It’s pronounced like “Mayo Sex” | Deus Ex: Human Revolution Review

Back when I was but a wee lad, still full of hopes and dreams and potential and all those other things life will do its very best to forcefully remove from you with a set of rusty pliers, you might be surprised to learn that I had a set of parents. These horrible creatures, spawned from the depths of old people hell were very strict when it came to video games. For the longest time, I wasn’t allowed to play any at all, and when I finally did get to play them, I owned a total of three for several years. How is this relevant to anything, you may ask? Well, my dear and apparently somewhat impatient reader, I never played Deus Ex. I know, shocking. I also hate kittens and sunshine and the smiles on little children’s faces. I did, however, see Deus Ex: Human Revolution on sale one day and I decided to buy it because it looked like an RPG game with dialogue options and all and, well, I kinda like RPGs. A lot. Sexually. Anyways, the game was met with very positive reviews, so I assumed this would be a wonderful little way to pass some more time before I die fighting off cops that are here to evict me for not paying my rent.

So here we are. The game kicks off by having you enter the back of the main character’s head – presumably because the game designers have a very literal interpretation of “getting into the mindset” of the player character – and thus the adventure begins. Or rather, it doesn’t as you watch a boring intro cutscene from a first person perspective while the credits roll. So you walk around waiting for something interesting to happen, learn that your character, a guy who shoots people for a living, complains that the biotech company he works for is making machines to do the same. Suddenly outsourcing isn’t so fun anymore, is it? Anyways, all of a sudden everything goes to hell and you set out to shoot some people and save your love interest. You fail miserably and get turned into ground meat, making the earlier complaints about combat machines ring slightly hollow. And indeed, you see some more credits roll as you are operated on. Once you wake up, you learn that you are basically the world’s most advanced half-robot supersoldier now. “Fragging hell!” I thought. “That’s awesome!” So I sat through all the boring dialogue and exposition and stormed into my first mission, guns blazing. Whereupon I was immediately turned into the world’s most advanced half-robot Swiss cheese sandwich.

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“Perhaps we could talk this over?”

It was at this point that I realised how the game was supposed to be played. You see, Deus Ex is a stealth game. Well, either that or an incredibly hard cover-based shooter where you can’t hit shit while behind cover and two enemy bullets to the face leaves you with an unfortunately incurable case of being dead. I am not good at stealth games, especially not ones that take place in brightly lit places. I mean, maybe if there was some shadows for me to hide in, but nope. Nothing. So I had to hide behind crates hoping that enemies don’t notice the suspiciously lively vending machine moving along the wall. At times, I’d still have to deal with a guard. This left me with two options. Either knock out the guard or stab him with one of the giant swords growing out of my arms. There’s a Mortal Kombat joke in there somewhere, but I never played those games either, so frag it. If you decide to just take the pussy option and knock the guard out, he’ll only be unconscious and if his mates find him later, they can just revive him and since all the enemies in this game apparently have magical regenerative powers, shrug off that fracture skull like it’s nothing. You can also just murder them, but this alerts other guards, so it’s completely useless unless you are in combat in which case it’s a way to get rid of one enemy for free. Then again, if you are in combat and close enough to use a melee attack, you’ll likely be dead within seconds. So much for that, I guess!

Right, so we can hereby deduce that the whole moral ambiguity aspect surrounding whether or not you want to kill your opponents or take the peaceful option that is dislocating their jaw is total bullshit, because the second option is always more useful unless you’re a massive attention whore who gets turned on by bullets, rather than turned off as is the case for our dear tin man protagonist. As for weapons, there is the choice between tranquiliser guns and real man weapons, but it once again comes down to convenience. There are very few rounds of tranquiliser ammunition scattered throughout the game, and it has the same downsides as the punching people option, namely that if someone finds the guy you just spent two minutes getting the perfect shot on and dragging away, they can awaken him with a light tap on the shoulder. Plus, you’ll have wasted some of your already-scarce ammunition. Plus, you’ll still alert everyone. Plus, you can upgrade the standard 10 MM pistol with a silencer, a laser sight, ammo-piercing rounds and a catapult that shoots angry, flaming badgers and still have money left to buy ammo for practically the rest of the game. Once again, so much for that! And even with all this, you will run into a brick wall with your first boss fight. The first boss is insanely hard. Seriously. I cannot stress enough how difficult he is to kill.

I am beginning to sense a certain amount of resentment from this game.

I had to use a YouTube walkthrough that showed a bunch of tricks needed to defeat him and set the difficulty setting as low as possible. Yet I still took around three or four tries to beat him after doing those things, and five or six before it. Maybe this is just due to me being absolute shit at playing video games, but this guy had a minigun on his arm. Why couldn’t I have that? I felt like kind of a shitty supersoldier when the other supersoldiers were just making fun of me. My superiors lied to me, I am not a special snowflake. I’m just another weaponised human cyborg with an instant ball pit inside my body. Okay, so maybe I’m being a bit harsh on the gameplay here, but it seems like my enemies get all the advantages. It doesn’t really give me the feeling that I am anywhere near what they said I was. There’s an upgrade system because apparently all my super supersoldier superpowers aren’t unlocked yet even though they’re already installed and I need to pay to get to use them. So basically an analogy for DLC. Huh, maybe the game is smarter than I give it credit for.

The story was a fragging mess. There was the overarching one about saving your love interest which got resolved with you finding out that you have some kind of unique genetic code that makes you the only one in the world whose body doesn’t reject all the extra hardware after a while. Then there’s this one guy who’s the richest man in the world and who invented the whole cyborg thing, but his body can’t take it at all, so he has decided that if he can’t have it, no one can. Funny, I would be satisfied with sleeping on a pile of money every night, but I guess there’s just no pleasing some people. Then there’s also some bullshit about the bosses and some news lady who’s not what she seems and some evil corporation and BZZZZZZZZZZT! The plot is just too fragging complicated, I couldn’t wrap my head around it. Maybe it’s because I didn’t do enough side missions, but if that’s the case, then why were those missions optional? There’s also the whole RPG aspect to the game, which comes up with dialog options and a dialog minigame and occasionally a choice. But these are few and far between. As a whole, the game is incredibly linear and the ending is just pushing buttons to get ending A, B or C on a Deus Ex Machina. Okay, the game is most definitely laughing at me right now. There’s also a central conflict between people who have miniguns on their arms and people who wish they had miniguns on their arms and are jealous of those who do have it. But after that one boss fight, all shades of moral ambiguity seemed to fade away from that when considering that one side has fragging miniguns on their fragging arms.

Seriously, am I missing something here?

Aside from all this, the game’s still pretty solid. The art style is good, the music’s good, the characters are likable with one exception. Namely, the main character’s voice which sounds so raspy I imagine he uses it to sharpen his sword-arms. Seriously, when was it decided that this was cool? It just sounds dumb. The stealth mechanic is alright, if a bit hard to master for an eight-legged orangutan like myself. The guns are all pretty cool, the hacking minigame is actually sort of fun and all the various upgrades are a blast. In the case of the one called the Typhoon, both quite literally and hilariously. I’d recommend the game to anyone who has a high tolerance for frustration. For anyone else, however, I think you might want to save the money so you won’t accidentally destroy your computer once that first boss kills you for the umpteenth time.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

6

Score

6.0/10

Pros

• Good Art Style

Cons

• Uneven Story
• Horrible Bosses