Human Revolution is the distant continuation of the Deus Ex franchise, roughly a decade after the previous game "Invisible War" and made by an entirely new studio! Sounds like it would be terrible right? WRONG IT IS AMAZING!!! One of the better roleplaying games I have ever played, one of the 'immersive sim' genre which is a term I'm not wild about but it is also a superb stealth game and I just love it to fuckin' pieces.
My history with the Deus Ex franchise is an odd one - I first played the second game of the series, Invisible War, on my original Xbox and I absolutely adored it. I had never played an 'action' game with so many RPG elements to it, it told an interesting story and had good characters and a heck of a philosophical ending to it - I loved it to bits and it further reinforced my love stealth games and RPGs. Little did I know - this was secretly the vastly inferior sequel to one of the most lauded games ever - Deus Ex 1. I purchased it a few years later on PC and I believe only made my way through it once, though I have tried several times since. Regardless, many years later the new franchise was announced coming from Square Enix, and I was a bit nervous. However fortunately a large chunk of the game leaked to the internet, and I downloaded it illegally and it was WONDERFUL. There were so many routes through each level, the voice acting and art direction were excellent, and a more straightfoward yet deep leveling system unlike the junk one of the previous games. I very much enjoyed the 'demo' and preordered it, and I've held it in dear fondness ever since.
"It isn't the end of the world, but you can see it from here"
This is said by Eliza Cassan, an AI who serves as a narrator of sorts for the game, both in and out of it. These words are the scene dressings of the game - the world is at a precipice, and a deep fall seems almost inevitable. This speaks to me even more now than it did on release, trapped as I am during an actual global pandemic that calls forth elements of the original Deus Ex game. This is a world on the edge of a knife about technology however, about man and its advances and not the natural world fighting back against us as we are seeing in the real world. Human augmentation, a rapidly advancing science is currently making people "better" physically and mentally, and every day these advances change the fortunes of the "haves" and "have nots" and the world seems torn on what to do about it. On the eve of a major announcement in the field of augs, you are Adam Jensen, a man who is the head of security of a mid-size Aug company whose former girlfriend is seemingly murdered by shadowy forces, nearly killing him. These wounds cause him to be grievously wounded, and thus becomes the tremendously augmented main character we grow to know and love throughout our time in Human Revolution.
Adam is an excellent "spoken" RPG protagonist, as he has just enough spoken into his lines by his voice actor and snappy dialog writing that we get a crystal clear sense of who he was - an effective and straightfoward cop who tried to do right by others, but after being unfairly maligned for a bust gone wrong, had to take work where he could get it, even if that meant having to work with an old flame. You get such a good read from him that one of my favorite lines of the whole game is in the opening scene - you are with Megan in her office on the eve of the grand announcement (and the night when everything goes to hell for Adam) and you are speaking to her about the mundane plans of security when Adam's tone shifts as he sees her fiddling with her necklace "...and if you keep playing with that necklace Meg, you're going to break it". The sheer acting chops on display of nailing that perfect tone of gentle chiding yet affection speaks enormous volumes between the two, and sets the stage for Adam's unrelenting quest throughout the rest of the game. The company they work for is attacked that night, and you must play through your futile defense of the place and her as augmented soldiers decimate the thing Adam wishes to keep safe. Through the rest of the game you chase clue after clue to find the men and women responsible and WHY such a thing was done - and that leads you all about the world to find the shadowy organization and bring them down.
Where the character writing is top-notch, the main story is only merely quite good. While on the surface tracking down all of these leads is interesting and putting all of the pieces together, unfortunately there are desperately few "Aha!" moments of making a real connection between all the threads that all good mysteries need. It feels more often like a 'A to B then C' type deal. There were several steps on this journey that I forgot - why did we need to go back to Detroit and Hengsha again? And when I did get to those portions of the game, they felt ultimately pretty tacked on. There are the two main hubs in the game along with some decently sized interstitial 'zones' to link them together and they are all pretty excellent - the revitalized Detroit with its seedy underbelly, a FEMA camp that is actually an advanced prison, Hengsha the city that is basically Midgar (odd timing after FF7!), the camp Omega where all the bad guys are, an Antarctic installation for the finale... oh yeah and the DLC area! Which I'm not 100% sure really fits into the story all that well..? The Missing Link DLC was released like a year after the original game came out and re-adds a portion they cut early in development but honestly the length of it doesn't fit its place in the story, it is far too much of a stop-gap. I do enjoy the 'losing the augs' bit so you have to play much more frugally than you normally do. It is an interesting challenge and hints at the horrors you will see at the end of the journey but without some tweaks to the pacing it just never feels quite right?
One more positive note - the environmental design! There is SO much done in this game without dialogue, though there's a lot of that too.. The prevalence graffiti in certain areas, the ambient music and dialogue of people discussing issues of the day (its augs) the lighting and mood set in each area feels beautiful and deliberate. But we must talk about one of the earliest and best examples of level design as character development - Adam Jenson's apartment. We spend the first few hours with Adam mostly as an augmented badass, though many dialogue options can be chosen to be more brazen and confident about his new abilities. Then we get to his home - a simple downtown apartment, with curtains drawn and dim lighting, with a gentle golden light streaming into the gloom, almost enhancing the darkness rather than banishing it. As we look around his apartment we see he is like a drifter - most of things still in boxes, take out food containers strewn about, clothing draped over furniture. If we take an even deeper look we can see someone who is still trying to put the pieces back together with books relating to trauma and adapting to limb injuries. Things like broken clocks and repair guides are everywhere, seemingly a suggested therapy to help Adam begin to recover from his physical trauma. Then we step into the bathroom and we see the truth in a shattered mirror - mentally Adam is still barely holding it all together.
So what negatives are there? Honestly they're all pretty small niggles. The enemy AI is not really up to snuff, they regularly ignore warning signs of your presence and attacks are all almost entirely straightforward rushes on your position during gun fights. It's almost refreshing when they remember they have grenades to try and use on you.. Many of the guns feel quite good but the shotgun is almost offensively bad, which is one of the greatest sins any shooter can commit. Also while the variety of paths through each level feel very nice and rewarding, there's a pretty clear advantage to non-confrontation and mercy baked into the mechanics. I don't think that is BAD at all per-se but it is a bit egregious in some places when Adam is scolded for killing people who not only are trying to kill HIM, but have previously kidnapped and tortured innocent civilians. Also as said previously, the main 'mystery' of the game, while not bad at all, does not really 'snap' into place near the end as good mysteries always should. And I did forget on the voice acting - a lot of it is great. Jensen, Malik, Pritchard, bad guys? Great. Ambient folks? Hit or miss honestly. Sarif even ehhhhhhhhhhhhh.... And the writing in some spots definitely needed an editing pass for sure. Then there's that one Black Lady who has the Most Southern Black Stereotype Accent ever... in the middle of downtown Detroit... oof.
So now we're at the end - how is Human Revolution, nearly 10 years on and many advances in RPGs later? Pretty fucking great actually. The level-up system feels rewarding the entire game, secrets aplenty and build variety is on display with all of the level routes available to you. A decent story with great characters is told and some heart strings get pulled on in a few places. The combat is respectably solid with an RPG-shooter hybrid though a disappointing shotgun stings in the wrong way... Honestly it just makes me desperately miss these types of RPGs and I weep I don't get more of them. You get to choose who you are and how you do things - you get to play a role! I was Adam Jensen, and I was going to make them all pay for hurting what I cared about. Let's see how this story continues though shall we?
Final Grade: A
My Adam Jensen was different than my previous passivist playthroughs - he was a man with some scars. Seeing Megan taken from right in front of him by overwhelming powers set him on a darker path - he would revel a bit in the new power he had, and often killed just for the sport of it. However as a general rule he saved his cruelty for those who deserved it - no one in the police station even got bonked on the head, and random thugs usually were spared whenever possible. But when the shadowy mercenary company revealed itself? Only corpses remained. When Belltower was shown to be in cahoots with the mysterious organization behind it all? No quarter was shown to them, especially after seeing their gruesome experiments in the Missing Link DLC Adam became even more devoted. The game ended with Adam choosing mostly self-preservation after realizing that Megan may well have betrayed them all, even after all he had done to search for here - he choose to spread lies and protect the Augs and his own benefactors at the expense of the truth. He left Panchaea deeply uncertain about the future and what his role might be.... Until next time Deus Ex!
My history with the Deus Ex franchise is an odd one - I first played the second game of the series, Invisible War, on my original Xbox and I absolutely adored it. I had never played an 'action' game with so many RPG elements to it, it told an interesting story and had good characters and a heck of a philosophical ending to it - I loved it to bits and it further reinforced my love stealth games and RPGs. Little did I know - this was secretly the vastly inferior sequel to one of the most lauded games ever - Deus Ex 1. I purchased it a few years later on PC and I believe only made my way through it once, though I have tried several times since. Regardless, many years later the new franchise was announced coming from Square Enix, and I was a bit nervous. However fortunately a large chunk of the game leaked to the internet, and I downloaded it illegally and it was WONDERFUL. There were so many routes through each level, the voice acting and art direction were excellent, and a more straightfoward yet deep leveling system unlike the junk one of the previous games. I very much enjoyed the 'demo' and preordered it, and I've held it in dear fondness ever since.
"It isn't the end of the world, but you can see it from here"
This is said by Eliza Cassan, an AI who serves as a narrator of sorts for the game, both in and out of it. These words are the scene dressings of the game - the world is at a precipice, and a deep fall seems almost inevitable. This speaks to me even more now than it did on release, trapped as I am during an actual global pandemic that calls forth elements of the original Deus Ex game. This is a world on the edge of a knife about technology however, about man and its advances and not the natural world fighting back against us as we are seeing in the real world. Human augmentation, a rapidly advancing science is currently making people "better" physically and mentally, and every day these advances change the fortunes of the "haves" and "have nots" and the world seems torn on what to do about it. On the eve of a major announcement in the field of augs, you are Adam Jensen, a man who is the head of security of a mid-size Aug company whose former girlfriend is seemingly murdered by shadowy forces, nearly killing him. These wounds cause him to be grievously wounded, and thus becomes the tremendously augmented main character we grow to know and love throughout our time in Human Revolution.
Adam is an excellent "spoken" RPG protagonist, as he has just enough spoken into his lines by his voice actor and snappy dialog writing that we get a crystal clear sense of who he was - an effective and straightfoward cop who tried to do right by others, but after being unfairly maligned for a bust gone wrong, had to take work where he could get it, even if that meant having to work with an old flame. You get such a good read from him that one of my favorite lines of the whole game is in the opening scene - you are with Megan in her office on the eve of the grand announcement (and the night when everything goes to hell for Adam) and you are speaking to her about the mundane plans of security when Adam's tone shifts as he sees her fiddling with her necklace "...and if you keep playing with that necklace Meg, you're going to break it". The sheer acting chops on display of nailing that perfect tone of gentle chiding yet affection speaks enormous volumes between the two, and sets the stage for Adam's unrelenting quest throughout the rest of the game. The company they work for is attacked that night, and you must play through your futile defense of the place and her as augmented soldiers decimate the thing Adam wishes to keep safe. Through the rest of the game you chase clue after clue to find the men and women responsible and WHY such a thing was done - and that leads you all about the world to find the shadowy organization and bring them down.
Where the character writing is top-notch, the main story is only merely quite good. While on the surface tracking down all of these leads is interesting and putting all of the pieces together, unfortunately there are desperately few "Aha!" moments of making a real connection between all the threads that all good mysteries need. It feels more often like a 'A to B then C' type deal. There were several steps on this journey that I forgot - why did we need to go back to Detroit and Hengsha again? And when I did get to those portions of the game, they felt ultimately pretty tacked on. There are the two main hubs in the game along with some decently sized interstitial 'zones' to link them together and they are all pretty excellent - the revitalized Detroit with its seedy underbelly, a FEMA camp that is actually an advanced prison, Hengsha the city that is basically Midgar (odd timing after FF7!), the camp Omega where all the bad guys are, an Antarctic installation for the finale... oh yeah and the DLC area! Which I'm not 100% sure really fits into the story all that well..? The Missing Link DLC was released like a year after the original game came out and re-adds a portion they cut early in development but honestly the length of it doesn't fit its place in the story, it is far too much of a stop-gap. I do enjoy the 'losing the augs' bit so you have to play much more frugally than you normally do. It is an interesting challenge and hints at the horrors you will see at the end of the journey but without some tweaks to the pacing it just never feels quite right?
One more positive note - the environmental design! There is SO much done in this game without dialogue, though there's a lot of that too.. The prevalence graffiti in certain areas, the ambient music and dialogue of people discussing issues of the day (its augs) the lighting and mood set in each area feels beautiful and deliberate. But we must talk about one of the earliest and best examples of level design as character development - Adam Jenson's apartment. We spend the first few hours with Adam mostly as an augmented badass, though many dialogue options can be chosen to be more brazen and confident about his new abilities. Then we get to his home - a simple downtown apartment, with curtains drawn and dim lighting, with a gentle golden light streaming into the gloom, almost enhancing the darkness rather than banishing it. As we look around his apartment we see he is like a drifter - most of things still in boxes, take out food containers strewn about, clothing draped over furniture. If we take an even deeper look we can see someone who is still trying to put the pieces back together with books relating to trauma and adapting to limb injuries. Things like broken clocks and repair guides are everywhere, seemingly a suggested therapy to help Adam begin to recover from his physical trauma. Then we step into the bathroom and we see the truth in a shattered mirror - mentally Adam is still barely holding it all together.
So what negatives are there? Honestly they're all pretty small niggles. The enemy AI is not really up to snuff, they regularly ignore warning signs of your presence and attacks are all almost entirely straightforward rushes on your position during gun fights. It's almost refreshing when they remember they have grenades to try and use on you.. Many of the guns feel quite good but the shotgun is almost offensively bad, which is one of the greatest sins any shooter can commit. Also while the variety of paths through each level feel very nice and rewarding, there's a pretty clear advantage to non-confrontation and mercy baked into the mechanics. I don't think that is BAD at all per-se but it is a bit egregious in some places when Adam is scolded for killing people who not only are trying to kill HIM, but have previously kidnapped and tortured innocent civilians. Also as said previously, the main 'mystery' of the game, while not bad at all, does not really 'snap' into place near the end as good mysteries always should. And I did forget on the voice acting - a lot of it is great. Jensen, Malik, Pritchard, bad guys? Great. Ambient folks? Hit or miss honestly. Sarif even ehhhhhhhhhhhhh.... And the writing in some spots definitely needed an editing pass for sure. Then there's that one Black Lady who has the Most Southern Black Stereotype Accent ever... in the middle of downtown Detroit... oof.
So now we're at the end - how is Human Revolution, nearly 10 years on and many advances in RPGs later? Pretty fucking great actually. The level-up system feels rewarding the entire game, secrets aplenty and build variety is on display with all of the level routes available to you. A decent story with great characters is told and some heart strings get pulled on in a few places. The combat is respectably solid with an RPG-shooter hybrid though a disappointing shotgun stings in the wrong way... Honestly it just makes me desperately miss these types of RPGs and I weep I don't get more of them. You get to choose who you are and how you do things - you get to play a role! I was Adam Jensen, and I was going to make them all pay for hurting what I cared about. Let's see how this story continues though shall we?
Final Grade: A
My Adam Jensen was different than my previous passivist playthroughs - he was a man with some scars. Seeing Megan taken from right in front of him by overwhelming powers set him on a darker path - he would revel a bit in the new power he had, and often killed just for the sport of it. However as a general rule he saved his cruelty for those who deserved it - no one in the police station even got bonked on the head, and random thugs usually were spared whenever possible. But when the shadowy mercenary company revealed itself? Only corpses remained. When Belltower was shown to be in cahoots with the mysterious organization behind it all? No quarter was shown to them, especially after seeing their gruesome experiments in the Missing Link DLC Adam became even more devoted. The game ended with Adam choosing mostly self-preservation after realizing that Megan may well have betrayed them all, even after all he had done to search for here - he choose to spread lies and protect the Augs and his own benefactors at the expense of the truth. He left Panchaea deeply uncertain about the future and what his role might be.... Until next time Deus Ex!
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1 year ago