This is the typical stream-of-consciousness opinion post so don’t hope for an ordered and organized text. Incoming long post.
ART
The first thing I have to say about Deus Ex: Human Revolution is great visually. Technically it’s solid, but the good part is the art design. It’s lovely, a very stylish slick future, mixing also a bit of renaissance style in some characters to give it an original touch but overall with a sense of cohesiveness rarely seen in videogames and without forgetting the functionality aspect, so it never looks like too crazy, but grounded in something real, plausible.
You can see how not only they had great artists, but they thought carefully about what they were designed, and how all should make sense. From the distinctive style of China or Detroit, to the fictional companies with their own Logos used in the game, the publicity seen in walls, the design of vehicles (robots, cars, bikes), or how integrate different styles in the same area, like going from the slums part to the visually cool districts. And of course the looks of the augs.
Worlds of difference from the original Deus Ex, where I remember even when I played it in 2000 (and taking in account the lower computing power in that year), it had a pretty uninspired and bland artistic design, and not very good artists. It was more a game done by coders and game designers, but Ion never had very good artists.
SETTING
Once of the virtues of this game it’s how carefully built is the setting, the entire world, how establishes the conflict in society and the problems and promises of the augmentation technology. In comparison, in the original DX it was much more directly “we are a sci-fi game, people have cybernetic technology, roll with it”. It’s happened to be a cyberpunk game, where the augs where the equivalent of scifi spells. Here, the cyberaugs are integral part of the setting, the plot, the dialogues, etc. Everything is permeated by it. It gives a laser-focus treatment to the issue and great detail to the game, but It also could be argued it’s a bit fake, it seems a world is spinning around the augs and nothing else.
Of course, like the old game, there is a lot of emails and magazines to realize this world and to make it feel alive. But a nitpick here, they went a bit too far in the quantity, there is like 250 emails in the game in total, so some number like that. Next time, they should take a ‘quality before quantity’ approach, because in the end very few of them are memorable.
STORY and CHARACTERS
The game has an interesting start plot wise, with the possible breakthrough in aug. technology, a mystery in the origins of it, and some deep conspiracy behind the attack. The characters like Sarif or the computer expert (and other secondary characters that appear later) seems nuanced, and well grounded, there isn’t any over the top stuff. I liked people like the ex-swat police in the reception of the police station or Tong or the mother of your ex-girlfriend. Part of it is the good voice work and body expressions.
Good work overall in the characters, they feel human.
Is the spoiler tag going to stay finally? Should i move this to the other thread??
I think the height of game’s plot is
plot
[spoiler]when you discover the FEMA is behind the attack, and your boss says “WTF, most of our contracts are from defense, it doesn’t make sense!”. You come back and Pritchard reveals there was a backup door in the system put by David Sarif. It’s a moment i said to myself “government is my enemy, conspiracies, my own company is not what it seems, yeah, this is Deus Ex!”.
Shamefully the game lingers around that point and going forward it doesn’t feel as the story moves on. All the rest is just following the clues and discovering there was a set of companies which helped in the attack. The plot doesn’t progress from that point, and the real story is truly pretty basic: your company technology was stolen to be used by nefarious purposes by the powers that be. A good Deus Ex plot would have much more conspiracies, plot twists and ‘nothing is what it seems’ vibe. The vibe here is ‘it’s exactly what it seems’, one you reach a certain point.
And the master plan is so plain and boring, the Illuminati, who always wanted to control society, just want the technology to make a biochip to literally control the humans with the chip installed. I don’t like the idea especially, it’s like too straightforward for the Illuminati! :P.
I also have issues with the end itself, the 3 button room. I didn’t like any of the three decisions, they seemed mostly forced to me (in what the game writer tries to tie each decision with what it will happen in the world), and i liked even less Jensen’s narration in most of them, as i felt he interpreted wrongly my point of view.
The final level is visually spectacular but the gameplay is not that interesting, it happens a bit like the boss battles, they don’t seem integrated well enough in the rest of the game, they rise like a sore thumb.
Special mention to the very obvious plot twists like Megan Reed not being really dead, and painful plot moments like when you discover that “you are special” ™ and the great secret from the technology it’s based on your DNA. I suspected as much when one the first level they comment you recovered very fast and without dependence on drugs, but i disbelieved the writer’s quality was so bad, i preferred to think they used the new technology on you and that’s why you didn’t need drugs, so it was like a hammer on my head when Megan says at much.
Or the AI, it was a bit jarring moment. I am talking of the Eliza character, the reveal she was an AI was superfluous and not relevant to the plot (apart from a bit inconsistent with the timeline), put in there because hey! this is a DX game and in the old Deus Ex there was also some super AI as characters. So let’s put one also here.
[/spoiler]
Apart from the plot, i want to make a point about the sheer quantity of lines given to the npc banter, it barely repeats lines, and there is a new set when you go to another location and return back to the same city. Lots of work there, even if i would liked more effort in having more interactive dialogue, instead of having a huge amount of passive lines.
Social encounters
YES, great idea. I always said it, if you want to make a game heavy on story and dialogs in your game, instead of a simple shooter, do it, but do it well, with the same attention and care you put in the shooting part. Not only a few lines said by a npc and that’s it. It’s a videogame, videogames are interactive. So if a fair % of your game is talking to people, the talking have to be interactive. And it does have to be reactive, your decisions should change something, not be pure fluff.
DX:HR developers got it right and did it with a great execution, the talks with the characters have that back and forth feel in the discussion that make them feel real and more active, giving the social duels an aspect of a boxing match. The main npcs are very well designed and mostly well animated, so you can see their different emotions as the discussion progress. They have a defined personality so there is a main thread of conduct in how the talk goes, that makes them coherent, and the application of the social augmentation is novel and gives an interesting edge on the social duels.
Weapons
One of the problems of the game difficulty (or lack of it) it’s in how some of the weapons are overpowered. An example: in some parts of the game would appear a great spider robot, it looks powerful and fear-inducing. The player shouldn’t solve the problem posed by an enemy like that pressing two buttons: one to select the emp nade and other to throw it. But that’s precisely what it happens in the game.
Or the taser, I almost did the entire game abusing this weapon. Let’s think about it: it’s a weapon that makes an enemy (any human enemy except bosses, included the heavy soldier type) go down in one hit, instantaneously, without opportunity of failing, silently, and it’s not like the ammo is very rare, I always had 35-40 uses in reserve. The only bad part it’s a close range weapon and have slow RoF, but even then it does have more range than a normal melee weapon, around 3-4 meters. Not even Dragon’s tooth was that good!
The other too good weapon is your own melee movement. Insta-down/kill movement, which pauses the game world, and is usable every 20 seconds? Tsk, I think the art of designing balanced games have been lost. Stuff as powerful as that need more drawbacks. Deus Ex got it right more often, the good stuff is very sparse and limited by ammo, or it does have a great inventory size (in the other hand, the sniper rifle in DX:HR is huge and it’s not that good) or you have to aim for the head or you have to be very close or they need some seconds to take effect, or only works in enemies unaware of your presence (attack from behind), etc etc.
It seems the actual designers falls prey on the temptation of doing a “press a button to win and be awesome” too much.
BTW, am I the only one who put around 15 upgrades in a weapon (the assault rifle, in my case) to use it only 3 or 4 times in the whole game? Because I always used the “temporal” weapons (sniper rifle, heavy rifle, laser) or the taser or the melee, leaving what I thought it would be my main weapon for later, for later… until the end of the game.
Economy
The economy is broken. In the original game you would never have money in the pocket, there was always some expensive and juicy weapons or upgrades. Here there is barely anything to buy, the praxis points of course, a pair of upgrades for the weapons, that’s it. The game will provide of the rest as you advance. Hell, in fact I had to left some stuff in the scenario sometimes. And that was with buying the inventory upgrades within the first part of the game. I finished the game with near 20000 credits, I think.
