Adam Jensen is back in a newer, and much better looking, Deus Ex. In this Cyberpunk action
game, Sarif Industries is attacked, and Adam Jensen is the man to find out what's going on.
With his lover taken, his workplace ruined, and every second person trying to kill him, Jensen
goes to great lengths (Literally. From Detroit to Shanghai kind of lengths) to solve this mystery.This is
all well and good to read, but I found that when I was playing, the story was much more difficult
to follow. I saw a dot on my minimap, and just walked there, without really being told why I'm
going there. I'd end up killing people, and I wouldn't even know why. Of course, you didn't need
to kill them. You could be a pacifist and avoid or knock them out, but with all those guns, and all
those gun upgrades, how could you resist?
There is what some would know as 'Modal Difficulty' in this game. A concept almost every gamer
knows of, where you simply choose between Easy, Medium, or Hard difficulty. These do have a
large effect on the game, for aspects such as, how much damage you take and how easy you
can kill other enemies. The bosses however are quite difficult no matter what. The first difficult
boss you will encounter is pretty much a walking, talking, human tank. This makes him quite
difficult if you do not have armor upgrades, or not a lot of ammo. It seems that you're expected
to have certain upgrades for differant bosses, but are not told you will need these. You will find
out when you are fighting the boss, but I think we can agree that most of the time, that's a bit
late.
Stealth is quite a large aspect of Deus Ex : Human Revolution. But it is not forced. You can just
as easily sneak around the enemies as you can mow through them with an assault rifle. You're
even rewarded with experience points for doing so, since you missed out on getting points from
killing all those enemies. The animations for the melee kills were pretty shocking too. For
example, with the lethal melee skills, Jensen's 'gauntlets' if you could call them that, sprout
knives, and he impales the enemy, with an unusual amount of blood and gore. Throughout
the game there was not a whole lot of blood, so it's a strange, but in my books, good change.
All the melee kills, including non-lethal ones, looked quite good. They were very original too.
Who, apart from Adam Jensen, knocks a guy out buy tapping on his shoulder then giving him
a 'Whollop!' in the side of the head when he turns around?
Everything in Deus Ex: Human Revolution has a gritty, Cyberpunk look to it. In near to every
area you travel to, despite all the lights and technology, which are clearly not very effective,
everything is dark. The sounds however, are great. Whenever you fire your gun, (which if you're
a trigger happy, civilian killing, crazy cyborg like I was, is often) the sound of it really makes it
much more realistic and believable. I played on PC, but I'm sure on an XBox 360 or Playstation 3
the controller vibration would make it even better. While we're on the topic of sound, can we all
just appreciate how crazily cool Adam Jensen's voice sounds? He sounds like Solid Snake and
Morgan Freeman did some Dragon Ball Z Fusion.
It's hard to classify whether this game should be considered open world or not. In the beginning,
you are restricted to just Detroit, but you can go where ever you want there. Do a story quest,
do a side quest, throw a vending machine at someone (that being my favorite past-time in Deus
Ex). But you are still restricted to Detroit. After doing some story quests, you're moved to
a completley modernized Shanghai. Once you go to Shanghai, you're stuck to Shanghai, and
cannot go back to Detroit until you do even more story quests. Once again, you're free to move
around doing what ever you want to, and yes, that includes throwing vending machines at people.
As you move around these places, killing people, knocking them out, doing quests, and climbing
through air vents, you would expect a reward. You are rewarded with experience points, and
with enough experience, you earn 'Praxis Points'. These allow you to level up your skills, and
earn new ones. One problem I had though, is that there is not enough Praxis Points to get the
skill you want. To get the ability to control robots, you will need a lot of Praxis Points, but you
will not have enough to increase your armor and maximum health, because you spent all of them
on your hacking and robot controlling abilities.
As a whole, I had a lot of fun playing the game. The controls were smooth and not
clunky, the atmosphere was unique, and the stealth was done pretty well, despite the bosses
being really hard, if you've put all your Praxis Points into stealth related skills. You'll really get
a good amount of game time out of it, with it's replayability being through the roof. I would
definitely say that you should at least try this game if you have any interest in action games.
I know I had a whole load of fun playing it.