Okay so anybody who’s been following The Game Show over the last three years will know exactly how highly I praise the Deus Ex franchise. The original title is a tour de force in 21st-century storytelling; Ion Storm’s Deus Ex introduced gamers to new heights of narrative, dialogue and causality within the genre of the first-person shooter. Offering unparalleled freedom and overwhelming adaptability, gamers are still raving about Warren Spector’s cyberpunk shooter over a decade later. A couple of years back Eidos Montréal rushed out their long-laboured passion project: Deus Ex: Human Revolution to mixed reviews. You can read my verbose and exhaustive review here, but the tl;dr version is that in my opinion the game is practically perfect, save for some glaring oversights in the boss fights. If those elements were fixed, would we have the first 10/10 rating ever awarded on The Game Show?
This autumn Square Enix have released an augmented version of Deus Ex Human Revolution, which they’re dubbing Director’s Cut. The game comes bundled with both the Tong’s Rescue exclusive preorder mission as well as the Missing Link DLC chapter; there is also a making of featurette, hours of developer commentary and an RPG-inspired New Game+ mode; the Director’s Cut also offers support for the Wii U Gamepad, PS Vita or Microsoft SmartGlass for a dual-screen experience and numerous other touches in the AI, graphics and energy systems.
More important than any of that though, is the claim that the boss fights have been fixed! That’s right; those frustratingly one-dimensional boss encounters have been re-jigged to allow the player to use stealth, hacking or action to take them down. That one feature alone is the sole reason I set out to play this game.
Being a conscientious review site we should take a look at each new feature in as much depth as we can, though. We don’t need to delve into the heady depths of the original game (again), we’ve already done that and frankly any small changes in gameplay are negligible at best; Deus Ex: Human Revolution Director’s Cut feels identical in terms of core gameplay so there’s nothing different and the story is identical save for the two missions which gamers may not have played before. The Missing Link DLC already divided the fanbase on its initial release; some say it feels inelegantly tagged-on or that it feels like an awkward deleted scene whereas others praise it for having the first instance of a boss fight with multiple approaches and some very choice achievements. The Tong’s Rescue mission is a great little side quest though; players who preordered Human Revolution will be familiar with this and it’s a beautiful nod to the first Deus Ex game.
The developer commentary however, is awful. It sounds like it was recorded in a layby on the M6 and has a habit of ruining some of the more dramatic parts of the game. Valve have gotten their commentary just right with the HL2, Portal and Left 4 Dead series all having optional, selectable commentary nodes – the Portal commentary in particular being snappy, smart and genuinely interesting. Unfortunately the commentary in HR Director’s Cut works via the infolink, so is only available for a finite window of time and is triggered by Jensen’s location on the game map. The commentary is verbose and drawls on, taking all drama out of sections of the game which require just that. Had Eidos Montréal offered the commentary after the fact, this would have been a well-executed decision: “Now that you’ve successfully snuck past those guards, let’s tell you about the design theory in that section”, rather than “You should be listening to the guard’s conversations but you can’t hear them because I’m talking over this incredibly tense part of the game and you can’t even skip this now it’s started.” After about an hour most gamers are likely to turn the commentary off – especially after it ruins the fantastic Bond-esque opening sequence. Despite that the disable commentary will still irk players as locative triggers will flicker the infolink on and off rapidly, making a short static noise which becomes rebarbative after a while.
Another factor which just does not work is SmartGlass support. The Wii U Gamepad and PS Vita dual-screen modes work perfectly but SmartGlass integration patently does not work. The device will synch and the game will assume that SmartGlass is working but hacking screens, keypads and any other dual-screen elements will fail to materialise on your touchscreen device. As an advertised feature, the fact that nowhere near enough QA has been put into making sure there is a good range of supported devices is truly invidious. Perhaps dual-screen play isn’t a selling point for the Deus Ex franchise, but it’s certainly a selling point for the Director’s Cut so it should be expected that these publicised aspects work as promised. To add insult to injury the dual-screen elements all look fantastic and rather than breaking the fourth wall, actually make the game feel more immersive as gamers find themselves juggling devices, hacking computers whilst retaining the ability to keep a weather eye out for patrolling guards. Alas, Xbox 360 gamers are not getting what they paid for here and this is doubly so considering the achievement list for Director’s Cut is the same list as the original Deus Ex: HR game. PS3 owners who’ve played the previous title get a new revamped list of trophies to try for but Xbox scorewhores are denied the extra 1000+G that a new game would offer, instead being given potentially only one new achievement for buying an entire new game, so caveat emptor on that front, Xboxers.
But, it’s not all bad news; the boss fights have been fixed! What demarcates these new boss fights is the newly-found freedom of choice. The original bosses removed the player’s diversity of actions and Jensen’s flexibility in approach where Director’s Cut cuts right to the core of this matter. Each boss can be avoided with a greater degree of ease; a well-placed EMP or concussion grenade will give Jensen just enough time to reach cover, from there the usual fun can commence! Those gamers taking big armour and gun builds won’t struggle with these bosses of course, but those taking hacker/stealth builds previously had no course of action but to resort to ridiculous lengths to defeat the end-of-stage antagonists. Having a variety of unlockable new areas, a stronger attachment to cover usage and a great deal of rebalancing you can see the lengths put into these sections to try and make up for the lament which players heaped onto the last title. Hackers can have fun, stealth players can mess about but the danger is still present, if somewhat toned down. Perhaps the danger is now too low – playing on “Give me Deus Ex” (The only way to play) still feels a little too easy, but in this reviewer’s opinion it’s better to be slightly too easy than far too hard; it’s a narrative experience as much as a gameplay one so that’s a small sin we can overlook. New Game Plus is a pretty welcome feature. In my review of Human Revolution I said that as soon as I’d finished Human Revolution I immediately started playing again. NG+ is a cool way for me to be the boss in the opening scenes of the game. It’s indulgent sure, but it does come with its own new challenges. I’m not going to talk for too long about the featurette as it’s content that not everybody will bother with. I’m one of those people who buys the two-disc Blu-rays; I watch the special features, makings-of and all manner of gubbins. If you’re into that gig then you’ll get a kick out of these features, if you’re not then you don’t need to watch it. It’s nice that it’s there, all the same.
All things considered this is a worthy purchase, although only really for those die-hard fans of 2011’s Deus Ex: Human Revolution. PC gamers can get the Director’s Cut heavily subsidised on Steam – even moreso for those who already bought the Missing Link DLC. Console gamers however are getting pinched for what is essentially an update; for the sake of a few extra features and a couple of updates this could easily have been sold as downloadable content, rather than a physical format. Considering that Eidos Montréal and Square Enix came under so much criticism for the rushed nature of Human Revolution, it strikes with incredible irony that so many of these supposed fixes have evidently been pushed out with equal celerity. As much as I want to say “This update has bumped Deus Ex: HR into the mystical realms of the 10/10, the perfect game!” I am disheartened to say that it’s fallen short (again) of the expectations it laid out. I’m awarding this game a very generous score but that’s almost entirely based on the fact that I already adore the original Deus Ex and I’m always fulsome about Human Revolution. The best part about Director’s Cut is that it got me to play Deus Ex again – so the lion’s share of the score is due to that. In terms of advertised versus delivered features this falls very short of the mark. Deus Ex: Universe has impossibly big shoes to fill and if Square Enix are going to continually fall short of their promises we’re going to be looking at the science fiction version of Fable – a future I’m more frightened of than one with Chinese cyborg gangsters and syndicate-owned police states, and no man should leave in the universe anything of which he is afraid.