PC Game Review: Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is the third game in the much beloved series and the prequel to the ground-breaking Deus Ex. It has been a long time since the poor Deus Ex: Invisible War was released, it's been eight long years in fact. Was the wait and hype worth it? Did Eidos Montreal understand the task they were taking on and fully grasp the importance of getting right? I shall answer in two parts. First, I want to look at Deus Ex: Human Revolution as a modern game and compare it to its competition. Then I will look at the game in the context of the series.

As a modern role playing first person shooter the game is quite simply a triumph. There is nothing out there that comes close. The depth of this game is astonishing. If you power game, it is said to take 25 hours, but if you play it like an RPG, DX:HR can last 45 hours. If you have been clever enough to buy it at a discount in one of the pre-order sales you will have paid $1 per hour of game-play or less. How many games offer that kind of value for money for solo play? Thankfully there is no multiplayer in this game. It is just straight solo play. As with any good RPG there is plenty of room for re-playability; in fact it could be argued that not replaying it at least once would mean you were not getting the fullness of the game.

Combat is spot on, in contrast to Invisible War, the game runs quickly and cleanly. There was a patch released soon after release to shorten the long load times when saving or re-loading. Despite the city hubs being huge, there is little need for reload time. Graphically, the game encourages and rewards the player stopping and looking around. Not only is it a beauty to behold, but there are all sorts of rewards for the curious. You will find goodies, hidden areas, passages and even new things to use your hacking skill on.  Rest assured this is one of the best games of the last five years.

Deus Ex aficionados will have enough here to sink their teeth into. Gone is the annoying universal ammo from DX: IW. Sadly however there are no "multitools" from the first game to collect and mess with. The augmentations have been streamlined and there are fewer. The same is true of the weapon upgrades. They vary in quality and effectiveness. One frustration is that ammo takes up room in your inventory. So you need to play inventory "tetris" and forever have to move around things to fit everything you need. There is an auto inventory management system which isn't very good. There is also a frustrating situation where you have to drop a weapon so you can add ammo to your inventory, and then equip the weapon it comes from to load it. For some reason the system does not realize your weapon has the ammo capacity and automatically add it to that weapon. You will spend a great deal of time messing with your inventory as ammo is, even on the easiest setting, fairly scarce for some of the better guns. Thankfully there is a separate inventory for quest items so they do not clog things up.

Article Author: Marty Dodge

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