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Deus Ex: Human Revolution |OT| I never asked for this... It gave me lemon-lime
- Thread starter abunai
- Start date
Finally finished this game...quick review without spoilers:
+Solid Story throughout the whole game
+Jensen is an awesome character
+Music was great though DX1's was more memorable
+Atmosphere was great as well
+Dialogue was excellent and I really liked the scenes were you had to win an argument
+Solid gunplay
+Densely populated environments (objects)
-Too many subtle Augs
-Too many praxis points, seems like it was almost possible to get all augs.
-Fugly NPCs along with dated graphics
-Too easy
And probably my biggest complaint is that the AI was about as basic as shitty AI gets in a stealth game...someone really needs to reinvent the stealth genre with some more dynamic AI and not this archaic shit of the Soldiers constantly following a certain path.
Overall I loved the game.
+Solid Story throughout the whole game
+Jensen is an awesome character
+Music was great though DX1's was more memorable
+Atmosphere was great as well
+Dialogue was excellent and I really liked the scenes were you had to win an argument
+Solid gunplay
+Densely populated environments (objects)
-Too many subtle Augs
-Too many praxis points, seems like it was almost possible to get all augs.
-Fugly NPCs along with dated graphics
-Too easy
And probably my biggest complaint is that the AI was about as basic as shitty AI gets in a stealth game...someone really needs to reinvent the stealth genre with some more dynamic AI and not this archaic shit of the Soldiers constantly following a certain path.
Overall I loved the game.
XANDER CAGE
Member
WELL SHEEEEEIIIIIT
EatChildren
Currently polling second in Australia's federal election (first in the Gold Coast), this feral may one day be your Bogan King.
vazel said:
Thats basically where Square is at. They've got a raging hard-on for their Western studios at the moment, so I expect them to give Eidos Montreal plenty of flexibility.
Technosteve
Banned
HD fmvs? Hi rez texture pack? i dunno area 51 dlc?
*sigh* Starting to get slightly disappointed by the story.
I just read the e-mails about how
and had to go ahead and read some spoilers about his past. I was really hoping he wouldn't turn out to be some kind of
like JC and we could keep this a "grounded" storyline about corporate and political intrigue. That's what disappointed me about the first game so much: Even if that game went to great lengths to ground its story in a complex and "real" world, it's still a bunch of secret society government conspiracy bullshit.
I just read the e-mails about how
Jensen is adopted
destined messiah dude
XANDER CAGE
Member
RedSwirl said:
this is deus ex, dude
The Xtortionist
Member
RedSwirl said:
Bioshock is pretty alright. And if anything looks to top this game in that department, and also the same genre, it's Prey 2. That game looks all kinds of engrossing as far as atmosphere goes. I do agree that the environments and atmosphere easily make you overlook the faults.Enco said:
I just finished Montreal. The gameplay and atmosphere is still top notch. I liked Montreal better than Hengsha's story missions. But the boss battles really are the worse part of the game, they feel out of place especially in Montreal. I'm also a bit down on how stupid Jensen is. Some stuff is just mind boggling how he doesn't see it coming. But I guess maybe they were going for dramatic irony?
Lionheart1827
Member
Man I just arrived in Hengsha and I'm already lost just exploring the place(not a bad thing) :lol
Place reminds me of Midgar.
Place reminds me of Midgar.
EatChildren
Currently polling second in Australia's federal election (first in the Gold Coast), this feral may one day be your Bogan King.
RedSwirl said:
And
the Masons, Knights Templar, Area 51, greys, Roswell crash, Majestic 12, etc
.I've only done 2 boss battles so far but they were both easy to me.
Boss 1:
Boss 2:
Sadly, both bosses died before I could understand why people became annoyed by them.
Boss 1:
1 1/2 combat rifle clips to the face. Boss went down in under 15 seconds on my first try
Boss charged me at the start so I instinctively let off a typhoon. Boss was running away so I shot her a few times with the pistol and she died
Sadly, both bosses died before I could understand why people became annoyed by them.
bonesmccoy
Banned
EatChildren said:Andthe Masons, Knights Templar, Area 51, greys, Roswell crash, Majestic 12, etc
If there's one thing I'd like them to retcon out, it's
Roswell and the greys.
Rated-Rsuperstar
Member
Finished it up tonight. Really enjoyed the gameplay, art direction, and music. Didn't like the boss battles, voice acting, and the main story. 8/10
Question about the ending. Which of the 4 is considered canon? I went for the middle option as my main choice and then went back and watched the other 3.
Question about the ending. Which of the 4 is considered canon? I went for the middle option as my main choice and then went back and watched the other 3.
Kuro Madoushi
Unconfirmed Member
I'm spoiled by Uncharted. Never thought cutscenes could feel so well done. The mocap, the voice acting, the little subtle movements that animators miss, etc. all make for a visual feast.Jarmel said:
Aside from the bosses and janky controls, I'm really enjoying the game. Though I do wish decisions had more impact and that there were more augs and side quests.
And if it's a problem with too many piraxes, just don't use any and get that cheesement then.
I don't really consider it a flaw. It does suck that you can't ger more individuality though.fuzzyreactor
Banned
yesPersona7 said:
damn that's nice
Junior Member
Beat the second boss earlier.
She was pretty hard until I realize I could just quicksave midfight.
She was pretty hard until I realize I could just quicksave midfight.
damn that's nice
Junior Member
..The Xtortionist said:
Lionheart1827
Member
Quick question for pacifist run: Other than the prologue part of the game, I havent done any lethal kills other than one boss so far, do the prologue kills count?
damn that's nice
Junior Member
hello check your private messagesKen said:
The Xtortionist
Member
Lionheart1827 said:
Yes, yes they do.
stealth edit - beaten
fuzzyreactor
Banned
that gif is getting really old, really fast
The Xtortionist
Member
fuzzyreactor said:
What a shame.
damn that's nice
Junior Member
aww shitSteveO409 said:
fuzzyreactor
Banned
did that response really surprise you?damn that's nice said:
must be new to the internet
Just finished off my second playthrough. First one was all-stealth, no-kills (messed up in the pre-aug phase though, so no achievement), second one was (meant to be) a straightforward shoot-em-up character. Both times I raised Hacking and was generally pretty thorough in how I went through the levels, exploring and hacking things.
It's a really great game, but I found the cracks started to show a little bit on my first playthrough, and were a lot more noticeable on my second. Even on the first playthrough, it really seemed like you were getting rushed through the story as soon as you started the Tai Yong Medical mission. Not being able to
kind of made it feel like someone cut the brakes on your video game. And then when that's over,
, only
And there's similarly little to do in the section after that, before you get shuffled off into the lengthy endgame sequence.
This was all exacerbated on my second playthrough, because once you've already learned how to get from point A to B on the hubs without stopping to check your map at every intersection, there are really only two or three different things you have to do in each of them before it's time to trigger the final mission, and only three sidequests in each place. When you finally get to come back to them,
This isn't really all bad, though - it's just a shift in mindset. What I was expecting (and what the game seems like when it's new to you and you're still exploring and learning your way around) was a game structured like VtM: Bloodlines, where the hubs are the 'main' area of the game and all of the quests/missions basically branch off of them. Instead, it's basically a linear mission-by-mission game, with a few points where you can do a limited amount of freeplay in a 'town'. There's nothing wrong or lesser about the latter approach, really - but you can't help but be disappointed if you thought you were getting the former.
As far as the game's design goes, I think overall it was really well done and don't have any huge complaints, but there are still a few quibbles:
- Hacking is too good. It's a pretty fun minigame (like a quicker, simplified version of the Matrix in the Genesis Shadowrun), and I like how much you can do with it (shutting down security or locking enemies out of the alarm system, getting into every room, safe, and locker you can see, controlling turrets and robots - fun stuff), but the rewards you get out of it are fucking unreal. There are, to the best of my recollection, six of those giant spider-walker robots in the game, that you're meant to fight (if you're doing the whole fighting thing, anyway). As the toughest non-boss enemy in the game, you get a hefty 250 XP for killing them. Meanwhile, there are probably twenty or thirty places in the game where you can hack something carrying a datastore with +200 XP - meaning that you're getting a minimum of 225, and upwards of 300 XP, just for opening a door/safe/storage locker (and many, many more with +50 or +100XP). That's maybe just a little too lopsided of a distribution to really be called balanced. Hell, Jensen's work computer (which I'm pretty sure you can hack twice) is only a level 3 system, and yet it contains two datastores that each give +250 XP, meaning that his system alone is worth 575 XP, or 1150 XP if you can actually do it twice. So to get equivalent amounts of experience, you can A) kill 115 human enemies, or B) hack one computer twice. It's kind of absurd.
And, of course, that's not mentioning any of the other bonuses you get from hacking, like the tons and tons of cash, or any of the weapons and ammo stores that are only accessible by hacking, or the easy paths to Ghost/Smooth Operator bonuses that it unlocks. Playing the game without putting points into Hacking probably raises the game's difficulty level by a lot more than the actually difficulty settings do.
- The selection of augs for a combat-focused character seems a little anemic/weak. To be fair, a large part of the advancement of a combat-focused character is in the upgrading and development of your weapons, so some of that can be forgiven, but it still feels like a really underdeveloped path. To put it one way: I can put points in augs that are designed to let me explore, and then I can go just about anywhere, lifting heavy things to build platforms for myself, busting through weakened walls, breathing poisonous gas and walking across a 100,000 volt electrified floor, jumping 10 feet straight up in the air, falling from any height without ever taking damage, or even seeing through walls to find out where the good shit is hidden. I can put points into augs designed for hacking, and then I'm fuckin' Zero Cool, shutting off lasers and opening every door and reading every e-mail and taking control of robots and turrets and getting all that crazy shit you unlock when you hack everything in sight. I can put points into augs that are designed for stealth, and then I'm some sort of Ghost Robot Ninja Savant, turning invisible and then sprinting full tilt right through a room of soldiers without them ever noticing a damn thing.
But if I want to put be a stand-and-fight badass soldier, these are my options: I can put points into augs that protect me from the effects of all grenades but frags - cool, but a pretty big point expenditure for something that comes up so infrequently. I can eliminate the recoil from weapons - legitimately a very cool upgrade, although it rarely comes up if you're just popping out from behind cover to deliver a headshot. I can eliminate the accuracy penalties caused by moving - or I can install a laser sight onto almost every weapon in the game, that performs that exact function, only much, much better by eliminating inaccuracy entirely. I can give myself a shmup-style 'bomb' attack that kills everybody around me - except if I'm not standing in the middle of a crowd, it's only going to pick off a few dudes, at which point I might as well just headshot them anyway. Finally, I can put points into augs that reduce the damage I take - so that instead of surviving for two seconds under fire, I now survive for three and a half (oh, and a close-range hit from a shotgun will still one-shot me).
It's not that you can't become a killing machine - between weapon upgrades and recoil elimination, you can become a deadly gunman. But no matter what you do, you're still incredibly frail, and so there aren't really any viable combat options in the game other than to treat it as a pure cover shooter, and just not get hit in the first place. Dermal Plating should have gone up another level or two, and/or there should have been an active version that reduces the damage you take drastically in exchange for draining your battery - considering how quickly you go down in this game, a damage reduction of 90% really wouldn't be all that unbalanced. They also could have put in a series of augs that increases the maximum that your health will regenerate to, all the way to 200. It's really too bad they didn't, because 1) adding in more augs would mitigate the current situation where, by the end of the game, you've basically got everything that's useful to you and half of the stuff that isn't, and 2) because it would be really cool if you could get as good at being Rambo as you can get at being Grey Fox.
Man, I only meant to gripe for a little bit and then talk about all the cool stuff, but this post is already super long I probably look like I didn't even like it.
It's still a really great game, though; I think this is the sort of thing where the quality of the game is so high that the places where it falls down stand out even more than they would otherwise. I think I'll probably give the game a break for a while, though - next time I think I'll do a pacifist, all-stealth, no-hacking playthrough, though, since I think those parts of the game were the most fun. It kind of makes me want to give the original Deus Ex another shot, too, but then I got that game in 2003, tried to play it about once a year on average since then, and have never made it past the second enemy. Something about the way it plays is just video game Ipecac to me, I guess, which sucks since it looks like there's so much about it that's actually cool.
It's a really great game, but I found the cracks started to show a little bit on my first playthrough, and were a lot more noticeable on my second. Even on the first playthrough, it really seemed like you were getting rushed through the story as soon as you started the Tai Yong Medical mission. Not being able to
go back to the Shanghai hub to regroup, sell off excess items, and/or restock on the stuff you stashed away there, before being whisked off to Montreal (another sizable mission in its own right)
you go back to Detroit
you can't get into either the police department or Sarif Industries, so other than the two short sidequests - one of which doesn't trigger if you don't check Jensen's e-mail at work in the time between Sarif telling you to go to Shanghai and the time you go to Shanghai - there's really nothing to do besides doing a quick inventory restock and heading off after Taggart/Sandoval.
This was all exacerbated on my second playthrough, because once you've already learned how to get from point A to B on the hubs without stopping to check your map at every intersection, there are really only two or three different things you have to do in each of them before it's time to trigger the final mission, and only three sidequests in each place. When you finally get to come back to them,
the police department and Sarif Industries are closed off in Detroit, The Hive and Alice Pod Gardens are closed off in Hengsha, there's even less to do in the main plot before you get whisked away again, and there are only two sidequests in each area - all of them very, very short.
This isn't really all bad, though - it's just a shift in mindset. What I was expecting (and what the game seems like when it's new to you and you're still exploring and learning your way around) was a game structured like VtM: Bloodlines, where the hubs are the 'main' area of the game and all of the quests/missions basically branch off of them. Instead, it's basically a linear mission-by-mission game, with a few points where you can do a limited amount of freeplay in a 'town'. There's nothing wrong or lesser about the latter approach, really - but you can't help but be disappointed if you thought you were getting the former.
As far as the game's design goes, I think overall it was really well done and don't have any huge complaints, but there are still a few quibbles:
- Hacking is too good. It's a pretty fun minigame (like a quicker, simplified version of the Matrix in the Genesis Shadowrun), and I like how much you can do with it (shutting down security or locking enemies out of the alarm system, getting into every room, safe, and locker you can see, controlling turrets and robots - fun stuff), but the rewards you get out of it are fucking unreal. There are, to the best of my recollection, six of those giant spider-walker robots in the game, that you're meant to fight (if you're doing the whole fighting thing, anyway). As the toughest non-boss enemy in the game, you get a hefty 250 XP for killing them. Meanwhile, there are probably twenty or thirty places in the game where you can hack something carrying a datastore with +200 XP - meaning that you're getting a minimum of 225, and upwards of 300 XP, just for opening a door/safe/storage locker (and many, many more with +50 or +100XP). That's maybe just a little too lopsided of a distribution to really be called balanced. Hell, Jensen's work computer (which I'm pretty sure you can hack twice) is only a level 3 system, and yet it contains two datastores that each give +250 XP, meaning that his system alone is worth 575 XP, or 1150 XP if you can actually do it twice. So to get equivalent amounts of experience, you can A) kill 115 human enemies, or B) hack one computer twice. It's kind of absurd.
And, of course, that's not mentioning any of the other bonuses you get from hacking, like the tons and tons of cash, or any of the weapons and ammo stores that are only accessible by hacking, or the easy paths to Ghost/Smooth Operator bonuses that it unlocks. Playing the game without putting points into Hacking probably raises the game's difficulty level by a lot more than the actually difficulty settings do.
- The selection of augs for a combat-focused character seems a little anemic/weak. To be fair, a large part of the advancement of a combat-focused character is in the upgrading and development of your weapons, so some of that can be forgiven, but it still feels like a really underdeveloped path. To put it one way: I can put points in augs that are designed to let me explore, and then I can go just about anywhere, lifting heavy things to build platforms for myself, busting through weakened walls, breathing poisonous gas and walking across a 100,000 volt electrified floor, jumping 10 feet straight up in the air, falling from any height without ever taking damage, or even seeing through walls to find out where the good shit is hidden. I can put points into augs designed for hacking, and then I'm fuckin' Zero Cool, shutting off lasers and opening every door and reading every e-mail and taking control of robots and turrets and getting all that crazy shit you unlock when you hack everything in sight. I can put points into augs that are designed for stealth, and then I'm some sort of Ghost Robot Ninja Savant, turning invisible and then sprinting full tilt right through a room of soldiers without them ever noticing a damn thing.
But if I want to put be a stand-and-fight badass soldier, these are my options: I can put points into augs that protect me from the effects of all grenades but frags - cool, but a pretty big point expenditure for something that comes up so infrequently. I can eliminate the recoil from weapons - legitimately a very cool upgrade, although it rarely comes up if you're just popping out from behind cover to deliver a headshot. I can eliminate the accuracy penalties caused by moving - or I can install a laser sight onto almost every weapon in the game, that performs that exact function, only much, much better by eliminating inaccuracy entirely. I can give myself a shmup-style 'bomb' attack that kills everybody around me - except if I'm not standing in the middle of a crowd, it's only going to pick off a few dudes, at which point I might as well just headshot them anyway. Finally, I can put points into augs that reduce the damage I take - so that instead of surviving for two seconds under fire, I now survive for three and a half (oh, and a close-range hit from a shotgun will still one-shot me).
It's not that you can't become a killing machine - between weapon upgrades and recoil elimination, you can become a deadly gunman. But no matter what you do, you're still incredibly frail, and so there aren't really any viable combat options in the game other than to treat it as a pure cover shooter, and just not get hit in the first place. Dermal Plating should have gone up another level or two, and/or there should have been an active version that reduces the damage you take drastically in exchange for draining your battery - considering how quickly you go down in this game, a damage reduction of 90% really wouldn't be all that unbalanced. They also could have put in a series of augs that increases the maximum that your health will regenerate to, all the way to 200. It's really too bad they didn't, because 1) adding in more augs would mitigate the current situation where, by the end of the game, you've basically got everything that's useful to you and half of the stuff that isn't, and 2) because it would be really cool if you could get as good at being Rambo as you can get at being Grey Fox.
Man, I only meant to gripe for a little bit and then talk about all the cool stuff, but this post is already super long
I probably look like I didn't even like it.It's still a really great game, though; I think this is the sort of thing where the quality of the game is so high that the places where it falls down stand out even more than they would otherwise. I think I'll probably give the game a break for a while, though - next time I think I'll do a pacifist, all-stealth, no-hacking playthrough, though, since I think those parts of the game were the most fun. It kind of makes me want to give the original Deus Ex another shot, too, but then I got that game in 2003, tried to play it about once a year on average since then, and have never made it past the second enemy. Something about the way it plays is just video game Ipecac to me, I guess, which sucks since it looks like there's so much about it that's actually cool.
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