Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a very odd game
But the combat is fun
I wrote this rather long review of the game Deus Ex: Human Revolution on PC (released in 2011, played in 2021), which turned out to be too long for either a Metacritic or Steam review. So here it is in its entirety.
I bought Deus Ex: Human Revolution because I kept seeing it referred to as 'the real Cyberpunk 2077', but if that's true then I really don't need to play Cyberpunk 2077. DXHR is not terrible, but it's definitely only worth buying at a heavy discount. The cover-based combat is challenging and plentiful, and some of the levels are very atmospheric, but there are also constant irritations that took me out of the experience. Sneaking around knocking out guards one by one and hiding their unconscious bodies in the ventilation ducts is fun, as is watching enemies through the walls with your augmented vision and then popping out from behind cover to shoot them in the head. Alas, you have to trudge through lots and lots of tedious exposition to get to the fun bits.
This game is a bit like the original Far Cry, another good action game interspersed with hammy B-movie cutscenes, but unlike Far Cry, DXHR takes itself terribly seriously. Unfortunately the protagonist, Adam Jensen, is humourless and unlikeable, as are all the other characters in the game, so it's hard to care about their interminable story. Although some of the voice acting is good, some of the writing is really quite bad and sometimes sounds suspiciously like it's been translated from another language, like when Jensen says that an incompetent gangster "can barely tie his own shoelaces without tripping all over himself". There are occasional swearwords and some very awkward dialogue from prostitute NPCs to indicate that the story is 'mature', in the shallowest sense of the word.
Characters are introduced with whom Jensen supposedly has a long and complicated history, but if you weren't there for that history then none of their conversations carry any weight, and they just come across as catty. There are some boss fights, but the bosses get no more than a cursory introduction, and most of the fights with them feel like a slog. The final boss fight is one of the easiest, but also the most confusing. The ending is incredibly weak: choose one of 4 boring videos made up of cheap stock footage to watch, then credits.
Character animations look good during combat, but up close all the character models resemble shiny plastic puppets and constantly flail their limbs unnervingly. They look a bit like Action Man dolls that have been dressed up in cute little outfits, as seen from the point of view of one of the dolls; fabrics in the game look strangely thick and heavy. Watching the death of one character (whom we only met about an hour previously, but whom we're supposed to care about) was unintentionally hilarious, like a bonus scene from Team America.
The technology of the game's world is strangely anachronistic. This game came out in 2011, but smartphones don't seem to feature in its vision of 2027. People are getting their bodies augmented and Jensen even has a constant audiovisual feed to his employers (although sometimes they sort of forget about this) but everyone, including Jensen, has to go to their desktop PC to read their emails, and lots of people don't bother locking their computers. People carry 'pocket secretaries' that are basically pagers and which hold a maximum of 4 messages on them, and everyone is constantly sending each other passwords and keycodes. There are old-timey news stands, but they dispense newspapers on LCD screens so... newspapers are like single-use iPads now?
Homes and offices have computers that you can either hack into, or log into with passwords found on other computers or on those 'pocket secretaries'. These provide some backstory, but I soon stopped caring what was in them apart from door codes, which save you from having to hack locked doors. The hacking minigame is terrible, your success being far too heavily reliant on luck.
The occasional 'Conversation' mini-game is also dull and confusing, and it's very hard to know how much your choices actually affect the story. I've only played through DXHR once, but I doubt that any of my choices could have made any difference to the overarching plot, driven as it is by decisions that Jensen makes with no input from the player. The one exception to this might be the decision you make whether to have a new biochip implanted that later turns out to turn people into zombies. Initiating conversation with a scientist in an underwater lab at one point - the point at which it starts to feel suspiciously like Bioshock - ends up with Jensen convincing her to turn herself in and shut down the lab, during which you make no decisions at all. At another point, in a sidequest conversation I chose the 'Charm' option but Jensen called the other guy a scumbag anyway, thereby failing the sidequest.
The pre-baked lethal and non-lethal takedown animations look like wrestling moves, during which your target enemy lets you knock them out or kill them while all their colleagues obligingly pause what they're doing to watch. However, when you perform your Typhoon attack the camera pans out as Jensen begins the theatrical wind-up to it, but during the wind-up the enemies don't stop attacking you, Jensen instead turning temporarily invincible until he's finished the attack animation and enemies have taken damage. I was confused about when the damage radius of the Typhoon impacts, since enemies are still moving between the point when you trigger the attack and the point when it appears to detonate.
Sometimes it feels like the game is just messing with you. If you try using the takedown moves on any of the bosses, the boss will overpower and kill you. One cutscene clearly shows your aircraft's parachute fail to deploy and the aircraft crash into the sea, but you start the next section on the helipad anyway, with no mention of how you got out of the sea. In another area you have to go through a 'biometric scanner', which is an unskippable process that takes about 30 seconds and which you have to endure numerous times to progress with the story - and if you decide to backtrack, you have to endure it once more in each direction.
The plot takes you to China for some parts of the game, but a lot of the NPCs there (including the police) are American, with no explanation of how that happened. Some characters speak to you in Chinese assuming that you can't understand them, even though their dialogue has English subtitles. Later on, a lead character seems to be living in the white room from the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is never explained.
The group-reputation system is rudimentary. Sometimes just being in a certain area can trigger an alarm, with no indication of why a group has suddenly become hostile to you. Conversely, you can kill a member of a group (including the police!) then run away and come back, and they will have forgotten all about it, even though the corpse is still there and a lot of people seem to know who you are.
As mentioned earlier, you can drag unconscious guards around, contort their ragdoll bodies to fit into ventilation ducts or throw them down the stairs, and they won't wake up - but if one of their buddies comes and shakes them by the shoulder, they get right back up into the fray as if nothing happened, even if your non-lethal takedown clearly broke their arm. These ventilation ducts offer shortcuts around levels, which NPCs can neither enter nor comprehend; they will watch you go into one, fire at the vent you went into and then just assume you've disappeared, until you pop up at another vent and the peekaboo process starts again.
The neat Smart Vision augmentation allows you to see enemies (even cloaked ones) through walls, but sometimes they will disappear from your Smart Vision view for no apparent reason, so it's hard to know when to trust it. The game claims that the radar only shows enemies once you've seen them, but in practice they would sometimes show up before I'd seen them. The map system is frustrating: you can only see a map for the area you're in, there is no mini-map on your radar, and entering buildings sometimes switches the map to only show the interior of that particular building. Sometimes mission markers disappear from the map, but not the radar. Playing with a controller, you can't zoom the map out far enough, and it pans around painfully slowly. The infuriating hacking minigame is also harder to play with a controller.
Some things about the game just seem poorly implemented. For instance, it took me a while to realise that the (controller-only) quick-selection wheel highlights a primary weapon, a secondary weapon AND a consumable as you go round it, rather than just the one you end on - and accidentally consuming an alcoholic drink that temporarily blurs your vision can easily get you killed. Dead and unconscious bodies remain searchable even after you have looted them of all their stuff, meaning that if you take down a group of enemies their bodies can cover up weapons that they drop, preventing you from picking the weapons up without laboriously rearranging the bodies. It's strange design choices like that, that make the game feel rushed and untested, even a decade after its release.
Despite these complaints DXHR can be a fun experience, livened up by the silliness of the story. Here are some quotes and oddities from the game that I particularly enjoyed:
Various NPCs:
"Hope you enjoy those fancy hands of yours! In a year they'll be worthless!"
"I'll bet you never have trouble finding a seat on the bus, do you?"
"This whole city deserves to burn, just like Sodom!"NPC standing in line at the augmentation clinic:
"I don't want any trouble. I'm just trying to get home."Arrested NPC, sitting on the ground with her hands handcuffed behind her back:
"Get away or I'll call the police!"Jack-booted riot cop, speaking like a bored shop assistant:
"There's a riot going on. I'm kind of busy."Gangbanger: "Something started going down in this bitch. Something real... What'd you call it before?"
Jensen: "Suspicious."
Gangbanger: "Word, suspicious."Merc 1: "Heard someone might be sneaking around here. Maybe even the same guy who got inside that morgue before we did."
Merc 2: "Man, I'd love to get my hands on that prick!"In a hacked email:
"I'm a bit on the chubby side and my traits are not those favored by the canons of the times."In a newspaper article:
"Police have arrested Joshua Korbin in connection with Saturday's car bombing at the Washington State Capitol. Officials say the man is accused of driving a bomb-laden SUV into the Capitol building."
So he drove his car bomb into the state capitol, detonated it, and was then arrested? Whatever.Another newspaper article says that a new drug may be used "to treat people inflicted with AIDS"
Most NPCs' ‘I won't talk to you with that gun in my face’ dialogue is noticeably quieter and of lower quality than all the other dialogue in the game. I think they may have forgotten to record this first time round. [NB. turns out that is exactly what happened! Youtuber Hbomberguy published a very long video on the game in early 2022, in which he goes through many of the game's peculiarities in detail.]
David Sarif, boss of augmentation company Sarif Industries, has a whole toilet block (2 cubicles and 4 urinals) for just him and his faithful secretary, with no sign of a meeting room or even some chairs to justify their existence. He runs adverts for the company on their bathroom mirror.