These days it seems that saying you like video games is fair play to have people tell you are the downfall of society: Gamers are immature; Gaming makes people violent. Won’t somebody please think of the children?!
When people get up on their soap box to preach me the evils of video games - of how games are childish play things for the young or feeble-minded, Deus Ex: Human Revolution is the big wet haddock I slap them in the face with. Deus Ex: Human Revolution is the action-RPG prequel to Ion Storm’s hit game Deus Ex, released in 2000. Deus Ex has since been hailed as one of the greatest PC games of all time, but it is aged and clunky, and I couldn’t get past the first hour. In Deus Ex you play as JC Denton - a super-secret, secret agent extraordinaire who looks and handles like a HGV. In Deus Ex: Human Revolution you play as a prototype of what would eventually lead to Denton, except you are shit hot and have cyborg sunglasses.
Not everyone is as well equipped as you are. Not everyone can afford it.Put simply, Deus Ex: Human Revolution is one of the best, most mature games I have ever played. The game tackles some socio-economic issues that we are faced with already, and then some that Eidos Montreal expects us to come across in the next few decades. They do this with such grace that, by the time you are finished with it, you could write an entire documentary on transhumanism, wealth disparity and body augmentation.
At its most simplistic, imagine that when you can pay to give your son a cybernetic arm that will throw a football with pinpoint accuracy, or pay for your daughter to get an implant which will make her sweet-talk her way to CEO. What chance does that give the poorer people in society to compete? Where would you even begin? This world is filled with prejudices and people in riots over their situation, much like our world today.
The beautiful black and gold aesthetic of this game just further serves this point, as you see the stark contrast between the rich and the poor. Growing up as the son of two Trekkies, I was constantly terrified that wearing a watch and glasses would start my assimilation into the Borg Collective, and so this game is right up my street; but even if you aren’t terrified of the cyborg collective, this game probably still has something for you - and is a fantastic lens through which we can examine our own society.
Adam and Megan, when times were more humanThis time around, you play as Adam Jensen, a disgraced cop. You’re ex-SWAT turned Chief-of-Security at a world-leading cybernetics firm, Sarif Industries. If you want to run faster or jump higher, you go to Sarif. In the opening moments of the game, the company is attacked by mercenaries and your long-term love interest and ex-girlfriend super-scientist is kidnapped. You’re left for dead - broken, bloodied and bleeding out. Your boss, David Sarif - knowing everything about your body and your past - decides to pump you full of cybernetic augmentations. If you pay attention to the lore and flavor text in the game, you will discover that most humans can only take a few augmentations before their body rejects them completely; people take a few to help them in their career and become hooked on the immune-suppressants that keep their body from rejecting their shiny new arm or eyeball.
Sarif knows that Adam is not like everyone else, and by the end of the gorgeous opening credits, you see that Adam is now more machine than man - which plays into the pun in the title.
Adam, lost in thoughtFor those of you who don’t know, the name is a pun on the term “Deus Ex Machina”, Latin for “God from the machine”. At the end of plays in ancient Greece, a machine would lower a statue of a God or a Goddess to narrate the ending, or explain away what happened.
In today’s media, it’s basically a narrative contrivance which means that you don’t have to write properly. As much as I love Doctor Who, the entire thing is built upon deus ex machina. Can’t get through that door? Sonic Screwdriver! Had your hand chopped up? Time Lord still regenerating! Want to end a romantic subplot in a way that makes everyone happy but doesn’t end the series? Parallel universe!!! This is not exclusive to Doctor Who and televised media, however; it crops up a lot in games, too: Ragnarok showing up when and where it does in Final Fantasy 8 was literally a deus ex machina in every sense of the term. In the case of Human Revoltion, you are the deus ex machina - the first human who doesn’t need medication for augmentation rejection. You take all the machine parts, stuff them inside your body cavity, and you become the God in the machine; the link that takes us from what we are now to the eventual godlike beings we strive to become. Adam is how we break past our evolutionary barriers to become what we want, when we want it.
He didn’t ask for this…This is where the game gets spectacular. You’re now a super-soldier, more machine than man - so do you want to play as a cold hearted killing machine, hell-bent on revenge, or do you try to find Adam’s soul - that part of him who is still more man than machine? The choice is entirely yours. You can either fuck up everyone who crosses you in some pretty gory ways, or you can traquilize your way through the enemy hordes, dragging their bodies to one side as you crawl through airducts like a cyborg ninja.
Either way, you can’t play as Adam Jensen, man who loves being a cyborg badass - because Adam Jensen is not happy about what happened. At one stage early on, you go back to your apartment and walk into your bathroom, seeing a mirror which had clearly been lashed out at when Adam saw his reflection. You can go downstairs to talk to the receptionist about a replacement, and it turns out that you keep punching mirrors, and that the apartment manager is sick of replacing them. The game is not subtle at all about what it is trying to tell you; no matter how badass you may be as a sexy, sleek, state-of-the-art cyborg - waking up as a machine is going to mess with your head. This is not a cut-and-dry smooth transition from man to God. This is something that has repercussions, and they will have to be deeply considered when this technology becomes a reality.
As far as the gameplay goes, Human Revolution is pretty solid. The aesthetic is consistent, and the music fits with the world. At times it can be haunting; at other times, energetic. As previously mentioned, you can play as a murdering asshole or a sneaky saint. You can pick a path through the environment which allows you to take the guards head-on in a blazing firefight, or you can bypass them entirely. However, if you want to max out your experience, you’ll quickly learn to sneak through the area earning the bonus experience points, and then backtrack, tranquilizing and knocking out your foes. Unfortunately, tranquilizing people has a nasty habit of killing them due to the buggy engine - so don’t set your sights on the clean playthrough achievement. I’ve finished the game multiple times on both Xbox and PC, and somehow someone always dies. One time, I bumped a dumpster while trying to grab the guy I had just knocked out, and the game thought I was trying to crush his skull. The game obliged and locked me out of the damn achievement.
Hacking is another good way of gaining experience, and is also weirdly engaging. Unlike the pipe-dream that was Irrational’s hacking game in Bioshock, in Human Revolution, Eidos Montreal actually puts some effort into the hacking minigame. You control data-flow through a series of networks, laying traps for the security software trying to reach nodes to capture before being locked out and chased down by security. Upon your success, you’re granted experience points, emails, diaries, backstories, flavor text, the contents of a safe, access to a security system or just the ability to turn the automated gun turret into a friendly device - making mincemeat of your enemies.
Pretty much everything in this game is hackable except humans, and if you want to hack those I suggest you play Remember Me. Unfortunately, the hacking minigame, while satisfying, gets pretty damn easy once you start upgrading your implants.
Speaking of the upgrade system, it works like this: you wake up as Adam 2.0 and discover that while you were unconscious, your boss went and made you into a machine. A machine which, by the way, he owns. He put all of this state of the art tech into your body, and said “right - there you go, but I’m not turning it on. If I turned it on all at once, it’d kill you. Instead, to pay off your new debts to the company, run around the world doing missions for me.”
As you do so, you collect Praxis kits - or upgrade packs to you and me - and just plug them into yourself as and where you see fit. If you fail at exploration, you can simply run around the world, earning experience to unlock the pre-installed Praxis kits which do the same deal. Either way, have some RPG in your action game. While this is a pretty contrived way of tackling the upgrade problem, this is not the real issue here. You can’t unlock everything, and some of your upgrades are literally useless; there’s one which allows you to see the percentage chance of setting off an alert while in the hacking minigame. It sounds useful, but you can already do this if you take the time to hit a single button while hacking. God knows why the damn thing is there, other than what I assume to be for the purposes of annoying those who don’t pay attention.
For such vapid characters they sure take a lot of bulletsOf the remaining issues I have with the game, the biggest is easily the boss fights. The bulk of the game was developed by Eidos Montreal, but the boss fights were outsourced, by publisher Square Enix, to GRIP Entertainment. Let this game serve as a warning to anyone else thinking about outsourcing their boss battles to a different studio. Don’t. If you insist that you must, and still want to risk ruining your game, at the very least make sure that their vision and your vision are the same fucking vision.
As previously mentioned several times, you can play Adam as lethal or non-lethal. If you want to play as lethal Adam, sweet! No problem. But if you don’t, you are screwed, my friend. There’s only one way to beat these enemies, and that is by beating your fist through their skulls until the red stops. For a game so centered on player choice, stealing this choice back from us just left a bad taste in the mouth.
The best boss is a dialogue battleSome games are famous for letting you screw yourself over by not leveling your skills properly; System Shock 2 springs to mind. Well in Human Revolution, it doesn’t matter if you choose lethal or non-lethal, you need to invest in making your body into a claymore mine - because that’s the quickest, and by far the easiest, way of dealing with these poorly designed boss battles. There has since been a Director’s Cut edition which redesigns this so the game doesn’t screw you over, but we’re looking at the base game. You made your decision, Eidos Montreal… Boss fights are supposed to be your final exam, proving that you know what you’re doing and earning you the right to continue playing the game. They are NEVER supposed to be bullet sponges which exist because four arseholes with no personality wanted to break the game into separate acts.
The other issue that really grates is the ending. I will keep this as spoiler-free as is humanly possible, but if you haven’t played it and are worried, skip to the score and go play this game - it really is brilliant. If you’re still with me, you either don’t care, or have already finished the game – a distinct possibility, seeing as how this is a retrospective review - so you’ve had your fair warning.
The end of a game, book or movie is supposed to be a climax. You work hard, investing hours of time into the world. You care about the characters and your choices.Unfortunately, Deus Ex: Human Revolution suffers from the same problem which plagued Mass Effect 3 – your choices suddenly don’t matter. Pick a button, and boop! Watch one of four endings based on what button you pushed!
The worst part of this multiple choice question ending is that each ‘answer’ is just stock footage spliced together while Adam tiredly narrates how much of an asshole he has been, or how he tried to be a good guy but tranquilized that one guy to death. There is no payoff. There is no climax. It is like spending an intimate afternoon with your partner who jumps up at the last minute, says goodnight and flounces out the door, leaving you with a great big Metal Gear Solid question mark over your head. What happens next? What happens to Adam? Is the world fucked or not? Why the hell would they end the game like that?? Nobody knows.
All in all, Deus Ex: Human Revolution is pretty spectacular, even if the ending and the boss fights are both rather bobbins. I highly recommend that you play this game if you are capable of doing it, and if you do, grab the Director’s Cut so you don’t have the same issues as we did. If you think that the game is too hardcore for you, but you’re still intrigued, either slap your partner in the face with a copy of this or sit down with a Let’s Play video.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution, for all its flaws, is a fantastic insight into how our society may evolve with the technology of transhumanism on the horizon (though, according to The Sun newspaper, it’s a horizon we’ve already surpassed), tackled with the sensible maturity that I know our industry can provide when it wants to.
It has some issues – some of which have since been rectified – but remains a compelling experience from beginning to end. Deus Ex: Human Revolution may seek to evoke the past in its use of a beloved franchise name, but in many more, it looks to the future – all while posing questions about our present.
Nic Bunce
Latest posts by Nic Bunce (see all)
- Light gets lit up on Steam - 14 July 2024
- Magic 2015: Duels of the Planeswalkers Review - 13 July 2024
- Metro: Last Light Retrospective Review - 10 July 2024
