Game Rating: Deus Ex Human Revolution

[fragger]

Game title
Deus Ex Human Revolution

Category            Rating            Comments Story line 7 This is a prequel to the original Deus Ex, but experience with that game is not a prerequisite, the story in DEHR is standalone. It should appeal to DE1 fans though as it details the events leading up to the premise of that game and reveals the histories of some of the principal players. Set in the future (naturally), it's all about the rise of cybernetic "augmentation" of humans and the inherent dangers of this technology in the hands of unscrupulous corporations. You are Adam Jensen, former SWAT officer and now head of in-house security for the Sarif corporation. You have been augmented without your consent after a near-death experience arising from an attack on Sarif HQ six months previously and must discover why this attack was made and who was behind it. You also have a personal motive for this as your scientist girlfriend was murdered during the attack – or so you've been led to believe... DEHR is driven by a fairly competent sci-fi story, if somewhat wordy and a bit confused at times. There are a few twists, some obvious and some surprising. Graphics 8 Graphics are not earth-shatteringly revolutionary but are still well and truly up there on the prettiness scale. DEHR takes place in a richly detailed world with lovely fire, vapour and particle effects. Character animation is excellent and quite natural-looking, a vast improvement over the previous DE games. Some of the action is outdoors and some inside, roughly 40-60. Parallax backdrops in the outdoor areas can be quite arresting and merge well with the play areas. The HUD is useful and relatively unobtrusive. Rather demanding on older PCs (well, my older PC) but there is reasonable scope for graphical adjustment, and with the right tweaking I got it to run just fine on my old rig and it still looked terrific. But if you want to play with everything maxed out on hi-res widescreen, you'll need some high-performance hardware. Sound 7 Sound quality is good overall and I like the weapon sounds, when I felt the need to use weapons, which wasn't often. Ambient sounds are quite rich and set the moods for the various missions nicely. Voice acting for the principal characters is generally OK - some actors are better than others – but I must say I have heard better (Half-Life 2 springs to mind). NPC vocal performances vary greatly, some are quite good while some are woeful. I'll have to leave the in-game music evaluation to the player as I've never enjoyed having music on during games. From what I heard before I turned it off it sounded quite good and fairly ambient as opposed to some species of head-banging metal, the likes of which seem to infest so many games (and movies) these days. Game play 5* *I sort of averaged this score out, it will depend on how you feel about stealth games. If you're looking for a rollicking, action-packed FPS game you'll totally be in the wrong place here (give it a 2). You can try and play it that way if you like but don't expect it to be fun - that's not what this game is about. There are a few combat situations – read "boss fights" – which, given the clumsy-feeling weapons, aren't a lot of fun and I was relieved once they were out of the way (SAVE!!!). Which is a pity as the weapons look and sound good, but just don't feel very good. Bear in mind that DEHR is intended to be a stealth game, so if you have no patience and no inclination to explore, observe and sneak around, then don't even bother with it. If you do enjoy that style of game, you may love it (give it an 8 ). The aforementioned qualities are rewarded and will result in a fairly fulfilling game, but be prepared to do a lot of computer "hacking" – and I do mean a lot. A kind of in-game minigame, it gets rather tiresome after a while, as can some of the long-winded conversations with primary characters. Sometimes you are presented with different response choices during these conversations but they don't make any difference to the ultimate story resolution, only – maybe – to the current mission, and even then the difference is not very significant. It's not a sandbox game and is fairly linear in terms of mission location – e.g. you complete a series of missions in one location then get picked up by a chopper-like aircraft to be flown to a new location for the next series of missions. Primary and secondary missions within a location can usually be undertaken in varying orders though, and some of the locations can be quite large – the location for the China missions is a labyrinthine, warren-like affair which can take hours and hours to fully explore. Almost all missions have multiple paths to completion. The overall immersion level is quite good in DEHR's brooding, future-dystopian game world, despite a number of third-person cut scenes. After the final big boss fight, the ending of the game is both anticlimactic and kind of full of itself. You are presented with a choice of one of four endings, and each will produce a different self-righteous moralistic monologue from your character overlaying a montage of real-life archival news clips illustrating his points. It's pretty naff stuff which takes itself way too seriously – this is supposed to be a game, not a debate about political, social and scientific morality. Replay value 2 You're left with the feeling that once you've done it, you've done it. Once you've found all the hidden stuff and discovered all the sneaky byways, there doesn't seem to be a lot of incentive to go through it all again unless it's just to see if you can do better or differently than you did the first time. There isn't really much scope for experimentation regarding your choices of augmentations as you pretty much discover them all before the game ends, and while some of them give you an edge, others are quite useless. The thought of sitting through all those conversations again is rather daunting even though they can be skipped through, line-by-line. I certainly wouldn't look forward to doing all that hacking again. Final thoughts Great looking game and lots of fun (once or twice) if you're into stealth games. Unfortunately it tries to be both a RPG and a FPS game but doesn't fulfil either role terribly well. There are much better RPGs and much better FPSs out there. If DEHR had had the same kind of decision-driven story-branching capabilities of an Alpha Protocol and a better-feeling combat model it would have been a serious contender. As it is, it's a worthy successor to the preceding DE games but that's about it.

[PZ]

Nice review fragger,
I was leaning toward not purchasing this game, and you've cemented my resolve.  There are too many games that I do want to play to spend time on titles that are not spectacular - I'd rather go back into FC2  :-()

[fragger]

That's where I'm headed next

After being here for over a couple of years I think I've gotten a pretty good handle on which members are into what kinds of games, and I'm very sure DEHR wouldn't appeal to you. In fact it probably wouldn't appeal to most of the members here that I've gotten to know, but I'm sure it would to at least a few non-posting members and visitors.

I liked playing DEHR and probably will have another go someday, but for now I need to shoot something. A whole bunch of somethings, actually - got some lost ground to make up :-()

[PZ]

... now I need to shoot something. A whole bunch of somethings, actually - got some lost ground to make up :-()

:-X

[Fiach]

I totally agree with the review mate :)

You said it wasnt a "sandbox" game and while it isnt, I did spend a fair amount of time exploring, looking for secrets, hacking the crap out of everything I could find..... just to avoid continuing the missions, I would consider these to be mild sandboxesque (tm :)) traits as they divert your attention from the main game.

The hacking I hated at first, but after spending a few points in it, I got quite good at it and enjoyed it alot more, possibly it was my favourite part of the game....which I suppose is a rather damning indictment of the main game  :'(

[fragger]

Cheers mate :)

Yeah, it's a bit sad when your favourite part of a computer game is interacting with computers :-()

I see you finally ditched Frank as your avatar ??? Who is that in your newie? Looks good, I like it :-X

EDIT: Oops, no need to tell me - I just found out who it is in the Dragon Age: Origins topic :-[

[Fiach]

Cheers mate :)

Yeah, it's a bit sad when your favourite part of a computer game is interacting with computers :-()

I see you finally ditched Frank as your avatar ??? Who is that in your newie? Looks good, I like it :-X

EDIT: Oops, no need to tell me - I just found out who it is in the Dragon Age: Origins topic :-[

Weird thing is, I cant see other peoples avatars, just names, tried turning it on and off in Profiles, but to no avail.

[PZ]

When you toggle the setting on/off, be sure to hold down CTRL-F5 to force a browser refresh - especially important if you are using IE.

[Fiach]

When you toggle the setting on/off, be sure to hold down CTRL-F5 to force a browser refresh - especially important if you are using IE.

Tried that mate, I can see them in Firefox, not IE, its no biggie though, I'll just use FF, cheers :)

[Art Blade]

Excellent review, fragger  :) :-X Wrote it on a rainy day with lots of spare time at hand?  :-()

There are too many games that I do want to play to spend time on titles that are not spectacular

Well said :)

[fragger]

Thanks Art :) Yeah, I guess I did get a bit verbose there

[Art Blade]

I liked it anyway  ;D

[KingRat]

I've played this on both my PC and 360 but when I saw the Directors Cut listed on Amazon I went ahead and placed a pre-order. Original date of 11/15 has been moved up to 10/22...anyone else interested?

[Art Blade]

moved from Nov. 2015 to Oct. 2022? ???? ???

Spoiler

OK OK OK, I know  :-D

[fragger]

Original date of 11/15 has been moved up to 10/22...anyone else interested?

I can't say I'm terribly interested - well, not anymore. I wasn't an enormous fan of the game to start with, but I did enjoy it - once - and thought I might play it one more time someday. But then Steam took it away from me (actually wiped it off my hard drive during the course of an "update", along with the desktop shortcut to it which I'd gone to the trouble of creating for myself) so I gave up on it completely. I also placed a curse on the firstborn of every employee at Steam.

I might have been interested if Steam wasn't part of the equation, but if they are, I'm not.

[fragger]

Actually, when I first saw the dates KingRat posted I thought it was what Art joked about (and thought WTF?) I'll never get used to the American method of listing the month before the date. Our format is dd/mm/yy, and since I instinctively know that there is no 22nd month I automatically interpret that date as October 2022 :-()

I wonder how that came about? Why mm/dd/yy in the U.S.? I may have to look into that. Things like that fascinate me.

[Art Blade]

indeed :) also, to me it is more common to use a day date with month and year while a month date may be used with year but without day. E.g. 31.12.2013 or 12/2013. In order to prevent confusion (and a Y3K bug) we usually note a year including the millennium not to be confused with a day or month date.

[durian]

Nice review fragger. I bought the game and I couldn't play it more than 1 hr thanks to the counterintuitive control. I mean you need to press right analog stick for aim down the sight instead to using L1 which is commonly used in other FPS like FC, COD ...

As for your question regarding the US's using of the month/date/year format, as far as I know, the British had used it long in the past until 20th century when they adopted other European countries' format (Germany, France, Italy, Austria ...). The British just brought it with them when they came to America and it sticks with Americans to this day. I find it amusing that Brits ask Americans:"How did you come up with this weird format ?"

Personally I prefer the date/month/year format  :)

[Art Blade]

nice info on the date thingy. :) The ultimate horror for me is a date you cannot tell which is which. I.e. a date with numbers <=12. Like, 01/12/09. Is it Dec 1st, 2009 or Jan 12, 2009 or even worse, when the year is in front ???? (which is a version I also happened upon) so it could be Sept 12, 2001 or Dec 9, 2001. Gah.. That's why I enjoy a spelled-out month, e.g. 12 January 2009. :)

[durian]

Yeah I know what you mean. I do the same as you when I write out the date in my journal to avoid the confusion.

[fragger]

The date-month-year format just seems more logical to me as it's a procession of short period to long. Nobody is right or wrong of course, It's just a curious cultural difference.

Here's another one: In Australia we flip a light switch on the wall down to turn on a ceiling light, but in America the switch goes up. Which way is "correct"? They both are, when you're in the corresponding country.

I remember mucking around with a bedside lamp in a hotel room in Hawaii trying to turn it on. There was a short little rod with a ball on the end of it sticking out horizontally from near the base of the lamp and it was obviously the on/off switch. I tried to lever it up and down and forwards and backwards, tried to push it in and out, but it wouldn't budge. I tried turning it and it wouldn't move either. Eventually I discovered that it did revolve, but only one way, and to turn it off I had to rotate it in the same direction as I did to turn it on. I was a stranger in a strange land :-()

durian, I didn't know about the British originally using that date format, thanks for that bit of info :)

[Art Blade]

you guys have light switches? We turn the light bulb. In = on, out = off  :-D I hear in Australia only licenced electricians may change light bulbs and that there even is a fine of $10 in case you don't call said electrician and change it yourself.. crazy.  :-D

[durian]

 :-()

[fragger]

? Who told you that? ???? News to me.

[Art Blade]

picked it up on a dictionary forum's discussion but checking again just now I see the guy has a "(US)" next to his name so maybe he didn't really know.

http://forum.dict.cc/?fo_get_entry=621812