That Humanized Revoluntionary Deux Ex Goodness

Have you heard of the classic oldie first person games such as Thief, Bloodlines, or even Deus Ex? You know, games that were complex, clearly with much thought put into it, and sucked you right in. Games that are so great that, especially with the stream of games that has been seen lately, is such a relief and change from leniency that they're incredibly relaxing and comforting to see and play. A stroke of excellence, and the latest addition to the Deus Ex series is one of those games.

Of course, even since the game came out a while ago, I have no intention of spoiling anything for anyone who has had the misfortune to not pick up this game and play it, I will not go into detail story-wise and despite how tempting it may be I will not go too far into talking about the game's mechanics. I will say right off the bat, however, that much of what makes this game great is the sheer amount of freedom that the player gets in each decision there is to make, despite the fact much of the information the player receives is limited, depending on the choices that are made. Because of the fact that said freedom and the ability to tackle a situation however you desire is a defining point for this game, that is why I refuse to go into too much detail and influence how you will go through the game once you play it.

More information after the jump.

Well, hey! There's that Megan lady now, escorting you around. How nice of her.

Now, this game starts off rather tamely, as one would expect. You begin in the office of your researcher scientist friend Megan Reed, who works at Sarif Industries where you, Adam Jensen, work. This is the only really part of the game that can be called "linear", as the game makes you follow Megan around the rather swanky labratory. At least, before the crap hits the fan. I'm not telling you what, you'll have to play the game to find out. All I'll say is that after transpiring events that set up the rest of the game, the game goes forward six months later.

The game touches upon a very interesting subject time and again throughout the course of storyline. Human enhancement, also referred to as augmentations, has become so popular that it is actually changing the course of human evolution. There are two main groups humanity is divided into: the Augs, people that have had augmentation surgery, and the sort of pure people that refuse to get augments and believe in the purity of the human body. I find this conflict interesting, because of the fact that one day we will have this kind of technology, and what you see in the game is a believable reaction to something like augmentations. Throughout the game, you will encounter arguments for why augments are either good or bad.

Rival firms across the entire world are competing for dominance in the augmentation field of business, and as augmentations become increasingly more popular with mankind, those that refuse to get human enhancements are getting more and more left behind in the wake. More jobs are being given to augmented people over those that have no augs. After all, why hire a man with augmented arms rather than one that does not? Why hire a photographer that requires a camera, when you can hire someone that only needs to blink to take a picture? There is a divide growing between mankind, because of the fear of being left behind unless you have yourself physically enhanced, with pressure on everyone over this very same subject. This concept, this idea, and this possibility in our own future is something that DX: HR explores and does so well.

As for the cities and exploration that you, Adam Jensen, end up going to display this very same conflict as you talk to the people you encounter on the streets and in the buildings. While walking around the city on your way to the next main mission or perhaps a sidequest, you'll likely happen to walk past a couple having an argument or maybe two friends talking about the latest news. You can even go up to a total stranger and hear a unique voice saying something randomized. In other words, no place in DX: HR feels like a zombie town, a place that is chock full of silent NPCs that only talk when you decide to be nosy and chitchat with them. Every place feels so alive, that it does really feel like an actual city full of living, breathing people.

Adam Jensen venturing into a happening club for a drink or two, perhaps even a guard to punch.

The stealth in this game is also something that is pulled off so, so right that previous games that you thought had an alright stealth system no longer look so okay. By dropping and hiding behind a piece of cover, the game seamlessly slides you into a third person view of Adam Jensen neatly hiding behind that cover, without this ever feeling odd or out of place. In this, there are no conveniently placed things for you to hide behind as if someone so kindly placed it all there for your arrival. There is office equipment, doorways, furniture in homes and on the streets, supplies, that all look like they are meant to be there. You begin to feel that you are in fact manipulating the world for your benefit, instead of vice versa.

Here's where we begin to talk about what really makes this game so very attractive. Choice; once you have a problem that needs to be tackled, you are given a bunch of choices in how to get past it. Of course, you don't have knowledge of these various options right away. There are pathways, options, easier ways of accomplishing something that you wouldn't know of unless you stumbled across it. Let's say that you want to sneak into a hopping club for whatever reason. There's, of course, a bouncer waiting at the front doors that will not let you inside unless you have membership or... you "convince" him. In other words, you bribe him to let you inside, for a whopping thousand credits, credits being the currency of this game. Say you don't feel like coughing up all that dough, so what will you do now? Well, on your way to this hopping club while walking down the streets, near your destination you start eavesdropping on two people standing by an alleyway talking about this very same club. One of them mentions that near the back of the alleyway is a vent that leads straight into the club. Well! There you go.

But that isn't the only other way. If for some reason you decide to take a leisurely stroll through the sewers, because that's just how you roll, you happen to come across paint on one of the walls that has the name of this club you want to go into, along with an arrow pointing down a passageway. Following this, you see that between you and this sneaky way into the club is a very large collection of toxic gas. If you happen to have an augmentation that allows you to safely breathe through this toxic muck, then this too is a way inside.

So, as you can see, it is not in fact your own style of play that causes the world to change to suit your methods, but it is in fact you simply not coming across the various options that you will always have in situations. Not only does this apply to infiltration, but this pleasing aspect also applies to your enemies.

As I played through this game, I focused mainly on non-lethal methods of disposing of my enemies. I always carried around a tranq rifle and a handy tasering stun gun with a nice supply of ammo for both. So, in other words, the main majority of the enemies I came across had some very nice naptime on the job, but none of them died. There is, of course, an exception to this that I will go into shortly, this same exception causing me to start to heft around lethal guns as well.

Now, I don't know about you, but when I saw that I had the option of not mercilessly killing every enemy I came across, I leapt at it like an adorable kitten jumping for catnip. The concept that I didn't have to kill a single soul was incredibly appealing to me. Of course, I also had the option of avoiding every single person like they had the plague, and silently sneaking my way past them all without them even knowing I was there. But where's the fun in that?

Of course, if you do knock out some unfortunate chap that so happens to be between you and your objective, you have the ability to move around his deeply sleeping body to somewhere that one of his guard buddies won't see him, and it's important that you do so. Why? Well, that should be obvious! If you leave the sleeping sod somewhere where another guard can see him, he'll run over and promptly cause your ammo to be wasted by waking up the same guy you just knocked out. The guards will then jump into an alerted status and begin looking for you, the intruder that clearly is in there with them. However, in the same aspect, if you decide to instead kill that guy that foolishly decides to stand in your way and lazily leave him there in the middle of the hallway to rot, once one of his buddies sees it, runs over and discovers the body to be that of a dead man, obviously the guy isn't going to be getting back up, but the guards will start searching for you all the same. All because you didn't hide the body, you lazy bum.

That guard is about to get that day off in a way he didn't expect.

Do you see, though? The game gives you the freedom of choosing how you can solve the situations you get yourself involved in. However I can, and will, go further to show my point by talking about missions that involve other people. The best example of showing this would be talking about the very first actual mission in the game, simply because by talking about it I don't accidentally spoil something story-wise.

A terrorist group called Purity First, a group of non-augmented people fighting against the spread of augmentations, have taken over one of the factory plants owned by Sarif Industries and are now holding the workers there as hostages. Your boss, David Sarif, sends you there to make sure that the latest invention that is getting prepared for distribution doesn't wind up stolen by these same terrorists. You have a nice amount of choices in how to go about solving this problem.

Going with the non-lethal route means that you can simply knock out off the enemies until you find the room where Purity First is holding those hostages. Of course, there's a bomb in there. You... do know how to disarm a bomb, don't you? Hopefully saving their lives afterward, you continue deeper into the plant, and eventually come across the leader of these hostage-taking, anti-aug dudes who unfortunately is holding a hostage himself at gunpoint. At this point, you have a choice, either bust a cap in his bald head then and there before he can pop the hostage, or brandish your silver tongue and talk him into letting the woman go and either agreeing to let him escape or taking him down without the hostage being in the way. I, personally, perhaps against my better judgment let him go for reasons I shall not divulge.

However! You can handle this a very different way. Making your way into the plant, this time with a lethal gun in your hands instead of those pansy non-lethal ones, you kill every single terrorist because they dared to even BREATHE the same air as you before getting to the room with the hostages. You then murder every single one of those hostages in cold blood because they looked at you funny before making your way to where the terrorist leader is hiding with a hostage like the pansy he is, before you promptly shoot him in the head faster than he can call you a filthy cog, which is an insult for augmented people such as yourself. You then show that hostage lady your spiffy new augmented arm blades the painful and bloody way because she begged and cried so much right as she's thanking you for saving her, before killing the cops that show up for DARING to interrupt you while you were having your sociopathic fun time. This way is the more extreme way, is it not?

As you probably guessed while reading that last paragraph, the game doesn't really react to you handling the situation so extremely. The only real reaction to all that blood on your hands is that you get scolded for killing the terrorist leader before he could answer any questions. Of course, the game isn't going to react to someone going through the mission is such a dumb manner, but at the same time I find it a shame that it doesn't even though it allows you to do so. Regardless, the game actually lets you kill every single person in that building if you wanted to, and that's the point.

With the hostage situation, which is something that is optional for you to handle, you can actually get them killed by not even saving them yourself before the police cause the bomb to go off, killing all those people in that room, or even causing the hostage lady to get killed in the ensuing firefight if you decide to tango with the boss of those terrorists. Hopefully, talking about the first mission and showing you, dear reader, the amount of freedom that the game gives you does show my point.

The sad thing about this, is that Square Enix probably will make that many FF games...

However, with games that shine with a heavenly glow of greatness, mistakes stand out like a big zit on the forehead of a teenager before prom night. Do you recall earlier in this review that I mentioned something that caused me to have to carry around lethal armaments as well as non-lethal ones? The reason why is the zit on this wondrous game's forehead. The boss fights, and how shockingly horrid they are compared to everything else ingame.

Yes, the boss fights are that bad. It's almost as if another gaming development team decided to handle designing the boss fights and failed at making them, and failed hard. The boss fights in this game do not fit into it in any way, shape, or form whatsoever. Period. Each fight against the bosses is boring, tedious, lacking in creativity that you wonder what the developers were smoking when they thought these fights were a good idea. The amount of sucking that these fights is nothing to the betrayal I felt once I was engaged in the first boss fight. I wanted to play as someone that didn't kill a single person, only to discover in the boss fight that I was forced into killing him. After a couple tries, I gave up trying to tranq the boss once I heard that the cutscene I would be treated with would be the same regardless if I used methods that would not kill the man or not. After the fight was over, I had a big scowl glued on my face and sore nerves.

All I can say is that, in the end, the only sensible thing you can do without wanting to hunt down and punch the developers in the face for designing these fights so poorly, is to just pretend they aren't even there. Trust me, it's easier than what it must sound like. The fights barely even make an impact on the story itself, strangely having minimal inclusion in the plot, that it's remarkably easy to zone out during the fight and wipe the memory of the boss battle out of your memory entirely before moving on to playing that wondrous Deus Ex you were enjoying pre-boss fight.

The very screen upon which you make Jensen even more badass.

Now it's time we talk, or rather I talk and you sit there and listen, about the augmentation system. Like I said at the beginning of this review, I shall not go into too much detail concerning this. I will say, however, that the equivalent of "leveling up" in this game is that once you earn a certain amount of experience points, which you receive for doing various things throughout the game, you earn yourself a shiny new Praxis Point. Praxis Points are used to unlock the various and numerous augmentations that are available to you. Since you are unable to unlock every single augmentation, you end up creating your own Adam Jensen, which will be at least somewhat different than the upgraded Jensen that someone else played as. Focus on hacking augments and you'll be certainly better with cracking terminals and door locks. However, if you've been beefing up your arms instead, you can simply punch through a wall and make your own way past a problem. Choice, decisions, you see?

Now, I have not yet mentioned the original DX for a simple reason being that I believe comparing this generation's game to that of the one that come out way back in 2000 will not help anything or anyone. There are a collection of books in this game, which are called e-books, are a combination of fiction and literature, providing a bit of backstory into the gameplay by showing written debates or explanations over augmentations and how they work. For the most part, these went right over my head, and a majority of them were picked up mainly for the experience bonus received for looking at a new book. Not that these e-books were a bad addition, mind you, but rather barely any of them grabbed my attention like a good book should do.

The conversations in Deus Ex: Human Revolution are impeccably voiced and impressively acted with well written lines. Never once, however, did these conversations make me realize how little I knew over a certain subject, nor was I challenged on my philosophy concerning matters. However, I do feel that, because of the atmosphere and attitude that the conversations carry, the developers could have easily pulled this off successfully. Intriguing stories are even told after hacking into someone's email account and reading their messages like the nosy person you are, able to see all the angles of each conversation you happen to read.

This guy tends to throw temper tantrums during arguments. Not a lot of fellow cops like him.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is an entirely compelling and entertaining game, that will grab you and suck you in every time you play. The game provides a stealth system that feels rather rewarding when you successfully stealth your way through an area without getting caught, even providing you with experience bonuses for doing so, and most of all the game provides you with an incredible and pleasing amount of choice. You can choose how to take down an enemy, gunning him or her down without mercy, planting a tranq in a soldier's neck, or simply tapping one on the shoulder before socking him. You can choose how you infiltrate a building, from the roof, the sewers, gunning your way through the front door or being a silver-tongued devil and smooth talking your way inside. You can choose to hack systems, simply smash them, or hunting around for the passwords instead. There is so much freedom to choose how you want to do something, that those very rare times when it takes it away, it easily stings. However, the vast majority of the time it does not, being a fantastic elaborate and, very pleasingly so, a quite long game that will take you a while to beat.

There are even things that I have not talked about in this review simply because I want you to experience it yourself, first hand. It's better that way really, trust me on this. This is a game that has decided to go back to it's roots, remembering what made itself great, and pulling it off remarkable and comfortably well. This game had many expectations prior to release, and it has met all of those expectations.

The question you should be wondering is not "Should I buy this game?". The question you should be asking yourself is: "Why haven't I gotten this game yet?"

Because, really, playing this game is something you should do. And you will. If you don't, I will hunt you down, tie you to a chair in a small dark room, and make you listen to Rebecca Black's Friday until you claw at the chair and beg for mercy after I have broken your sanity.

Oh, don't worry. I'm quite serious.