I have spent the past five years avoiding new computer games. There are plenty of very good games from years past that I have not been able to find the time to play, I usually have not had hardware capable of playing the state-of-the-art, and the deep discounts that Steam eventually offers are too good to not wait for. But this is different. The original Deus Ex was possibly the best game I have ever played. (Inter-genre comparisons are difficult.) The first sequel, Deus Ex: Invisible War, was a disappointment, but when I heard that there would be another Deus Ex game I had no choice but to buy it and begin playing it the week in which it was released. Eleven years was a long time to wait, but I believe this is a worthy successor.
I squeezed about 40 hours of play time out of one very thorough playthrough of the game across three months in which it consumed most of my free time. It would probably be possible for someone who is less obsessive about reading every document, exploring every corner, conversing with every non-hostile character, and knocking out every enemy to complete the game in 20 hours, but that kind of player should probably be choosing a different game.
One of the things that made Deus Ex amazing was the degree of role-playing game-inspired customizability that players had. First, the character gained experience through the various things that they did in the game and used this experience to improve their skill level in a variety of ways. For example, players were functionally incapable of using sniper rifles until training themselves to be able to aim steadily at a target, and were unable to pick certain locks until they had learned how to do so. Second, the character could gain augmentations throughout the game that allowed them to do entirely new things. For each of several slots, the player needed to choose between mutually exclusive augmentation types, and the decisions that they made had a very significant impact on how they would play the game. Third, each player would use different tools throughout the game because of very limited inventory space and weapon upgrades.
Deus Ex: Invisible War took a step backward by eliminating the element of experience and skills, but retained the augmentation and inventory bases for customization. (Though it also managed to make those systems less interesting as well.) Deus Ex: Human Revolution does not do quite as good of a job as DE did, but is much better than DE:IW. There are no skills, but experience is reintroduced as the primary way in which the player earns the ability to augment their character, so that the game is able to reward exploration and doing things the difficult way. There are many more augmentations than in the past, some of which provide or enhance abilities in a manner analogous to the skills of DE. In DE:HR, however, no augmentations are mutually exclusive. In a moderately thorough game, the player will likely gain almost all of them, and a few are so obviously useless that you might as well be able to gain all of them. I can imagine why this design decision was made as developers targeted the game at a mass audience: many players feel cheated when they cannot be and do everything at all times. But it also means that the stakes are depressingly low when choosing augmentations. Whatever you do not choose now, you can instead choose half an hour later. Since all characters will end up close to identical, there is very little incentive to play again using an entirely different character build, like there was in DE.
Another of the amazing features of DE was the extent to which players had real choices to make, and these choices had significant effects on the game. One way in which the game accomplished this was to have multiple ways to achieve the same objective: through combat, stealth, intelligence, etc. Because characters were so highly customized, several of these ways might not be available depending on decisions made earlier. A second, more powerful way in which the game accomplished this was to allow the player to choose their objectives. Throughout most of the game, different organizations asked the player to do different things. The player spent most of the game trying to suss out what the real objectives of these organizations were and which they should ally themselves with. Ultimately, there were many ways for the game to end depending on the decisions that were made.
DE:IW did a decent job of maintaining this freedom of meaningful choice, but this is one area in which DE:HR falls short. There are usually multiple ways of accomplishing the same objective, but since all characters are pretty much equally good at everything, it never really seems to matter how you accomplish your objectives. The rich, fluid way in which in which the player decided what to do from DE is almost entirely absent from DE:HR. In the new game, you work for a company and do exactly what your boss orders you to do. There are side quests you may take, in which you do exactly what the person who gave it to you asks you to do. The player can exercise some small amount of narrative control by choosing not to take some quests, but for the most part this game is as linear as most games that do not bear the Deus Ex name. There are four possible endings to the game, but they do not relate in any way to the decisions made by the player during the game (because there essentially are no decisions of import). Instead, the user simply presses one of four buttons in the final room. There was one moment of genuine pathos induced by player decision or player failure.
The third way in which DE was a step forward in computer games was the incredibly detailed world that existed. Every computer had emails that you could read, every bookshelf had books that you could browse through, and other narrative elements revealed a very complex story with lots of jokes and other details that were completely irrelevant to the plot but fascinating. The game was played in what was for that time an amazingly open world. You could wander around New York City, exploring whatever buildings and alleyways you wanted. Most had nothing plot-related, but would reward the player with interesting vignettes, useful items, or experience. Since that time “sandbox” games have grown tremendously in popularity and scope. So while DE:HR does essentially the same thing, it now seems mundane rather than groundbreaking. But in this regard I think they struck the right balance.
DE:HR perpetuates a number of dumb cliches. Guards will not be at all suspicious when their colleagues start disappearing, as long as they do not actually observe the disappearance. Almost everyone has their username and password written down somewhere, often because someone reset it and sent them a document giving the new values. Ninety percent of the employees of every company are security guards. Chinese women (Mei) have horrible stereotyped accents. I would have loved it if the game had subverted some of these, but I am not sure how it would do so. (Other than the last, which seems almost an homage to the horrible stereotyped Chinese accents in the first game.)
The gameplay in DE:HR is fundamentally similar to its predecessors, and should be familiar to anyone who has played a first-person shooter game. The controls are mostly self-explanatory and the beginning of the game includes optional tutorials as you encounter the first opportunities to take various actions. One major improvement over the prior games is that one of the built-in augmentations that the character has gives him regenerating health, so that players do not have to be paranoid about preserving it. Combat (at least on the highest setting) is more difficult than I recall in previous Deus Ex games, but this is not because of a problem with the controls or maddeningly accurate enemies. Rather, it is because of realism: if you are hit by more than a bullet or two, you are probably going to die. The boss fights were jarring and unnecessary, but I did not hate them as much as some people apparently did.
Technologically the game is a mixed bag. It ran smoothly and looked good on my machine, and I only found a handful of glitches while in the game itself. (All that I can recall consisted of two oblivious enemies next to each other but me unable to use the multi-takedown ability on them.) But while saving the game, loading the game, and loading a new area I repeatedly experienced freezes. This did not happen every or even most times, but it was frequent enough that it certainly should have been found and fixed unless the problem is very specific to my hardware.
I feel as though I have written rather negatively about the game, but I enjoyed it tremendously. My disappointment is in comparing it against a game that was legendary. By those standards DE:HR was destined to fail, but it is still far better than 95% of what gets published these days. It seems counter-intuitive, but no game with a massive development budget and even television ads is going to be great; it must sacrifice too much to be palatable to casual gamers. Deus Ex: Human Revolution is, frankly, a better game than it should be considering that fact. I would say it is significantly better than Deus Ex: Invisible War, marginally better than The Nameless Mod to Deus Ex, but not quite as good as the original.
