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Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a prequel to the original Deus Ex, which was released back in 2000. Human Revolution is set at an extremely interesting time when augmentation is starting to become the normal and people are taking their stand for or against it, thus creating a civil war of sorts.
You play as Adam Jensen, an ex-cop that is now the head of corporate security for a biotech company called Sarif Industries. Sarif is at the top of companies that are working on human augmentations—implants. These implants give the user all sorts of superhuman abilities. Run faster; see through walls and superhuman strength, among other neat features.
Human Revolution is a mixture of many game types that I normally love to play, however here some of the story arc is diluted in political jargon speak, that sometimes leaves you not exactly sure what is going on or what to do next. Here you have the tech and sneaking around of a Metal Gear game, the interactions with other characters of a Oblivion or Mass Effect game and the boring meaningless story telling of a Splinter Cell. In some situations it works, but mostly does not. The sneaking it hurt mostly by the fact that the game is in first person, so you can never really tell where you are at in a given situation until you are far enough behind a wall to hide behind in which you they are in third person. I see that as a reason why games where you should be more stealthy and hiding only work in a third person game.
Some of the games rely on your upgrades being high enough to access different things. You lever your character up like you would in almost any RPG. You get XP and then you get Praxis points. You use these points to upgrade many different features of your augmentations. You can hack computer better, get more information out of people or a number of other things that will help you survive like body armor. You have to becarful though, you do not want to put all your points into augments that will help you be sneaky if you are going to walk through the front door and start mowing everyone down, that would be suicide.
Part of the problem I found with how the games lets you upgrade is it would essentially lock out side missions from me until I had the proper upgrade that was needed to get to a certain place. I am fine with a game locking out some aspects of a game in missions or making it so you can’t get into a door that only has some weapons or something behind it, but to basically lock you out of the whole mission because one augmentation is not high enough is ridiculous.
I did not play through all of Human Revolution. In fact I did not play much of it at all. The game play was clunky being a first person shooter trying to hide and be stealthy, the interactions with other characters felt like every voice actor was phoning it in and the story was only somewhat interesting, but mostly told in very boring cut scenes. Maybe it would have help if I had played the previous games, but that would only help the story a long. In all, this game takes a lot from other games I love and does a poor job of creating something new and fun to play.
Final Score: 2/5
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