PC Gamer - October 2011

REVIEWS

myriad ways to get to your objective. The pleasure of that freedom is that it leaves major elements like pacing, challenge, and variety up to the player. If stealth gets too hard, you can find an easier route. If you’re bored of crawling through cliché man-sized vents, you can open fire. And if your ears are still ringing from the last gunfight, you can slip through the next area quietly.

These are just the routes the developers planned for. The soul of Deus Ex is in its systems: simple sets of rules with no scripting, no exceptions, and no accounting for what the player might do with them. Human Revolution has that exact system, letting you pick up and manipulate certain objects. The slick, surprisingly natural third-person cover system lets you hide behind any vertical surface—including the ones you’ve placed there yourself, lending to all sorts of mischief. I once built a hilariously conspicuous secrecy fort of boxes around a security terminal before hacking it to hide my crime.

Thinking behind the box

You can also pick up and move turrets. I called mine Gunther. I was only able to get to his control console by shuffling past him behind a cardboard box—I’d move it a few feet closer to him each time he turned away, then hide behind it when he looked back. Once I hacked into his controls, he was my friend for life. (Hacking, by the way, is immediately smarter and more involved than in any previous game.) Then I sat him at the top of a ramp to pelt fire at a whole gang while I snuck up behind them. When a guard destroyed him a few fights later, it hurt—because I was using him as cover at the time.

Like Deus Ex, Human Revolution is a linear series of levels. Also like Deus Ex, the levels themselves feel like real places. When there’s a facility to infiltrate, it feels like a real building, with multiple floors and wings to explore in whatever order you like.

There are two differences in their approaches. The positive one is the city hubs: both games have large,

I once built a hilariously conspicuous box fort around a security terminal to hide my crime. www.pcgamer.com com

Terrorist Zeke has taken Josie Thorpe hostage.These are your options (minor spoilers!)

1. Let him go The easy option is to let Zeke here leave with Josie, but there are armed guards outside. It’s not likely to end well for either of them.

Dealing with Ezekiel

open urban areas you return to after several missions. Human Revolution’s are bigger, more complex, and far richer in activities and secrets.

The negative one is more subtle. Quite a few missions in Deus Ex, including the famous first level on Liberty Island, let you explore the grounds of the mission location before entering the main building. Only a couple in Human Revolution do this, so it doesn’t always have that same dizzying level of freedom the original occasionally did.

There are t wo other areas where Human Revolution doesn’t entirely pull off what the original did. Firstly, the direct approach is a little too effective. While there are bots and turrets to hack, gas barrels to blow, and photocopiers to throw at people, subversion and improvisation are rarely the best ways out of a situation. The effectiveness of a silenced pistol shot to the face can undermine the pleasure of coming up with a brilliantly convoluted solution.

The last problem only comes up four times in the whole game, but it’s an odd one: boss fights. They’re terrible, and they can’t be avoided. The game is so conflicted about this that there’s even a Steam achievement for completing it without killing anyone, which apologetically adds that boss fights don’t count. Yes they do, guys.

2. Talk him down If you say just the right things, you can talk him into letting Josie go in exchange for a safe escape. Both he and Josie can help you out later.

5. Knock Josie out An unconventional approach: knock out the hostage and Zeke is too surprised and confused to do anything but defend himself from you.

6. Kill Josie
Or “the psycho option.” It’ll certainly
shock Zeke, but don’t be surprised
if Josie’s husband doesn’t see this
as a satisfactory solution.

3. Knock him out

If you manage to taze him before
he can shoot Josie, she’ll be
safe. You’ll find Zeke in jail
later, swearing he’ll get
out. It’s up to you what to
do about that.

4. Kill him

If you’re a good shot,
you can kill Zeke before
he hurts Josie. Almost
everyone sees it as
justified, and Zeke’s
body shows up in the
morgue later.

Killing under cover

That’s it—those are the only three things that really bothered me. If all Human Revolution did was capture that much of Deus Ex’s genius, with so few flaws, it’d be incredible. But we’re only just getting started.

The cover system immediately improves the two main things you spend your time doing: hiding and shooting. Deus Ex made stealth viable by making enemies hilariously short-sighted; Human Revolution makes it viable by pulling out to third person every time you hold the cover key to hug a wall. It shows you exactly which directions you’re hidden from, and lets you see out from your hiding spot without exposing yourself. It’s not realistic, but it means stealth works all the way through a game where enemies are sharp, aggressive, and can kill you in a second.