By Christopher Pinner
Don’t come into this game expecting the same experience as the first time you played Deus Ex.
To some people, that might seem obvious; to others, not as much. But this game, the third in the series and a prequel to the first, is certainly not going to have the same impact on you that the original might have, especially if you played it close to its release in 2000. No, we live in a post-Deus Ex world, and the innovations of the original have become widely known and talked about, though not really implemented in much of modern gaming.
What were these “innovations”? Player agency, basically. In a host of different ways, the player could affect and even drastically alter the storyline of the original Deus Ex, and the game’s story took this into account. The game gave players numerous ways to complete its missions, and often the story altered itself (even if ever so slightly) to take those into account. The player had explicit control over how the main character grew and developed, and how that development took place determined much about how the game could unfold. Deus Ex brought some of the best ideas of RPGs in both storytelling and character customization, and applied them to a first-person game. The game was rightly lauded for these innovations.
But that was 11 years ago, and at the very least, the character customization aspect has been largely folded into mainstream gaming as a whole. Many games, regardless of genre, now let us level up our characters, giving us at least some illusion that we have control over development. Yet, in so many of these games, the leveling of a character doesn’t actually change how the game plays out. Whether it is fear of player frustration over an inability to see/do everything in a game, or developers who don’t want anyone to miss what they’ve so carefully crafted, very few games will ever lock out players from doing specific things in-game, or even force much weight onto the decisions of play. For the most part, a player can see 100% of a game, the first time, with whatever stats/abilities he or she chooses. Notably, From Software (in the “Souls” series of games especially) is one of the few developers that doesn’t follow this school of thought, but they are a rare exception. This lack of consequence is something that could’ve clearly been fixed in games made post-Deus Ex, but so far, this isn’t the case.
In Deus Ex: Human Revolution, it certainly isn’t fixed at all. The only thing that may change about the game is your method of doing something, but you will still arrive at the same end goal. Take, for example, a room with robots in it. If your hacking skill is high enough, you can hack the robots and turn them off, or even turn them on your enemies. However, if you haven’t developed that enough, you have probably developed a comparable skill, which means fighting the robots, or sneaking past them, will be equally viable. While in the original game, this was interesting enough on its own, in Human Revolution, it feels like very little has changed in the past 11 years, because, in the end, the effect is the same. You are past that room, and you probably don’t have to worry about it. At the most you might have triggered an alarm, and may have to deal with some consequences for a bit.
There are a few times Deus Ex: Human Revolution makes actions have consequences, (such as an early hostage rescue, and a subsequent visit to a police station), but for the most part, you can easily see everything on the first play-through of the game, simply because the people who made it decided you should be able to. You are even encouraged to do this by various experience point rewards that give you a bonus for going back and exploring how you could’ve done whatever you just did differently. This lack of weight on smaller decisions specifically can get very exhausting if I think about it too much.
Despite this disappointment on a theoretical level, I do enjoy the game itself. The individual mechanics of the game are all fairly enjoyable. The cover mechanic that fans yelled and shouted about upon its reveal turns out to be a fairly elegant extension of the stealth aspect of the original game. The AI is sadly not much better than the original game, but it is still fun to sneak around different baddies and trick them however you want. The takedown mechanic (also an early source of rage) is somewhat limited by a power gauge, only one takedown’s worth of energy recharges. Various special abilities also drain this energy, thus limiting ability/takedown usage significantly. This would add a little weight to the decision to use abilities, if energy recharging items weren’t so common.
The story is about on par with the original in terms of the actual plot. Though the player’s role in the story feels a little less dynamic than in the original game, the story itself is decent enough that it isn’t too disappointing. Faint praise, I know, but I never held the original’s actual story in high regard, as much as I enjoyed how it was executed. The player character of Adam Jensen is quite interestingly written with a very laissez-faire attitude towards what the outcomes of his actions are, as long as he achieves his goal. He doesn’t seem to personally mind killing people or destroying things, if they get in his way. This attitude actually does go along quite well with the weightlessness of some of the minor decisions in the game, which I appreciated.
The look of the game is distinctive and enjoyable, even if it does rely a bit too much on orange and hexagons. It feels cyberpunk in a way few games outside of the original have, and the aesthetic is incredibly consistent throughout. Though it does sometimes rely a bit too much on cyberpunk design tropes (of course your main character wears a trenchcoat), the consistency and overall feel of the art style is commendable. The game feels distinct, which, in the era of brown graphics, is a pretty big plus. An appreciation of that aesthetic is largely personal, though I mostly liked it.
In the end, Deus Ex: Human Revolution had an impossible task. The original Deus Ex made such an impact that expecting the same from this game was pretty much unfair. With that in mind, this game is a fairly well-executed experience that is worth playing for people who loved the first game, and people who enjoy FPS and/or RPG games. It certainly isn’t the best game released this year, but anyone expecting that is bound to be disappointed.
Recommended: Yes