This is an archive review, from the olden days of The Game Show. Enjoy!
The biggest problem with releasing a game like Deus Ex Human Revolution is the fact that it’s the latest game in a franchise long-loved by its fans, but has laid much-neglected for most of a decade. The last time I felt this excited about the revival of an old franchise was queuing up to see The Phantom Menace.
Eidos Montreal will no doubt have felt under considerable pressure taking on this beloved game series. The critical response for the first sequel, Deus Ex: Invisible War mainly stemmed from the observation that the game seemed to ignore everything that made the first game awesome and eschewed it for a more console-oriented experience. To declare the third game as console-friendly would have taken nothing shy of – as JC Denton would put it – Nerves of steel.
The original Deus Ex was described as being set “minutes in the future”; decades have passed but it’s a future you can relate to. The streets are still dirty, people are still homeless. Corporations have more power than governments and on the streets, crime reigns supreme. Filled with poverty, misery and a worldview caught somewhere between Neuromancer and The Sleeper Awakes, Human Revolution is a prequel to the previous games (which compounds my Star Wars analogy), in which we see the groundwork being laid for the many plot hooks used in the series.
Whilst Deus Ex and Invisible War deal with the idea of nanotechnology, Human Revolution concerns itself with the nanite’s granddaddy; mechanical augmentation. This theme forms the backbone of the dazzlingly rich storyline we’re treated to in Human Revelation. Transhumanism is a major topic here, echoed brilliantly by the delicate coupling of renaissance architecture and fashion. Much like its thematic forebear, the beautifully-realised world of Human Revolution is obsessed with perfection – from the peacockish fashion, which extends even into body armour, to the proudly-displayed consequences of unlocked human potential. The darker side to the renaissance theme is echoed further in the inescapable misery of the poor souls left behind in the wake of change. For every nightclub filled with champagne-swilling biomechanoids, there’s at least one slum filled with limbless drug addicts, one tenement packed with ruthless gangsters selling black-market body parts harvested from the freshly-murdered. This coupling of past and future is what gives the impressive visuals of Human Revolution a real boost. Whilst the visuals of the previous two games were cold blues and unforgiving steel, the palette for Human Revolution is a range of warm hues; from the ever-present golden sheen on everything, to the beautiful touches from times long gone such as rich mahogany and many leather-bound books. Small touches that drag you further into the world are the various eBooks scattered around the world, very similar to the dataslates of the first game. And in some interesting instances you find yourself smiling when you see a shrewd reference to Joseph Manderley or a Skull-Gun. That’s the game winking at you, letting you know that Eidos Montreal are as nerdy as you are. The soundtrack is exceptional – Michael McCann has done a fantastic job of capturing the electro-noir themes of Deus Ex whilst giving Human Revolution its own deep and ambient soundtrack. I would place the OST neatly between Daft Punk’s work on Tron: Legacy and more classical ambient artists like Tangerine Dream or Vangelis. I’m a big fan of ambient electronica, so the OST resonated with me. If you like the work of Amon Tobin or Brian Eno you’re going to love this.
In Deus Ex: Human Revolution you play Adam Jensen, head of security at Sarif Industries – the world’s biggest supplier of augmentation technology. Attending a routine security disturbance, Adam is royally messed up by highly-organised and devastatingly kitted-out mercenaries. After being smashed through a wall of monitors and shot point-blank in the face, Adam is left for dead. In order to save his life, Sarif scientists set about rebuilding his shattered body and before you can say “We have the technology”, Adam surfaces as a cybernetic badass. Using his incredible ability to wear sunglasses indoors (“My vision is augmented”), Adam uncovers a global conspiracy whilst investigating the attack on Serif Headquarters and the murder of his ex-girlfriend Megan Reed – a leading augmentation scientist at Serif. The gradual unravelling of the globe-spanning conspiracy is the mainstay of the gaming experience, but whilst the story is excellently-written, it’s the little details which you may (or may not) experience along the way that make this game truly special.
During the game, Jensen investigates several cities all around the world. Each city is rich in its own unique culture and design. Shanghai, for instance, is far more vertical than Detroit. Seeing Hengsha for the first time, you’re presented with a believable solution to the spiralling population crisis – the sky. The richest members of society live in a plateau, living out their hedonistic existences among the high-rises whilst the toiling masses writhe in their filth in the shadows miles below.
The arcing narrative is the main focus in each locale. Each city however is seemingly choc-a-bloc with side quests – from short spats involving hookers and pimps, to long, multi-part quests that affect the direction of the main story and can genuinely change the angle at which you view the narrative. The side missions are a rich, multifaceted experience in themselves with a multitude of ways to complete them, offering a plethora of potential outcomes not only in the loot or experience generated, but in far-reaching consequences often not uncovered until later in the game. This isn’t your usual fare of “Fetch me ten wolf pelts and I’ll pay you five gold pieces” crap; everything you undertake has a tangible sense of worth, helping a character here might mean they come to your aid later on. Get someone fired and they might catch up with you much, much later and attempt to kill you when you least expect it. This sense of cause and effect, of action and consequence gives a palpable weight to your actions throughout the experience of Human Revolution.
Another immediate demonstration of the weight of your decisions is that of the experience system. Throughout the game, almost every experience you have generates experience. Unlike other RPGs though, Alex gets experience for a lot more than just bashing scorpions with a pipe wrench. Conversations generate experience, using non-combative skills generates experience, even just exploring your surroundings can give you experience. This rewarding mechanic gives you impetus to stray from your given path, to find unique ways to reach your objectives and gives you truly original gaming. The conversations themselves offer up the opportunity to craft Alex’s character, perhaps taking the persona of a stone-cold killing machine hell-bent on revenge or even an emotive ex-cop seeking redemption for his failure.
The payoff of gaining all that experience isn’t the tired approach of levelling up, either. Once you’ve garnered enough experience, you’ll be granted a Praxis Point. You can then spend this ethereal currency on “awakening” part of your potential. As the game progresses, you’re forced to make some often difficult decisions about Alex’s physiology. This is the real crux of the Human Revolution experience. Your abilities determine how you are able to go about achieving your goals. When you’re given the task of breaking into a police station to retrieve some data, do you go in all guns blazing with armoured skin, do you sneak in silently and undetected, or do you perhaps walk up to the front desk and socially engineer your way in? These are just three potential tactics – but in truth there is a cacophony of options available to you. Choosing which augs to unlock or upgrade has a devastating effect on the minute-by-minute gameplay, which is subtle at first but really comes into its own down the line. Two players given the same options could choose drastically different character builds, meaning their approaches to identical situations will play out radically differently. The synergy between augmentations is dead-on. It’s practically pointless upgrading armoured skin if you’re playing the sneaky – invisibility and silent movement are the key players here. If you’re planning on being the master computer hacker it’s hardly worthwhile upgrading your arms to fire ball bearings.
I feel that it’s worth mentioning that whilst the first Deus Ex offered a similar arrangement of augmentive gameplay, Eidos Montreal’s new offering actually does what it says on the tin. Whilst Deus Ex offered the concept of a wildly-varied gameplay style, the game was essentially built around the stealth mechanic, and differing from that rigid guideline was harder to achieve than most gamers felt comfortable with. Human Revolution actually achieves what is set out to do, and to echo a previous point, you feel the weight of your decisions throughout the game. You’ll get a pleasant shiver of contentedness when you realise that whilst you don’t have the hacking credentials to open that locked gate, had you not upgraded your legs to jump over the fence, the job could perhaps still have been achieved by punching a wall down with your upgraded arms. There really is more than one solution to every problem. You won’t curse yourself for not choosing the “right” augmentation on the upgrade tree. There really is no “perfect” solution to a situation, rather the game asks you to choose your path. So far I’ve found that if you can imagine it, you can achieve it in Human Revolution. You may find yourself planning a complex route through the blind spots of patrolling guards, switching to invisibility to bypass some cameras then engaging in a little unarmed combat before hacking a locked door. You may find yourself achieving the same goal, but a lot quicker with a few silenced headshots, some air duct traversal and opening the door with a code looted from an enemy corpse. You maybe just want to blow everything up. It’s all a possibility in Human Revolution, and that’s not an empty promise, that’s the reality. Whatever approach you take, you will be rewarded for it. You won’t be punished for choosing the “wrong” augs; rather you’ll be rewarded for using the right ones correctly, and you always feel like a boss doing so.
Stealth purists however may initially ignore the combative elements of Human Revolution, I myself was guilty of that. The gunplay is deep and fulfilling however and should not be underestimated, even if the controls lack the slick CoD control scheme we’re now all used to. The stealth mechanics are wonderful. There’s a satisfying switch from first to third person camera views when Adam slips into cover, adding both tactical advantage and the pleasing aesthetic of seeing your protagonist slinking along a wall. Enemies are clever enough so not to be a pushover, but just that right side of artificially dumb that makes the game worth sneaking up on your opponents. Sneaking up on guards is rewarding in another way, as you often find yourself hesitating to listen to the conversations the guards are having with one another, adding another tick in the “deep game world” column.
Favouring the cinematic, stealthy approach, I am keen to do things right. I still (perhaps erroneously) consider Deus Ex to be a stealth game, so upon unwittingly setting off an alarm, or alerting a guard to my presence, I will willingly stand up and be mown down by machine gun fire, essentially killing myself to do be given the option to try and do it right next time. Having died countless times whilst playing Human Revolution, not once did the game feel cheap or badly designed. The words often banded around GameShow Towers are to the tune of flawed design, unintentionally difficult, relentless, impossible AI and a host more. The fact is, in Human Revolution, if you get killed, you have no-one to blame but yourself.
I can’t remember the last game that made me talk positively for so long. Every element of the gaming experience has ensured that I continued to play this game straight through again, from the beginning, as soon as the credits stopped rolling. The beautiful visuals, the deep, deep play mechanics and rich and beautifully-realised universe in which it is all based should mean that anyone playing this game should expect to sink at least thirty hours of gameplay into this game. Double that if you’re like me and you want to find everything.
I suppose I should try and be an objective journalist here though. There is one thing that really bothers me about this game. The bosses. If you think you’re going to play the game as a sneaky, non-lethal type, guess again. There are a number of unskippable bosses who can only be defeated by brute force. When you’ve made it to the first boss using nothing but a stun gun and air ducts, it quickly becomes distressing. Barrett is a monster of a man with sub-dermal armour and a minigun for an arm. He relentlessly paces toward you unloading hundreds of rounds a minute and occasionally a small payload of grenades. Yelena Federova is invisible and can kill you immediately with her close combat attacks. She also has two machine pistols that are exceptionally accurate. Admittedly, once you figure them out it’s entirely possible to take them out with the stun gun and some environmental props, but it’s a long, hard slog and is entirely counter-intuitive to the gameplay I’ve been so busy applauding. You still have to use your bonce to find the best combination of augmentations and weaponry, but it would have been nice to have the option of using some non-combative skills to defeat them, or just avoiding the bosses altogether. In a strange feat of admission, Eidos Montreal added an achievement/trophy to the game for not killing anyone in the entire game, besides the bosses.
This alone is the sole bad point I’ve found with this game, but in a way it’s the worst possible thing that could go wrong. No other RPG have I played where I feel like my ethical or moral decisions are actually changing the world around me, whilst keeping the metaphorical fourth wall intact. So few games ask the player to creatively troubleshoot complex situations in the way Human Revolution does, so to create a situation where their intelligent problem-solving is essentially whittled down into wastin’ fools feels like a crying shame.
My opinion of Deus Ex: Human Revolution has not changed a great deal. I don’t think its right to chastise Eidos Montreal for something as trite as boss fights, no matter how 90’s they are.
The fact remains that we are holding history in our hands with this one. This game can rightfully be called art – videogames’ highest accolade. A near-perfect combination of beautiful visuals, a well-realised universe and rock-solid gameplay. Human Revolution is the yardstick by which all RPG-shooters will be measured from now on, and with damned good reason. Deus Ex is a tour de force of triumph through bravery, and summed up in one last JC Denton quote, Bravery is not a function of firepower.