Video games are a conceptually simple piece of art. You’re given a situation, and you need to find how to solve it. Play any game, and it’ll ask you, “Can you find out how to solve this?” Deus Ex: Human Revolution, on the other-hand, decides to ask, “How would you like to solve this?”
In this respect, Deus Ex: Human Revolution carries the torch gracefully from it’s predecessor, the original Deus Ex, by providing players with a plethora of choices to attack a scenario. Yet it does more than just respect tradition. As my cryptic intro implied, Human Revolution provides a more open-ended experience than most games and is endlessly refreshing because of it.
In the not-too-distant future, humans (surprise-surprise) have advanced in technology. Upgrading TVs to holograms and food to pill-form just wasn’t enough though; enhancing the human body is the world’s new endeavor. This obviously doesn’t sit right with many people. Two kinds of people now exist: Pro-humanists who believe we’re playing with fire and “augies,” or people that have chosen to augment themselves with almost super-human enhancements. Our protagonist in this scary future is Adam Jensen, the security chief of a company pioneering human augmentation technology. When a mysterious mercenary group attacks his workplace, Jensen is left physically broken and half-dead. His bosses decide to pull a Robo Cop, and rebuild him with crazy augmentations. Now a cybernetic force to be reckoned with, Adam Jensen is faced with unraveling a conspiracy that will change the world forever.
The premise is definitely interesting, and provides a great drive to barrel through the game in one sitting (good-luck with that). The sparse cast is relatively interesting if undeveloped, but the plot moves at a brisk pace and the moral issues it presents truly make you think.
Now the best part: the way it plays. When you first look at this game, first-person shooter comes to mind. You’d be partly right… yet it’s also a first-person stealth game. It could be both, or strictly one or the other. When traversing an environment, you can jump into an area of enemies and start unloading bullets like Rambo. If you’re the more patient type and like the idea of non-lethal espionage, you can carefully knock out or sidle past enemies. Or, you could be a non-lethal mad-gunner by running out there and using tranquilizers and tazers. How about being an undetected soldier that enjoys the occasional satisfaction of snapping a neck or two? Will you traverse through one of the many hidden vents or barge in through a door? It’s all up to you.
That’s all well and good, but what makes this experience truly spectacular is the augmentations. Like I said before, Adam Jensen is a paramilitary superhuman cyborg. Thus you are rewarded experience very often by doing anything from finding a hidden passage or stealthily taking out an enemy. When you accumulate enough experience, you are give skill points to spend on upgrades for Jensen’s cybernetic body.
This can be the ability to see through walls, perform a two-person take-down, or even become a human grenade. In other words, you always feel like you’re empowered; a true force to-be-reckoned-with. I said before you could crawl through a vent to find secret areas. But if you purchased the upgrade, you could tear down an entire wall, disable the enemy behind it, and go along on your merry way!
With all these choices, Deus Ex: Human Revolution can feel different each time you play it. Not only that, but your actions have ramifications on the way the story plays out. For example, deciding to poke around at your base while your boss tells you to get to a hostage situation may result in those hostages being dead by the time you arrive.
Judging by all the praise I showered on this game, you must think it’s one of the best games ever. While it’s definitely a great game, there are a few notable short-comings in the game. Throughout my time with Human Revolution, I noticed technical issues such as unresponsive AI or frame-rate slow-down. A bigger disappointment was the ending, which was very unsatisfying. You’re given various choices at the end, and they all feel the same sadly. Not only that, this game, which hooked me into playing incessantly for days, completely lost steam at the last levels. These parts were just tedious and a pain to slog through.
And yet the worst thing that prevents this game from truly reaching its potential is an odd one: its boss battles. It’s odd because it completely strips the games concepts of choice away from the player and feels very much unnecessary. There’s only one way to defeat a boss when you encounter one, and that’s pumping it full of bullets. So throughout the entire game if you were striving to be a total pacifist, no dice. These rare encounters feel like an after-thought and only serve to pull the player out of the experience; it’s infuriating. It’s infuriating because the game is so immersive and satisfying otherwise, that such a gaping flaw was left unchecked and hampers the product so severely.
Maddening these flaws may be, they aren’t enough to ruin the amazing experience Deus Ex: Human Revolution presents. It just should be noted that it is not the holy-grail of gaming. It’s pretty darn close though. From the many choices you have in tackling a level to the many augmentations that are available, it nearly guarantees each persons experience with Human Revolution will be different. That is an achievement in and of itself. The fact that game play itself is spectacular just propels it forward even further. Everything from the stunning, consistent art-style to the expertly crafted level of choice, Deus Ex: Human Revolution oozes quality and brilliance.
You’d have to be a pro-humanist fool not to pick this game up.