Deus Ex: Human Revolution takes place in the year 2027 when human augmentation is no longer a thought, but reality. You play the game as Adam Jensen, head of security at Sarif Industries, a company specializing in human augmentation and weapons design. After a raid at Sarif Industries, Adam wakes up to find himself involuntarily heavily modified with augmentations for his eyes, lungs, arms, and legs. It was explained that these augmentations are the only reason that he’s even alive. Adam also finds out that his former love interest, Megan Reed who had just had a breakthrough in the augmentation technology, along with many others died during the raid. Seeking answers, Adam embarks on a quest that takes him around the world to find those responsible.

When I first saw this game I saw what I now realize were trailers that consisted solely of cut scenes from the game along with other additional cinematic footage not found in the game. After watching these promotional trailers I was left thinking that this was a run and gun, slash em up action packed type of game, but this was also the first time I had even heard of the game so I was not familiar with the series.  What I learned from playing was that this game is a sandbox style stealth game that is best described as the basic storyline from Repo Men (minus the organ failure/repossession parts), the stealth of Metal Gear, and the overall feel of Mass Effect.

STORY:

The storyline is pretty good, and it’s the key factor that kept me playing the game. While I wasn’t having much fun trying to be stealthy going from one room to another via maneuvering through air vents, hacking doors and security systems and silently assassinating enemies and disposing of the bodies, once the storyline progressed and more options opened up, I was finding the game more and more enjoyable. I played the game before any major patches were released so I found some of the side missions to be rather buggy and even encountered the Motherly Ties glitch which resulted in me wasting  quite some time on a quest that I later found out was impossible to complete due to my earlier decisions. For some people, they never encountered any bugs or glitches, especially if they were on the PC version, (which I heard was a lot more solid) but I personally ran into a few of them due to my non-linear style of playing and “shoot everything that moves” mentality when playing. While these glitches made me dislike the game to a point I was ready to put it down about halfway through, I decided to abandon all side quests and put my focus on the main storyline which sucked me in and turned out to be the best decision I could have made.

While Jensen starts off the game with some augmentations, the game revolves around his ability to turn on some the augmentations that were initially left off upon instillation, on top of enhancing those augmentations. Throughout the game you gain experience points by discovering air vents, successfully hacking systems, taking out enemies in a non-lethal way, and by completing missions. Once you earn a significant amount of EXP you then earn Praxis points which you can use to unlock more abilities such as temporary invisibility, damage reduction, the ability to see through walls, the ability to persuade people and much more. For the gamer who doesn’t want to have to work too much to unlock these abilities, there are also the local LIMB clinics where you can purchase Praxis kits which can also be used to unlock more abilities, but the amount of Praxis kits you can purchase is limited.

GRAPHICS:

Graphically the cutscenes were stunning, but I wanted a bit more visually from the normal gameplay. The characters mouths were very out of sync when talking, some of the character animations were very robotic, and considering how many similar games are out there that were made years ago, I was expecting the graphics to be on par with those at the very least. While the quality of the in game graphics was a bit disappointing, it didn’t hinder the gameplay. This was just another let down after seeing the amazing trailers on youtube.

HACKING:

One of the key parts to playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution is hacking. The hacking system was probably one of the features I liked the least in the game. One of the key elements to getting into secure locations, and accessing important information in computers is to “hack” the system. Hacking consists of capturing nodes before the timer reaches zero as your location will be known and you will be booted from the system. A failed hack results in being temporarily shut out of the system with limited attempts left to try again and having to deal with guards that will then swarm the area and/or security bots which will come shoot at you making the rest of your mission quite a bit harder as the whole building will be on temporary alert until you shut down the alarms. I found hacking a bit harder to do on 360 than it probably is on PC. On PC you can just move around the area with the mouse really fast and click directly on the nodes you want to work on, whereas on 360 you have to maneuver onto a node with the less accurate left analog stick. It’s a slower process hacking on the 360 version, but it can be done. While hacking into most of the major security systems will require a player to level up their augmented hacking skills, I was happy to see that pretty much all of the doors, computers and other “must hack” systems in the game remained at level 1 in case you decide that you don’t want to waste your Praxis points on that particular skill. You can also find passwords/codes for some of these systems if you search inside desks or search the bodies of those you knocked out, so not everything HAS to be hacked. Entering a password/code will not yield any EXP however, so if you cheat by looking that stuff up online… NO EXP FOR YOU!

While you can hack any computer or door with a security system attached to it you never see any sort of ATM machine or anything actually worth hacking. That’s something else I found disappointing. I mean, if you’re going to call it “hacking” shouldn’t there be a level 5 ATM you can hack to get some cash to purchase items? And why do I have to pay for items? The purchases of all items are done through a computer… why can’t I hack that computer to give me a 0 balance for all my items? On top of that most of the time when I am hacking a computer I’m just reading emails about how people have reached their max capacity in their email or how some co workers were having a fling on their break and are thankful they didn’t get caught. I used my stop virus for THAT? Probably my biggest upset when hacking was when I hacked into a computer to gain access to the police armory and was not able to take the SWAT bullet proof vests and helmet. Things like this would make hacking actually worth it, but are not in the game… so enjoy reading spam mail from Nigeria, because you’ll see a lot of that!

STEALTH:

Another key part to playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution is the ability to be stealthy. While I personally went the “run and gun” route with the occasional invisibility to sneak past major threats whenever possible, stealth is encouraged throughout the game by limiting your options by not making many weapons or ammo available to you in the beginning of the game. Being “stealthy” doesn’t just consist of traveling through air vents or underground tunnels; it also consists of pressing up against walls with the Left Trigger (LT) to avoid being seen. This feature I found to be slightly annoying as the character seems to snap to only one segment of a wall at a time. For example: if you are following a wall that comes out in a rectangle shape you must hold A to make the transition from one side of the wall to the next. On top of that I also encountered a few issues with snapping to the wrong wall or object when attempting to hide from an enemy which put me in their direct line of sight resulting in being shot at. Not too fun!

While being ninja-like is hard to do, there is a way to beat the game without any sort of confrontation aside from the bosses if you max out the right abilities and know where to look for alternative routes. This feature adds a whole new level of difficulty to the game that is pretty unique, although I noticed that the stealthier you are, the longer this game is going to take you to beat. With the average playthrough being somewhere between 20 to 45 hours, you may not want to try to tackle THAT task unless you have a lot of time to set aside for that.

WEAPONS:

There is a wide selection of weapons in this game. Not so many non-lethal weapons if you decide to go that route, but for the lethal route you have everything from a pistol to a rocket launcher at your disposal. On top of the wide selection of weapons, the weapons can be upgraded throughout the game as you find modification boxes for increased ammo capacity, silencer add on’s as well as cool down systems for the heavy artillery. I was extremely impressed. I was not, however, too happy about how you have to go into another screen to swap out your weapon. It would be nice to just hit the Y button and be able to swap through the various guns like in other shooter games, however that was not an option.

Players can also hack into systems and turn turrets and robots against enemies, and those make for the best weapons in the game! There’s nothing better than turning a turret to “enemy” and carrying it around letting it take care of all the baddies for you. I have to admit, I almost made it through an entire level doing this… and it was BAD ASS!

BOSSES:

While I’m not a fan of boss fights in games, I found the bosses in this game to be embarrassingly easy no matter what difficulty you play on. The only time I encountered any sort of issue was when I made a poor choice in the storyline which made one of the boss battles a bit harder, but once I learned this bosses pattern he went down relatively quick. The final boss battle I completed in less than 60 seconds on my second run, with my first run only being about 2 minutes. While I personally dislike boss battles in games I feel like if you’re going to put a boss battle there, you might as well make it challenging. If you look on youtube you’ll discover that all three bosses can be defeated within 1 minute which is rather disappointing. In my opinion one level of normal gameplay is much harder than all three boss battles combined. For those of you who believe boss battles don’t belong in these kinds of games, at least you know that you won’t have any problem getting past them!

SIDE QUESTS:

While the game is a sandbox game of sorts, the main storyline keeps the game very linear as you have no options of how you want the story to go up until the very end. Unfortunately the side quests don’t change the story at all… they don’t really do anything except raise your gamerscore. There was only one side quest that I encountered that actually affected the gameplay and that only lasted for one boss fight. While completing side missions in other games like Fallout will yield a custom ending with additional clips showing the results of your completed side missions, you won’t get anything like that in this game. The only side missions that really affect the game are the final two side missions you are given in the very last level, and even then you’re shown one of four speeches/ montages which don’t tell you anything about what you’ve personally done or how it’s affected those involved on your journey, which was very disappointing to me. Your actions don’t even affect how others treat you aside from people acting temporarily scared while the “alarmed” status is in effect. You can literally just wait a minute for the status to go away and everyone goes back to acting like normal again, unlike in games like Fable where your actions result in long term reactions from the characters in the game and how they act around you.

NEGATIVES:

There is no chapter select option. This is something I didn’t like too much because after finding out that I made a bad choice in the story that affected me later on in the game I wanted to go back and start from that point again and change my decision, and found that was not an option. When you load up one of your previous saves for the first time you land on a screen that shows you each of the chapters you have completed and you can hover over each one reading a brief description about it, however you are unable to select it. The average player is not going to create a separate save file for each mission, so it would be nice to have the ability to start playing from any previous point in time that you would like instead of having to start completely over again if you don’t have a save file that goes back far enough.

If you take down a person in a non lethal way they are down for the count for the rest of the game unless another person comes and wakes them up. I found this fact is very important in the game. If you knock out several people in one room and there is no security camera to see them there will be no one to come wake them up. Why does that matter? You could just unknowingly knock out someone that is important to a side mission, and even though you didn’t kill them, you might as well have because you’ll get the same result if someone doesn’t wake them up… Mission failure. I found this out the hard way.

Your energy bar never regenerates past one bars worth, leaving you constantly hunting for energy bars/packs, etc. to replenish it enough to actually use your powers. Since most abilities (such as the ability to turn invisible) are based on using energy it’s easy to find yourself in a situation where you’re forced to either hide or fight until you can find more energy bars.

The game has a lot of random glitches/bugs. While I was told some of the bigger one (like the Motherly Ties Glitch) have been fixed in the latest patch, I found lots of clipping/collision issues throughout the game. While most of the time it involved dead bodies just clipping through each other on the floor, I did have a couple incidents that actually affected my gameplay. Here’s just a couple examples: Issue 1- I move a dumpster next to a fence next to the police station so that I could jump the fence. I walked away to go find another box to help aid me in making it over and as I walked away I see “HOSTILE” status on my radar. I turn around to see the cop who was 10 feet away from the dumpster walking toward it on his routine check around the building was now underneath the dumpster dead. Every cop in the area was shooting at me for “killing’ this officer when I was nowhere near him and have no idea how that happened. Issue 2- I was in a warehouse and was playing peek-a-boo with enemies peeking out from a door to shoot then going back in to reload, one enemy just walked right through the door without opening it and shot me right in the face. An arm sticking through a door that is shut in their face is one thing, but straight up walking through closed doors is just not cool! Luckily this issue was one I only encountered a few times in my 30+ hours of playing.

POSITIVES:

Multiple endings provide for at least one ending you’ll find at least somewhat satisfying. There’s even a little bonus if you stick around past the end credits.

Multiple side quests and achievements add to the replay value of the game by keeping you busy for hours and giving you tons more information about everyone involved.

 FINAL THOUGHTS:

Overall I thought the game was good, but it did not live up to my expectations. I found the game most enjoyable when playing just the main story line and it didn’t really grab my attention until the last third or so of the game. I will say this though… the last third of the game is pretty awesome!

Is this game worth buying? It depends on the type of games you like honestly. If you’re into stealth games you’ll probably love this. If you’re a fan of Mass Effect there’s a good chance you’ll find this at least interesting and it’ll be worth a run through for you. If you’re into FPS games where you just run around and kill everything, you might not like this game as there is a considerable amount of times when you’re required to sneak and hack. The fact that there’s achievements for completing side missions and accomplishing other tasks all in a single run through make it so that it does have some replay value, so it’s not a total waste if you DO end up buying it. I personally think this game is worth a rent from Gamefly if this is not your normal type of game. A good week or two is probably enough time for you to fully experience this game.