.
  However if your Boss is basically an invisible super soldier who can take a hundred bullets to the face and laugh it off while firing three types of grenade out of his ass and hosing the room down with his chaingun-nipples, it’d be really nice if your main character didn’t die from say… Taking two rounds to the leg. Also if you offer an Armour upgrade, it really aught to protect you. Even slightly.
• There’s three ways Deus Ex used to deal with bosses:
1. Go toe to toe and see who’s upgrades were better
2. Use some clever environmental trap.
3. Pick up some information and evade the fight alltogether.
• In DX:HR your option is basically to die a lot then say ‘Fuck it’ and hammer the ‘Fire Typhoon Aug’ four or five times, and walk away. This is shitty design. The fact is you can tazer and tranq and EMP and gas the Boss and they will always still die of massive gunshot injury.
• Too many no win-scenarios were provided apart from ‘Kill everything that moves’. If your game’s major feature is ‘find alternate routes’ and ‘look for other ways to cccomplish your goals’ (Both of which are handy laoding screen tips). maybe you should allow for htat to happen?
• The ending is a throwaway – In a game full of fully rendered cut scenes with dramatic Bladerunner Noir visuals, they went with the cheapest, nastiest and least satisfying ending. It’s like sitting through Avatar and then the last five minutes is two interns with blue sock puppets.