Deus Ex : Human Revolution

I’m trying to let the shock wear off but I feel that if I do I’ll miss the deadline for this review and I’ll fall into the dust of the aftermath of the Deus Ex : Human Revolution release. If anyone reading this has listened to the podcast or followed what we do here at Handheld Heroes, I have talked about my anticipation of this game for a fair amount of time. It was one of the few games on my list this year that I was truly looking forward to. Andyb0y worked his ass off and got me a review copy. I was so ecstatic that, in the light of me finding out that I’ve been destroying my bandwidth cap for the past couple months, I threw worry aside and activated this 8 gig beast for download. I’d really like those 8 gigs back now.

The Portrait of Degradation

I loved the first Deus Ex. I found some charming things about Invisible War. Running head long into Human Revolution with that love and all the hype that I’ve been inundated with this past year I found myself falling apart. Not a quick slam into the wall either. A kind of slow motion cinematic death scene. A bad looking character model here. A massive and random loading frame drop there. Bland voice acting. Awkward mechanics. I felt like Sean Bean as Boromir. As time crawled on I came to one clear and concise realization. I’d been lied to. I’m not quite sure where the lie began though. Did it come from the developers, trying to hype their game up? Did it come from the title itself, existing as a jewel in the history of gaming? Or did it come from me, and my established definition of what a high end and innovative game is?

The Idea of Possibility

After such an incredible rendering of gaming possibility such as The Witcher 2, I had a decent amount of hope for a new Deus Ex title. What I saw CD Projekt Red do for cinematic gaming there had me salivating at the thought of what Square Enix and Eidos could do with a title utterly rife with possibilities. The struggle between human and meta-human has always been a breeding ground for fantastic stories, and this all had me creating Deus Ex in my head for months on end before getting my hands on it. The trailers shown only pushed my ideas further and made me believe that Deus Ex was going to bring such an outdated yet still amazing idea back to the forefront of gaming. Crossing genres in the best way possible. Now over time genres have expanded their tool sets. RPGs have gained a lot of in depth story telling aspects, incredible cinematic quality and very unique character development tools. FPSs and hybrid TPSs have come together to bring the world some of the most incredible experiences in gun play. Stealth games made being sneaky and quite a nerve racking endeavor. Deus Ex : Human revolution shot for all of that and came out the other side as a hot mess. An A quality effort from what now feels like a B team situation.

When I say B team, I kinda mean it. This was one of the first games I was given that had a press release and reviewer notes file in it. This allowed me to do some background stuff with the company and the game. I have in writing what they feel the game represents, which is something I’ve always asked for but never received, so good work there. In going through it I realized some moments in my gaming history shining through. Why I utterly hated the true ending of the first S.T.A.L.K.E.R thanks to the guy that was sent by THQ to force the game to finish having only a handheld game that bombed under his belt, in particular. Deus Ex started to feel that way as well. Though certainly not a testament to the skill of anyone else on the team of this “revolutionary” title, I was given all the directors names and claims to fame. Lead narrative designer has Myst 3 and and Myst 4 and Homeworld 2. Rated well, but all very meh. The now-industry-standard 80% rating. The audio direction apparently has many games on the trophy rack but the noted ones I was given as reference were Thrillville and Code Lyoko (both for the DS) and State of Emergency 2. That doesn’t sound like the makings of an unforgettable, hard sci-fi game to me. It just doesn’t. The art director seems fine. The game was a little too boxy for my taste but I loved all the concept art I’ve scene so far. I just wish the feeling truly rolled over to the final product (flashbacks to APB). The producer himself decided not to list any games, though he did work on some. Most notable of these would have to be Splinter Cell Chaos Theory. Less notable would have to be Rocky Balboa for the PSP and the game AND 1. Instead of listing these it was made clear to me that prior to the game industry he worked at Mega Brands. None of this screams “game I’m never going to forget as the best experience of my life”. I didn’t even look into any of this until well after the game decided to disappoint me. (Wanders off to active counter-character-flame-shield) Character assassinations aside, I know I have my shortcomings, but I would hope others would recognize theirs and either genuinely get better or realize the futility in all of it.

Grievances Abound

Aside from the decision to make your character, Adam Jensen, sound like Christian Bale’s Batman, I found myself going over the why-our-game-is-awesome list and refuting most everything there is. Mind you I didn’t read over the company PR pamphlet until after I played. I didn’t walk into this game looking for all of these faults. I really did hope that the game lived up to their expectations.

“Deus Ex: Human Revolution’s gameplay stays true to the groundbreaking legacy established in 2000 by the original Deus Ex, combining the best of multiple genres to create a refreshingly new and immersive Action-RPG experience“

Lets walk this road for a moment. I’ll agree that at times the function and quality of immersion in the game did feel like my first play through of Deus Ex. But haven’t the genre’s evolved since then? The shining examples of current RPG character development and story would have to be the Mass Effect series and, to a different extent, the Witcher series. Deus Ex barely keeps up with those titles in character depth. They all have customizable things, but I just sat through a 20-odd hour excursion and found myself using the same weapons I had since the first couple of chapters in the story and wondering why the augmentation tree only had a small handful of near useless upgrades. I saw maybe 2 weapons that I decided to not use, but other than that my inventory barely changed ever. Very different story for me in both Mass Effect and The Witcher. I was constantly having to think about new armor, or weapons and upgrades or spec based items. In the Witcher I even had to balance mats to use in potion, weapon and bomb creation.  Deus Ex over-simplified. Because ammo was apparently hella-scarce I had to keep a ton of guns on me if I wanted to take the roll of aggressor and would just fill out the rest of the slots with ammo and grenades.Thankfully the pistol had a lot of ammo early for it because I must have made it through 80% of the game killing all my enemies with my 10 mm murder machine.

And there it was. 80% of the game killing very simple AI characters with a pistol. In that thought I felt my heart stop. I was playing a slightly better looking FPS hybrid Alpha Protocol. The mask was removed. After killing a room full of enemies with a silenced pistol from around a corner it struck me that all the cool possibilities about what Deus Ex could have been were gone. I tried to fight it too. I was originally playing on hard and realized that all it meant was when I popped my head out of cover it would be taken off by the most inaccurate gun possible from across the room. I lowered it to normal in hopes that it meant I could be a true “John Woo” style gunner. Go all Path of Neo on some assess. Instead of dying right away I died slightly later. Then I specced into armor all the way. That let me take about 1 to 2 more bullets than normal. Enemies were still insanely accurate though so that was a waste of points.

As for the FPS side of things in this amazing genre cross-up, all I can say is “are you serious?” Retarded enemy AI (wasn’t allowed to take my own screens for this but I have a pile of 15 dead bodies in The Hive night club that happened by accident) along side very bland weaponry makes for a light and very forgettable experience. The first F.E.A.R only had so many guns but I at least have a fun and exciting story for each and every one of them. Instead I’m left with shooting a guard in the head from a pillar next to him, then subsequently shooting the next 5 guards that came by and wanted to check out the corpse real quick. ROOM CLEARED HOORAY! My favorite is still watching a guard stand in front of an alarm panel I hacked and repetitively tell his then dead team that he was calling for back up for a solid 10 minutes before I decided to put the muzzle end of my mass murdering 10 mm pistol to the back of his head and put him out of his special Olympics misery. And the guns… holy crap, the guns. So many that made me believe the blitzkrieg method would have worked. A heavy machine gun. A SMG. A Shotgun. A fully automatic rifle. Lets do this. Oh wait. If I stand up for more than a single burst of shots I get lit up. That limits me to being able to pistol people to the face if I don’t want to get hit once and have my screen go red and inform me I’m about to die because the armor upgrade I grabbed was worthless. Just for reference, I was informed from contacts at Square that this is the retail build I was playing. Not some beta.

“Deus Ex: Human Revolution is about choice and consequence. For every simple decision a player makes, the game erupts with new, additional choices based on the first. No two games will play alike.“

In The Witcher 2 I chose to side with the elves first and saved their women from a burning building. This trickled down from chapter to chapter with minor and major benefits and a whole different story arc in chapter 2. Second time through I picked the Blue Stripes story and got a tattoo, killed a despot, found out he had been raping an elf woman for the past year whose husband I met while talking to the city guard. All that in the first chapter. Then I was given a whole different chapter 2 experience. In Deus Ex I tricked an old cop buddy into letting me into a morgue, only to have to punch him out in the lobby of my hotel halfway through the game.  Not what I call an eruption. Granted this is a prequel and you can’t wander to far from making the later games possible, but still. I expected better in this day and age.

“The game creates multi-path gameplay and provides for multiple solutions to singular challenges. Players can use their abilities, augmentations, upgrades, weapons and the environment in unique, creative ways to discover their own path to multiple possible endings.“

But I want to go blitz-crazy super soldier on some people. Where is that setting for me. I saw it in the gameplay trailers. The augment system was toted as the “becoming anything” system. Why is quick and defensive assault character not on the list. I had speed boost, lung capacity, hardened skin, recoil reduction, super strength. In the end all of it meant nothing. I had two options. I could either run head long into the enemy and try and use my 9 foot vertical leap to pull some crazy awesome acrobatics while fighting only to get shot 4 times in quick succession the moment I appeared and die, or hide behind a wall and either stay hidden or kill people. Don’t claim player freedom when the game restricts the player to it’s idea of fun which just so happens to be “hide behind stuff a lot”. That is what killed Mass Effect 2 for me.

“The gameplay of Deus Ex: Human Revolution includes four core systems that the developers at Eidos-Montreal consider the “Pillars” of the game. Those gameplay pillars are: Combat, Stealth, Hacking and Social gameplay.“

First up on this is combat. They do point out that it isn’t a bullet fest like I did just say I wanted, but that is a player style and they did say this game would allow for a player style to shine through. So no on that one? Granted if I decided to play this like Ghost in the Shell and be all super stealthy hacker then maybe I would have liked the title more and not found the flaws that I did. Flaws that were there anyway. It was an active decision by me early on that I was tired of playing a stealth character in an open ended game and I wanted to be the big, scary gun nut that I usually miss out on thanks to my general disinterest in Call of Duty. This gave me a front line view of how limited this “pillar” is in terms of the game.

That of course leaves the stealth pillar as how to get around when talking won’t stop a bad guy from shooting you. This is where the atmosphere they claimed was a key feature for Deus Ex fell through for me. I understand this as more personal but I also feel it was a huge swing and a miss on doing something cool with the augments on Eidos’ behalf. When Jensen clings to a wall you get the Gears of War view. The third person camera. Not unlike Rainbow Six : Vegas, but way more clunky. Every time I pulled away from the wall I had no idea where my reticule was facing or why. Clunkiness aside, I felt it would have been more pertinent to keep the first person view while in cover. this would have fixed the horrible side cover shot mechanic I kept running into and it would have added an edge to the stealth portion of the game. Augments could have been made to allow Jensen to see over the cover, or the use of already existing augments like tracking would have become more important than they honestly were. Its certainly more nerve wracking to be peaking around a corner to get the gist of whats going in than just seeing it out right. That and the stealth felt so mechanical. Almost every situation in the game had a stealth course that was pre-built to let you get around if you just knew how to quick jump between cover.

The hacking pillar took up a good 60% of my time. No joke. I went full hacker because of the importance of it in this world layout and that mini game became Deus Ex for me. After each fight I would see how many hacks I could perform before having to fight another group of bumbling idiots. The game is basic and could have been more incredible, but then it would have taken the show. All it did was make me mad that I had to scroll through my log in order to actually obtain the passwords I found and make me sad that in this rendition of the future of mankind keypads with 4 digit sequences are how we lock our doors. Not electronic key fabs. Not ocular or vocal scanning. No. Just a 4 digit number. Sad and unrealistic at the same time. After a while I grew to hate the hacking game. The controls felt as horrible there as they did during cover hugging.

The ever important social pillar. Arguably it should stand taller than any of the other pillars if this game were to consider itself an RPG. There is even an augment you gain in order to converse with others better. Its too bad that I used this maybe 5 times since I specced into it early on and found it insanely not useful at all. Past that the conversations were at times very bland. Random people on the street all had the same things to say and none of it mattered. The people that actually had info for you all sounded very disconnected like they were told to take a break after each line in the game, even during events where I didn’t control the speed of the conversation. Usually at the end of these major and boring conversations I found myself pointing my 10 mm murder stick at the NPCs that made me sit through it all and unloaded into them. Thankfully they were immortal so it let me vent my frustration with how very bland everything was.

I found myself hard pressed to find anything overly good about all of this. Just more of the same followed by more of the same. The bosses were all about avoidance and retaliation. Wash, rinse and repeat in all honesty. There wasn’t anything outstanding about the game. Load times were ridiculous and the world visuals didn’t give me a reason why that would be the case. Horrible matte painted back drops against a high res and very starkly colored world. Next gen brown ran rampant through the first open world zone. I use open world loosely because you will be making your way across the same zones over and over to do different side missions that have you constantly revisiting the same place at different times. This way you only have to kill all enemies there once before you can just waltz back through with no issue. I did enjoy t-bagging the bouncer at the Hive club every time I had to go back there. His body was never removed for some reason. I guess that was my biggest grievance though. I thought I would be in a world of true repercussions based on actions. After lighting up half of the Detroit police department and walking out of there like nothing happened I had given up on this. I went out of my way to try and have the world turn against me as a player. Emptying full clips from my heavy assault rifle into Ramen stands in the streets of Hengsha. Killing random street punks in Detroit. Throwing boxes at civilians. I was begging the world to show me that my actions truly had ramifications. Instead I was given a taste of apathy.

The best was the ending and my realization of how overly simple the whole thing was. But I will not spoil it. After all it is a story and despite my words people will play it and praise it. I’ve accepted this and I’ve even heard that Deus Ex is being awarded with several game review outlets special mentions. I’ve decided to give it one as well, I guess. This is based on the merit of where I was hoping the game would be and where it actually was. On behalf of Handheld Heroes I bestow upon Square Enix and Eidos Montreal the “More Disappointing Than Amnesia” award for their work on Deus Ex : Human Revolution.

With all the innovative games being shot down these days for minor issues that make people complain about “not buying a complete product” that I’ve seen burning around the internet like pyres at a witch hunt, I’d think this 5-years-in-the-making game wouldn’t slip by unburned but it already looks like the flame-retardant is working. All I can do is wait and see if it holds out.