5 Niggling Things: Deus Ex Human Revolution

Deus Ex: Human Revolution has proven to be one of my favourite role-playing games in recent years; it’s a deeply investing and intriguing peek into a future ruled by corporations, conspiracies and technological advancement. Recently I got back into the game with the director’s cut, a pack which cuts down the loading times, implements downloadable content into the game and comes with a full set of developer commentary. As much as I enjoy it though, there are still some annoying things which hold it back from exceptional status.

1. Panchea (A good portion of it)

When taken as a whole package, Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a very well-paced title, taking you from Detroit to Hengsha and back again while managing to maintain the freedom of choice it prides itself in offering. Panchea (An arctic base) is the exception to this rule though. The opening of the final mission in the game is fairly straightforward; you’re introduced to the scale of the base and the sheer devastation unleashed by Darrow’s actions. Jensen eventually finds the intellectual inventor and a very intriguing conversation/social boss battle unfolds in which you convince him that his deed was unjustifiable. However once you take the elevator down into the bowels of the facility, things go downhill. The final stretch of the game turns into a maze with brainless zombies as the main adversaries; there’s barely any elements of choice here and many limitations placed on the augmentations the player has spent hours building up. You can slog your way through it, mowing down the enemies as they charge mindlessly into your bullets or undergo a process of trial and error as you attempt to slip by unnoticed. It’s a shame to see Human Revolution clunk to an end like this, but at least the endings themselves (if you took the time to unlock them) manage to pick up some of the slack.

2. Some sloppiness in moving enemies and performing takedowns

As mentioned previously, Deus Ex’s focus on player choice is tightly maintained in Human Revolution but the gameplay itself does have some hiccups. The process of moving unconscious foes out of view is incredibly fiddly as you can only drag them around as opposed to picking them up. The game could have taken a cue from the Metal Gear series and allow Jensen to sling a body over his shoulder for a more efficient move. The takedowns are incredibly flashy and cool to watch but they have their own limitations as well; dual takedowns require two enemies to stand mere inches from each other and it’s impossible to take down two enemies when one is sitting and the other is standing. Some further refinement here would have gone a long way to ensure the core gameplay offered full flexibility.

3. Missed opportunities and brief story moments that could have had more depth to them

Human Revolutions boasts a very absorbing story and it often dips into some great looking pre-rendered cutscenes to tell it. As Adam Jensen delves deeper into the attack on Sarif Industries and the conspiracy behind it he comes into contact with underground crime gangs, hidden artificial intelligences and a set of conflicting ideals. Despite this, there’s never a moment that really wows or shocks the player and some of the darker elements of the story (particularly the anti-augmentation riots) are kept out of bounds to the player throughout the game. Some of the cut scenes themselves felt quite brief too me, falling short of the depth they could have added to the story. The most prominent of these is the point where Jensen finds Megan Reed after months of searching; it’s a very quick conversation that ends up putting aside the bond between them too soon.

4. Few consequences when playing lethally

Depending on how you wish to play, Deus Ex can change and alter itself in some unexpected ways, such as the quests you have access to, but this is not carried through every aspect of the game. The impact of a gun-toting Jensen ruthlessly slaughtering hundreds (or acting unethically) is miniscule at best. Some of these include Pritchard’s line in response to the first main mission: “If it isn’t Attila the Hun, back from the killing fields”. The only real detriment to the player for going the guns blazing route is a slightly reduced XP intake for killing as opposed to knocking out foes but the sheer number of enemies taken head-on quickly makes up for this. One of the biggest offenders is the Detroit police station; if you walk through the front door and murder every police officer in the building to complete the objective, the only impact of this is a newspaper headline with Jensen’s face across the front cover. Other more dubious choices don’t have a lot of weight to them which throws the element of choice out of balance somewhat. In a Hengsha side mission, Jensen must head to a LIMB clinic to get information from an informant. He gives you the information then asks for 1000 credits which Jensen can refuse to pay. His frustrated words: “You scoundrel! I’ll get you for this” ring hollow as there’s never any point where this informant comes back to hinder the protagonist later in the game. A similar thing occurs with Arie van Bruggen, a hacker who is being hunted by one of China’s largest PMCs, Belltower. You can choose to give Bruggen a weapon to help him escape or leave him unarmed. The latter sees him killed by Belltower which felt rather basic to me. What if the PMC had used the hacker’s intelligence to increase their security in a later mission? It would have gone a long way towards adding consequence to the player’s actions on both sides of the spectrum.

5. Inconsistencies in stealth gameplay

Stealth is definitely the most rewarding way to play Human Revolution; it’s incredibly satisfying to slip into heavily guarded areas unnoticed, fitting in a silent takedown or two along the way. For the most part, enemy AI is also well-tuned to this style of play. They’ll check Jensen’s last known location, hit alarm panels upon discovering fallen comrades and look into suspicious sights or noises. If only the alarm system itself had the same consistency; the indicators for the enemy being “Suspicious”, “Alarmed” or “Hostile” are sometimes tricky to discern from a situation where the an alarm panel has been hit. When you’re attempting the stealthiest run-through possible, it gets pretty confusing when the indicator occasionally bounces between suspicious, alarmed and back again with reckless abandon. I’m hoping that the sequel, Mankind Divided has managed to tweak this to a better degree.