Deus Ex: Human Revolution

I have finally finished Deus Ex: Human Revolution. According to Steam, it took me close to 46 hours but much of that time was artificially padded by stealth game play. Basically, I really tried to pass every level without being detected even once, and without tripping any alarms. When I would get detected, I would usually reload instead of wasting massive amounts of ammo and health restoring items on a pointless firefight. Now that I reached the end, and had a chance to look back at what I have accomplished, the game does seem a tad short. I didn’t feel this way when I was playing it though.

Adam Jensen, master of save creeping

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I definitely got my money’s worth. The fact that the game allowed me to take my time and play at my own pace is definitely commendable. You see, DE:HR has something that is becoming increasingly rare in the modern console driven market: quick saves. Any game that allows me to save creep through difficult battles or stealth sections gets my seal of approval. I guess video game companies know this, and being environmentally conscious they are trying to cut down on the number of seals I have to give out each year. Which is of course silly. Whenever I run out of seals, I just give out walrus’ of approval. Those are not endangered, right?

DE:HR also has an inventory screen that allows you to drag and drop items with your mouse. I have not seen this in a major triple A release in years and it almost made me tear up from nostalgia for the good old days. Seriously, the last FPRPG I have seen this type of inventory was Morrowind. And that was like three lifetimes ago. So this game wasn’t just haphazardly ported from the consoles. Someone actually sat down, and spent more than 10 minutes figuring out how to work mouse and keyboard into the game-play. And that person deserves a medal.

I am a hoarder. I cant help it.

Oh, and FPRPG is a thing now. I am making it a thing – spread the word folks. Anything that has first person mechanics and some RPG elements is henceforth going to be known a FPRPG or FPRP for short. Cause in this day and age of information overload we abbreviate even fucking acronyms. Why not just call it an RPG?

Well, because it is not. There are no stats and no skills. In DE:HR you merely “activate” your augmentations over time. Which works great as a gameplay excuse for not giving you god-like powers right away, but it is not make it a full blown RPG. It is an RPG ellement, and a limited one at that. While the number of possible ways you can spend your “praxis points” seems quite extensive, by the time you reach the end-game I can almost guarantee your character will be maxed out in all the ways which actually count. To me, this is both good and bad.

This is from near the end of the game. At this point I pretty much maxed out everything that could possibly make a difference in the gameplay.

It is bad, because it prevents you from specializing and focusing on certain gameplay style and instead allows you to make a flawless munchkin instead. I feel that good RPG ought to allow you to create very different character builds, resulting in different playtrhough experience. The original Deus Ex was like that – playing as a stealthy dude provided you with a very different experience than playing as a tweaked out tank of a man. Modern games rarely have this complexity. Deus Ex was 80% there though. Most of its levels were built to accommodate exactly that sort of thing. There were always several ways to get from point A to point B – some would require stealth, while others would force you to punch holes in walls, move heavy objects or fight hordes of enemies. The problem was that around the middle of the game my character could do all of these things. And it wasn’t a “Jack of all trades, master of none” kind of thing – I was more or less maxed out in everything. So I could take the stealth way, eliminate all the guards with silent take downs, then backtrack, and collect all the weapons and ammo scattered around the “wall destroying Rambo” path.

On the other hand, I can’t deny that being able to both cloak and throw refrigerators at people was a lot of fun. My inner munchkin was having a great time with the super-augmented Adam Jensen. In a way, I was able to experience all the different facets of the game without having to start over, and I could switch up my strategies as the situation required. It really did create some very fun moments.

Have I mentioned how much I like the backdrops in these game? Sometimes I would just walk around and stare out the windows.

For example, that one mission in which your pilot, Malik is in danger and you have to rush to save her – I went into an instant killing machine mode there. Throughout most of the game I have always used stealth and non-lethal weapons. I figured that Jensen, who used to be a cop would have a strong, Batman like work ethics. But when I saw bunch of dudes converging on Malik, I kinda lost it and dispatched all of them in a hail of very lethal machine gun bullets and EMP grenades. In fact, that entire sequence is probably my favorite part of the game – mainly because it incited such an emotional response. I really did not want Malik to die, and I kept reloading trying to save her until I was successful.

Lovely night time cityscapes

The main character is rather strongly characterized – he isn’t a blank slate. But his personality is malleable in certain limited ways. For example you can slightly skew his attitude towards the human augmentation debate which is the core social and moral conflict in the game. You can play him as a resentful and bitter guy who never asked to be made into mechanical demigod, who things such things should be either banner or very rigidly regulated and used only to treat life threatening conditions. Alternatively you can play him as an optimistic progressive who thinks people ought to be free to better themselves through augmentation, and sees it as a next logical step in the evolution of our species. Regardless how you behave in all the conversations, when you reach the end of the game, you end up in this room:

Push a button, get an ending montage.

You get four buttons, and each of them will give you a different ending. One will result in a worldwide ban on all augmentations. One will result in tight regulations, but may help to thwart the plans of the Illuminati. One will indirectly help to hide the evidence of the Illuminati, but will allow research and development of new augmentations to go on as normal. It doesn’t really matter how you behaved before this point – you can pick any button you want. Then you can watch the end sequence, reload the game and watch another ending. Once you do this four times, you get an achievement… Which is kinda ridiculous.

Not to mention that the endings are a bit weak. They are basically just stock footage montages, with the main character narrating over them. He talks about broad implications of his choice, but we never actually see how it will affect the characters we have actually met. I would love to be given a chance to have a final debriefing talk with Davin Sarif back in the Detroit office. You know, kinda like the non-martyr ending in Dragon Age: Origins where you get to walk around the throne room and talk with all your companions of the last time. It would be awesome walk trough the Sarif offices listening to NPC’s, watching the TV coverage of Pangea aftermath, and reading in game newspaper articles about it. I would love to visit Pritchard and Malik and see what they thought about my choice. Too bad they decided to end the game in such an abrupt way.

A lot of people on the internet complain about the boss fights, but I didn’t find them all that annoying. You see, I’m a hoarder so I would always try to have at least two lethal weapons and about a metric ton of ammo in my inventory, even if I only used it once in a blue moon. When I faced the first boss and realized he was immune to my stun gun, and tranqualizer darts I quickly switched to machine gun and took him down in no time. From that point on I would strategically hoard ammo, and occasionally spend praxis points on combat related upgrades. Yes, the fights felt quite out of place, but they didn’t really ruin my immersion much. I was mostly just annoyed that my super-stealthy assassin Jensen would completely forget his cloaking field and sneaking skills in every fucking cut scene. It was really silly of Edios to outsource those parts of the game, especially considering how great the rest was.

Little details like this make a whole world of difference. They make the world feel lived in.

The level design in this game is really amazing. I couldn’t help but be impressed by the Edios design teams attention to detail. Just look at the screenshots I posted throughout this review. Their backdrops and beautiful and visually interesting, and their environments feel “lived in”. A lot of games will create these sprawling industrial levels that feel very sterile, and linear. DE:HR does not do that – every room has some interesting garbage that tells you meaningful things about its inhabitant. Every computer terminal has flavorful emails that help to flesh out the game world. Offices have rooms full of janitorial supplies in the hallways, apartments have beds and bathrooms. Hell, I have even found this very odd cubbyhole somewhere in the sewers:

Wait.. Tissues, lotion, laptop and... Is that... Eeeewww! There is probably nasty stuff on my shoes now!

This is very, very good design. No, it’s more than that. It is visual storytelling. Very few game companies do it right. Valve sort of pioneered this, and are the undisputed masters of incredible level design. Their games basically tell their story through their meticulously designed environments. Bethesda is also very good at this. God knows they can’t design faces that don’t look like undead with Down syndrome, but their environments are always populated with strategically scattered junk. In Fallout you could get a good idea what each Vault was all about without reading any of the notes on the computers. They would always have enough clues scattered throughout he levels. So now I would like to officially add Edios Montreal to my hall of fame of companies with awesome level design skills.

Despite a weak ending, and somewhat sucky boss fights the game was excellent. I got plenty of entertainment for my money, and Edios deserve mad props for actually making the game PC friendly and making their environments look as awesome as they did. If you haven’t picked it up yet, I highly recommend it.