Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Sarky

It's not bad. not bad at all.

The soundtrack is fantastic and really feels like Deus Ex music without actually being all that similar. The visuals aren't the sharpest but they're some well put together I really don't care. Inside Sarif Industries was pretty enough but once you got outside to Detroit there was so much going on in the background, it really felt like a piece of a city. Tonnes of stuff to do and look at, datapads and newspapers and books and hackable computers all over the place. The hacking game is pretty sweet. I haven't come across a boss fight yet, and I'm annoyed that they're there, but the sheer freedom in every aspect of the game thus far is very refreshing, and very Deus Ex. I love how if you finish a mission without killing people or without being seen or setting off alarms, you get XP bonuses to acknowledge the fact you didn't go charging in with guns blazing like a Call of Duty fanboy. I love the references to the original that just get slipped in every now and then. And the nice little subquest you'll completely miss if you don't go to your office and check your emails is a lovely incentive to check everything. I really hope that hostage thing in the first mission isn't a once-off, it was a great reminder that choices have consequences.

Gripes:

The augmentations would appear to be the only thing resembling RPG skill progression. That's rather more simplistic than I'd like.

Those takedowns and the general lack of a melee option. Stupid design decision.

The bonus content completely fills your inventory, right when you want space to pick things up. That's not cool. Had to hold onto all those weapons I had no intention of using, passing up useful things until I could sell them an hour later in Detroit.

Gripes aside, I'm impressed with the whole package. Deus Ex is hands down one of the greatest games ever made, and those are some very large shoes to fill. Human Revolution doesn't quite fill them, but it makes a bloody good effort at it. Perhaps all it really needs is a mod or two to get rid of some stupid decisions like the takedowns (or their stupid energy requirements at least) and unavoidable boss fights.

humanji

Josey Wales wrote: »

Any else a bit confused by the hacking mini-game?

Is the whole thing just based on luck? It seems like every single time I try to capture a node I'm detected.

It's a bit confusing until you get into it. Each node has a percentage change of you being detected depending on the number beside each one. You can lower this chance by putting skill points into one of your hacking augmentations.

There's 3 types of nodes. The normal file nodes that don't do anything, the data ones, which give you a bonus if you activate them and complete the hack, and the ones with a cog icon (can't remember what they're called). The cog ones do random things, like changing the security level of random nodes, or sending spam which slows down detection.

You also have a couple of options for your nodes too. I think there's only 3 of them. The first is to fortify, which makes it take longer for security to bypass that node if it's alerted. The wait thingy stops security for 5 second. And the nuke thingy will activate a node with 0% chance of alerting security.

Shiminay

Yea, the Hacking is a little strange because I'm not really understanding what a Stop and a Nuke actually do or how and where to use them (and dammit, if they're taking up space in my Inv, I wanna start using them). I would like a "learn to hack" thing maybe in your office or in Prichard's Tech Lab.

mcgovern

Nuke lets you hack a node without being detected.
Haven't used the other one.

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar

the stop worm stops the countdown, so it gives you more time to capture nodes. handy for some hacks where once you're detected you have 6 nodes to capture and five seconds to do it in

spankmaster2000

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rSXOKxq7Ro

DarkJager

About the hacking : nuke will instantly capture a node, worm will slow down a trace if there is one active. If it's a complex map, fortifying nodes you've captured will also slow the trace.

With the right aug you should be able to reduce detection rates to around 15%. you can capture a lot of them quickly wit this, though I'd recommend using nuke on any with a detection rate above 30/40% unless you want a race

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar

was silently cursing the fact that the amount of ammo around for the tranq/stun guns was so low when I suddenly realised I hadn't been performing any takedowns at all because of the energy cost, and that I had about 40-50 potential bars of energy stored in my inventory so now I've been figuring out ways of seperating soldiers from packs and taking them down instead of shooting them. i wonder if its possible to get through the game on only takedowns

Sarky

considering the tiny number of people you actually have to fight head on, I'd imagine so.

grizzly

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar wrote: »

...so now I've been figuring out ways of seperating soldiers from packs and taking them down instead of shooting them. i wonder if its possible to get through the game on only takedowns

I use cardboard boxes. Throw one away from yourself and near to just one enemy. If you're lucky only one will go to investigate = Bamn! takedown.

I've not upgraded to multiple takedowns – has anyone got it? Is it practical to use?

zero19

Finished this today, make sure to watch the credits til the end, also look out for some dude in a blurred out Dublin GAA jersey in the crew photos!

Zillah

Just finished it there yesterday. It is a very good game, with a lot going for it but it also has some serious problems.

(Ok so it turns out that this is going to be a huge post, enjoy!)

I love that the soundtrack really reminds me of the original, top marks there. Hacking mini-game is the best mini-game I've seen, I only got sick of it near the very end. Most of the characters are good, I found myself genuinely being interested in the opinions and welfare of Megan/Prichard/Sarif/Malik, generally good voice acting helped there. I actually almost teared up when

I saved Malik after the crash "Thanks spy-boy", "Any time...fly-girl" - Awww, I really hoped those two would hook up at the end

. Also I loved

AI Eliza, she was fun, I kind of hoped there was a way to free or ally with her, she was underdeveloped

.

I'm just going to make a list of some of my gripes with it though:
- Too much emphasis on stealth. I enjoyed the sneaking around, but when you've got gansters in a decaying sewer setting off an alarm system when they spot you...that just makes me roll my eyes. Similarly, there are scenes where you get ambushed by squads of soldiers, but as soon as the cutscene ends it defaults back to stealth mode and they start patrol routes... Square peg, round hole.

- While the gameplay emphasised stealth, the cut scenes did the opposite. I spend an hour slipping past dozens of enemies, breaking necks and hiding bodies, crawling through vents and cloaking through security lasers, and as soon as I click on the last door Adam stands up, puts away his gun and walks proudly into the middle of the room, saying hello to whoever is there. This pissed me off most with

Barret, who is essentially a seven foot robot-tank and apparently he is able to casually walk up behind him without Adam noticing

, that was all pretty dumb. Similarly the whole thing with

Zhao pushing you out of her safe-room..ugh, I was going to put a bullet in her skull

.

- I don't mind the take downs at all, most of the animations are quick enough for it to not be a problem, but having them cost an entire energy bar was infuriating and non-sensical. I can't even think of a game balance justification for that, sneaking up behind someone makes it tricky enough.

- The ending was underwhelming. Final confrontation was random and out of the blue, and didn't even seem to make sense.

- Boss fights were out of place generally. They cheat like crazy. Those mercenaries are basically superior to Adam in every way, and the only reason he wins is because I can load it again and again to work out how to kill them.

- Detroit felt small and underdeveloped, more like a town than a real city, the first game's locations felt much larger. Shanghai was a bit more impressive, but still too claustrophobic. Also, navigating them was a pain, I got so sick of running back and forth from one end to the other, crawling through the same vents or jumping off the same wall time and time again.

- Loading times are the worst I have seen in years. It's the first game in a very long time that I've found myself feeling impatient at a loading screen. The graphics are also quite mediocre for a recent game (though the art direction is great - I love that his apartment reminds me of Deckard's), so its not like they justify it, and I have a very good rig, Crysis 2 loaded much faster.

- While I loved some of the Augs (Icarus and leaping were great fun), a lot of them seemed completely pointless and poorly thought out. The stealth augs are completely pointless (three separate upgrades for tracking people, are you kidding me?), immunity to concussion grenades is a waste (I actually can't think of a single time I was hit with one of these during the entire game). Sprinting is far too slow and having to invest in a ton of upgrades to run a little faster for a little longer is a bad decision. Immunity to gas is similarly pointless, I can count on one hand the number of times that might have helped, and most of those were grenades that made little impact in the long run anyway.

- They had no skill system, which was a bad decision I think. I remember in the first being so impressed when I mastered rifles and discovered that the reticule stayed tiny no matter what I did, or how the movement in the scope vanished. That would have been very easy to implement and would have added a lot to the experience.

- While I was impressed with the conversation system, I think it often didn't quite make sense, and while I could watch the personality types and read the hints, often it didn't seem to relate or connect to the way it played out, making the whole thing fairly pointless.

- It auto saves when you fail an objective. Then you load most recent save to try again, returning to the exact same spot. I don't know if this was a problem for anyone else, but it drove me completely nuts.

- Some conversation parts were unskippable. Nothing should ever be unskippable, Jesus Christ, for all you know this might be my fifth time doing it, don't ever make anything unskippable.

- AI was bad. There I said it. Snipe Guard 1 in the head. Guard 2 walks over to the exact same spot. Shoot him too. Repeat until all guards in range are dead. Or, guard spots you, run away. Guard goes to exact spot where he saw you, turns in circles for a second, walks away. It's just bad AI.

Ok, I'm gonna stop there. I'm sure there's more but this post is already massive. Good game, tons of flaws, still had fun.

Mike Litoris

DirkVoodoo wrote: »

I'm an old fogie, I will always think the older, flawed and less polished version is the best.

You're not being fair to yourself there buddy. The original may be less "polished" as far as GFX are concerned but thats about it.

ríomhaire

Just finished the second city hub area, loving this game so far. I've mostly played by no-kills and stealth but I have used lethal force against people who I think deserved it

like the soldiers who killed everyone in the hotel.

Also I found a cool feature: In areas where guards patrol through laser tripwires the tripwires automatically shut off if a guard approaches. But this continues even if you knock out the guard, so you can punch one out, then drag his body with you through the beams for a free pass. I love little touches like that in games.



The game mechanics are solid. I expected the cover system to annoy me but it really doesn't. It works quiet well and the cover-to-cover jumping works great too (but I'd certainly recommend turning off the cover indicators to make it a bit more natural).

Instant take-downs are quiet frankly fun. Much more satisfying than trying to stun prod them four times before they finally decide to fall over in the original. Shooting is fun and the new grenade/mine system is very nice too. All the basic mechanics are vastly improved from the original, which, while amazing in many ways, had some pretty weak gameplay.

I prefer the weapon improvements system too. Every upgrade seems really significant and gives you something big, not just applying upgrade after upgrade to your pistol and not really noticing each individual improvement (except of course the laser dot, which was a bit ridiculous how much it improved your aim). Of course the upgrades in the original did add up, making your starter pistol an almighty beast by the end game.

Hacking is great. I didn't really understand it at first but I got used to it and I really love it now. By far the best hacking mini-game I've played (and unlike many I like the trend of hacking mini-games in these sorts of games). It certainly blows Bioshock's and Fallout 3's out of the water.

The augs system is good. I'm not sure if I like how every upgrade point can be used on anything. Sometimes limitations can be good. But the upgrades are good and nothing seems useless (looking at you Aqualung). I also like how many of them are passive. Feels like real upgrades to your body rather than magic spells like many of the original's were. Was there really a need to active and deactivate improved strength every time you wanted to use it? It was really just pointless extra button presses. Human Revolution's upgraded strength is simpler and I think better for it.

Like the conversation system. Very tense and interesting. The social interaction augmentation doesn't really confer much of an advantage at all but really is for unlocking extra dialogue options. For instance you can get people to pay you in advance using it.

Not really too bothered over the lack of skill system. Waiting for the targeting reticle in the original was simply a pain in the ass and many thing that were skills in the first game (swimming) were useless in the first place and some things that were skills in the first (hacking) have been replaced by augs in this (and the hacking in this is infinitely better than the original).



I must also mention how amazed I am that this game runs on my netbook. This is my PC. The processor is actually bellow the minimum spec and it has a netbook-designed graphics card (nVidia ION 2) and it actually fecking runs! I'm pretty amazed. Great optimisation here.

Jet Black

Hate that the control scheme cannot be changed for the PS3. R3 is a awful place to put ads.

Raze_them_all

just 1000 pointed it on xbox, good game though i think rental would of been a better option

calex71

Raze_them_all wrote: »

just 1000 pointed it on xbox, good game though i think rental would of been a better option

Did you need a full second run for the alarms? Worried I may have cheated my self out of it during the prologue.

Raze_them_all

yeah and pacifist, I didn't realise once a turret turns hostile it counts as an alarm, same with cameras.

Yer pretty much going to get it if you stop them hitting the hand panels and don't get copped by cameras or turrets going hostile

Sand

Nice game - enjoying it so far. I dont think it can compete with nostalgia, but objectively it seems a better game than Deus Ex.

The only thing I particularly dislike about the game is the XP awards are all around dealing with the guards. Every guard you sneak past is a guard you could have snuck up on and tookdown for 50XP, more if you nail two together. So long as they dont spot you before you nail them, you still get the Ghost bonus of 500 XP.

If you like Praxis points (decent hacking will absorp a lot of Praxis to begin with), then its a no brainer to take down as many as you can so you end up with a pile of slumbering enemies and the few remaining AI guards not wondering "WTF *is* everyone?!?"

It would have been nice if there was a significantly huge XP bonus (vastly more than the 500 XP for Ghost) for accomplishing your objective without actually interacting (killing/stunning) any enemy as that would have given an incentive to sneaking past enemies rather than sneaking up on enemies. Which would have meant you werent confronted by the unreality of knocking out 10 guys and none of their friends noticing theyre missing.

The other pet hate is the Energy cells with only the last one recharging. The Augs around extra energy cells are utterly pointless when you can just pace yourself and run an entire mission on your single rechargeable cell. The extra energy cells might have been somewhat useful if they all recharged - that way you would have a bigger pool to draw on for short bursts.

Raze_them_all

Sand wrote: »

Nice game - enjoying it so far. I dont think it can compete with nostalgia, but objectively it seems a better game than Deus Ex.

The only thing I particularly dislike about the game is the XP awards are all around dealing with the guards. Every guard you sneak past is a guard you could have snuck up on and tookdown for 50XP, more if you nail two together. So long as they dont spot you before you nail them, you still get the Ghost bonus of 500 XP.

If you like Praxis points (decent hacking will absorp a lot of Praxis to begin with), then its a no brainer to take down as many as you can so you end up with a pile of slumbering enemies and the few remaining AI guards not wondering "WTF *is* everyone?!?"

It would have been nice if there was a significantly huge XP bonus (vastly more than the 500 XP for Ghost) for accomplishing your objective without actually interacting (killing/stunning) any enemy as that would have given an incentive to sneaking past enemies rather than sneaking up on enemies. Which would have meant you werent confronted by the unreality of knocking out 10 guys and none of their friends noticing theyre missing.

The other pet hate is the Energy cells with only the last one recharging. The Augs around extra energy cells are utterly pointless when you can just pace yourself and run an entire mission on your single rechargeable cell. The extra energy cells might have been somewhat useful if they all recharged - that way you would have a bigger pool to draw on for short bursts.

on the energy cells i agree though sometimes it help when you've level 3 cloak, silent spring and the 5 cells you can just invisible sprint past alot for ghost

like when the big bad boss throws you out of her panic room

calex71

I'm still in Detroit, and playing for no kills like I said . just got to the bit where

you go down in a long lift with a glass front and see all the troops and now I'm at the bottom and there are Mechs :eek: then I spot a rocket launcher

/Save + use toys for kicks and reloads

Raze_them_all

lol some toys are fun like the laser rifle which end boss spoiler :

can shoot straight through her shield killing her without anything ever attacking you

TomCo

Is it possible to start a game without the 10k extra credits in the augmented edition?

About to start my first game and I want the extra mission but not the credits.

calex71

TomCo wrote: »

Is it possible to start a game without the 10k extra credits in the augmented edition?

About to start my first game and I want the extra mission but not the credits.

Those credits wont go that far really , you could get 2 aug points at the limb clinic @ 5k each. Might give you a slight edge but not a game spoiling one if playing on harder settings.

Grumpypants

Ah come on Xbox just RROD's on me flip sake!!!! Going to have to start it all over again now on the PS3. All that time down the drain. :mad:

calex71

Grumpypants wrote: »

Ah come on Xbox just RROD's on me flip sake!!!! Going to have to start it all over again now on the PS3. All that time down the drain. :mad:

Ah rotten luck dude

Sephiroth_dude

That barrett is some ****er :mad: what are the other bosses like difficulty wise?

Raze_them_all

Sephiroth_dude wrote: »

That barrett is some ****er :mad: what are the other bosses like difficulty wise?

harder, hardest, handiest

In order

calex71

Sephiroth_dude wrote: »

That barrett is some ****er :mad: what are the other bosses like difficulty wise?

He was dead on my 2nd attempt in 30 seconds !!!!!!!! on the hardest setting!!!!

Dont waste bullets on him there are loads of barrels and gas canisters to lob at him, the gas stuns him and the red barrels explode, so once the battle starts run left and grab a gas can and then work your way around the room.

I ran out of stuff and in the end 1 tranq dart finished him off

Maximilian

I can't believe the mirror was never fixed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whtNHRYJnrU