You take the rough with the smooth, thought Jensen, as he detoured around the side of the building to wedge himself into a conveniently placed air duct. There's always a way in.
As a prequel to what is widely regarded as one of the best games of all time, Deus Ex: Human Revolution has a lot to live up to. Deus Ex set the bar of excellence so high that it has rarely been reached since. It was revolutionary in that it offered almost unprecedented freedom to approach any challenge, in any way that you wanted. You could be a sneaky, stealth, ninja who only stabbed people in the backside with electric prods, or you could be a raging, nigh-on-invincible, bazooka wielding machine. Not only this; Ion Storm had designed a game that was so thorough in it's predictions of what a player might do in any given situation, that even if you went in the exact opposite direction of where the game was prodding you; it would accommodate this and change accordingly. To this day, the bit where Anna Navarre ordered me to kill an unarmed hostage, only for me to save my game and experimentally kill her with a bunch of grenades, stands out as one of my fondest gaming memories. Not because I particularly enjoy blowing sadistic cyber-agents to bits with grenades (i do) but because I wasn't confronted with a game over screen for doing it. Will Human Revolution live up to the name?
As I mentioned above, you play as gravelly voiced Adam Jensen. A mechanically augmented ex-SWAT operative who is now working as Head of Security for Sarif Industries; one of the worlds premier creators and suppliers of augmentation technology. It's a time of political unrest as the world is divided over the ethics of forcing evolution by grafting machinery onto our bodies. Where some people fight for their right to choose this path, others believe that it's an abhorration and that our humanity is reduced with every upgrade. In addition, anyone who has been augmented runs the risk of their bodies eventually rejecting the implants and so, must take drugs bought from the government for the rest of their lives. For me, this gave an interesting spin on things as my opinion on the matter fell somewhere in the middle. Do I agree with people effectively being trapped into paying for drugs for the rest of their lives? No. But on the other hand, Adam himself would be dead if the same augmentations hadn't saved his life. It's a debate that is often brought up throughout and it's interesting to play a game where the line between good and evil isn't so obvious.
The game itself plays as a kind of stealth-rpg-cover shooter with multiple ways to achieve your objectives. The levels are split between a series of fairly tight linear sections and large, open, hub areas where you are free to explore and pick up side quests. Although the linear parts do shepherd you from point A to point B, Eidos have done so well with creating the illusion of choice that you rarely feel as though you don't have it. Indeed, there are always alternate routes available or turrets to hack or roofs to recklessly jump off of; but you're really just walking down an extremely wide corridor as opposed to a narrow one. The hub sections are far more open and look fantastic, with multitudes of npc's to talk to and conversations to overhear. Heng Sha especially, is a real joy to explore with bustling labyrinthine streets lined with bars, shops and clubs with chefs outside cooking food in woks over open flames: All is bathed in the neon glow of hundreds of individually branded signs hanging from the twisted, cramped buildings, towering above. It's deliciously foreign and you get a real sense of futuristic culture as you walk it's winding paths.
The missions and side quests themselves are also a real joy to fight or sneak your way through for various reasons aside from the beautiful design. First, the much lauded third person cover system is actually fantastic. The transition from first person feels extremely natural and any perceived lack of immersion is more than made up for by how cinematic it looks when Jensen rolls from cover to cover. By default, holding the right mouse button will cause you to stick to any valid object in an instant and releasing will un-stick you just as quickly. I've never once had any frustrating issues with getting stuck behind cover when a bad guy flanks me, or accidentally ducking behind something when I wanted to go around it. That's right, i'm looking at you Mass Effect and Gears of War.
The enemy AI is perfect too. Well, I say perfect. The very essence of their perfection is that they are not quite perfect. That makes sense right? I'll explain... The enemies in this game are a bit too forgiving when it comes to spotting you diving around stealthily, and will tend to miss you even if they are standing right next to you cowering behind a sofa. This is never annoying. In fact, because of this imperfection it stops the game being about cowering behind sofas and allows you to get on with the sneaking and the stalking and the frenzied beating of bad guys with cybernetic fists. If they do happen to spot you (or if you're the Rambo type) they will fan out convincingly, cover each other with suppressing fire and try and flush you out with grenades. But again, they are stupid enough so that you can still pick an opportunity to disappear. Maybe to flank them and pick them off one by one. I've had great fun doing just this; zipping from enemy soldier to enemy soldier and taking them down with kung-fu uber moves.
And what kung-fu uber moves they are! You have probably heard of the animated take-downs that you can execute if you get close to somebody. If you do this, and press a key, you will expend a bar of energy (used to power your augmentations) to launch into a brilliantly choreographed and violent insta-death move. These are entertaining right up until the end of the game and were my primary way of dealing out destruction all the way through.
Annoyingly, the constant fun provided by the basic guards in the game is broken up somewhat by several boss fights that follow the basic game formula of being invulnerable until they reveal their one weakness. Further to this, they feel shoe-horned into the story. The bosses' appearances don't really add any significance to the plot so it remains a bit of a mystery as to why they were added in the first place.
There is another type of 'boss', however, that is far more satisfying. At certain intervals you get to engage in a kind of conversational battle (which may or may not actually be the official name for these) with key characters. The idea being that you need to convince them to release some information to you or to do something else that you want purely with the power of speech. An extremely well acted and well animated sequence will start where you need to listen carefully to what your 'opponent' says and react accordingly by choosing the correct response. It's a very well done, surprisingly natural process that feels far more at home in Human Revolutions world.
You also have access to a large range of augmentations to unlock and upgrade as you progress. These are upgraded by earning experience points. Once you get a certain amount you're rewarded with a praxis point which you spend to upgrade yourself. (Someone needs a thesaurus....) The aug' tree is deceptively expansive but, in all honestly, only a handful of them are actually fun to use. The majority are either passive abilities that make you harder to kill, immune to the effects of certain weapons or better at hacking computers (done with a brief but entertaining mini game). The others are used mainly for exploration and only five really change the way you play your character. One being massively over-powered; a fully upgraded stealth aug' almost feels like an invulnerability button.
Finally, in this regard; the hacking augs are far too important. Not upgrading them massively gimps your chance of accessing interesting areas throughout the game, and as I didn't want to miss content, I felt forced to invest heavily in fairly boring augs early on. Upgrade.
Having said all this, when you manage to jump off a roof in a ball of shiny light, only to stun everyone nearby with your shiny fist slam, and then spin on the spot to release a load of tiny explosives that kill them all, before cloaking and sprinting into the night - it's damn cool.
The game runs brilliantly on my HD5770 and looks fantastic doing it. Some of the textures dont quite make the grade when subjected to a closer inspection as there are some weirdly low-res clutter items sitting around. For the most part though, they dont detract from the overall feel of things and you don't really notice them. Loading times were reasonable on my PC and considering how much I used the quick load function, (more often to re-play fun sections than because of horrible deaths, honest) it says a lot that I never felt frustrated when waiting for the action to start back up.
Overall It's about as worthy a successor to Deus Ex as we are going to get. No other game on the market that I'm aware of right now manages to pull off such a deft mix of linearity and freedom. In fact, I'd go so far as too say it's the best game that I've played this year. If it wasn't for minor problems such as the dodgy boss battles, slightly unbalanced augmentation system and a bit of a repetitive lull in gameplay during the middle segments, It would be right up their with Half-Life 2 in my all time greats. It falls a bit short, but you can do far, far, worse than devoting 30 or so hours to this gripping, futuristic, thriller.
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