It’s a really good thing for Mankind Divided that Invisible War exists. Otherwise its claim to the title of “Worst Deus Ex game”¹  would be completely undisputed, and I think that’d be kind of a shame given how much it tries to improve on Human Revolution.

It would be fair to say I enjoyed Human Revolution very much at the time it was released. Despite a fairly protracted development period it felt like a game that did a decent job of blending the incredible freeform style of the original Deus Ex with the dominant console FPS gameplay of the period. It would be equally fair to say that Human Revolution is a game that has not aged well at all; both attempts I’ve made to replay it since its original release have ground to a halt just a few hours in, and this is despite my love of HR’s world, visual design and general atmosphere. It had that in common with the first game, in that it adequately captured something of the prevailing cultural zeitgeist at the time it was released (“It is a time of great innovation…” indeed). Unfortunately the gaming landscape almost immediately started to shift under Human Revolution’s feet with titles like Dishonored demonstrating a far better mechanical grasp of how to execute on the concept of freeform first-person gameplay. It got worse when the new console generation enabled a rapid evolution of what it was possible to achieve on console tech, and when you put it up against modern heavy hitters such as The Witcher, MGS V, and even slightly more unusual fare such as Alien Isolation it feels like a game that’s a good five years older than it actually is. HR’s world remained vibrant and interesting to me, but many of the mechanics and the underlying technology comes across as extremely decrepit.

This creates both problems and opportunities for Mankind Divided, since it’s built using technology that, if not a direct descendent of HR’s, then at least is driven by much the same philosophy. This approach provides many, many opportunities to iteratively improve on the worst mechanics from Human Revolution. To its credit Mankind Divided takes advantage of nearly all of them; there’s a huge number of snarls that have been either eliminated completely or streamlined away into something much better. A lot of this consists of basic things that had a disproportionate impact on how Human Revolution played, such as nu-Deus Ex protagonist Adam Jensen (a man with a beard so pointy that were this game set in another age he’d be a shoe-in for Grand Vizier) getting from point A to point B by sprinting and jumping. In HR he could sprint for a whole 2.5 seconds (upgradable to a generous 7.5 seconds if you invested valuable upgrade points) and reached about knee-height with his jumps, making you feel less like a mechanically-augmented post-human superman than an asthmatic OAP crossing the road. By contrast in Mankind Divided he can sprint indefinitely with no upgrades required, and while his regular jumping height isn’t much improved he can at least mount ledges and fall more than half a storey without shattering every bone in his body.

The bog-standard, unaugmented version of Adam Jensen is a lot more fun to play with this time around, and this goes double when you start tossing augmentations into the mix. Since Jensen already maxed out his upgrades in Human Revolution you do start with a fair chunk of them already activated in the tutorial so the game can show them off; however this does mean that Mankind Divided predictably has to put him through a Samus Aran-esque mishap just afterwards where they all fall off and he has to start over again from close to zero. While cliched, this turn of events is at least unusually well-handled with one of the lengthier side missions having you chase down the reason why all your augs went on the fritz, and why you now have access to some completely new experimental ones. The existing augs are hardly unchanged from Human Revolution, however; most of them have been pushed in a direction that makes them more powerful and hence more satisfying to use. Smart vision is probably the standout here since it ties into gameplay in a number of very subtle ways when upgraded and combined with other augs — it’ll let you spot enemies through walls, examine their equipment and any augs they have, mark them on the HUD with a Battlefield-style arrow so that you know their position, and target their weak points with armour-piercing rounds. Other returning augs include Punch Through Walls, Lift Heavy Things, Breathe Poison Gas and Cloaking, and they’re all more or less the same – however, I found myself using them far more than I did in Human Revolution thanks to the overhauled energy mechanic.

Human Revolution’s ridiculous chocolate-fuelled energy bar was probably my most-hated thing about the game; the fact that only a sliver of the energy bar recharged for free once drained basically encouraged the player to hoard chocolate bars and never make full use of their augs except on very special occasions. Not only did it strike me as terribly-designed at the time, but it was really shown up a year later by Dishonored’s far more generous system where using a power would grey out a chunk of your energy bar which would then start recharging after a short delay; using another power before it had fully recharged would deplete any un-recharged energy for good and necessitate Corvo glugging down a mana potion to refill it. This struck a really nice balance between making prolonged use of your powers have a cost while ensuring that you still felt free to use them to overcome isolated obstacles without wasting anything, and so it’s no surprise that Mankind Divided has pretty much stolen it wholesale. It’s a little bit more punitive in that all aug use has an upfront cost in energy which is drained permanently, and then any energy which is drained while the aug is switched on will eventually be recharged. However the permanent energy cost for most augs is so small that you don’t feel like you have to be restrained; the notable exceptions here are the takedowns, which still cost a fair chunk of non-refundable energy², but I kind of understand why that’s the case since the game really wants to encourage you to make use of the hundred other options you have for neutralising or bypassing bad guys. Anyway, the game vomits so many biocells at you (yes, the chocolate bars and jars of Nutella have met an unfortunate demise) that you’ll still never run short unless you’re really abusing your superpowers.

Thanks to this nearly-new energy system the simple act of using augs in Mankind Divided feels way better than it ever did in Human Revolution. There’s so many ways to get around obstacles now, from the fairly humdrum hacking minigame (largely unchanged from HR, and whose major flaw is that it is invoked approximately 200 times in the course of the game and so gets really old really fast) to the series staple of the vent shafts hidden behind some boxes, to the Klipspringer jumping aug that allows you to leap moderately tall objects in a single bound, to the Remote Hacking aug which is (thankfully) a different minigame to the main hacking one and which opens up so many additional paths that it should be purchased ASAP. It moves Mankind Divided back towards the series ideal: the main choice you’re faced with is which route you’re going to take, standing in stark contrast to the more miserly decision space of whether or not you can afford to. The augs themselves aren’t locked behind any sort of progression tree and you can buy them in any order you want — individual augs have mini-trees where you upgrade their functionality and power efficiency, but actually unlocking the thing can be done at any time as long as you have the skill points. There’s lots of tools for stealth, lots of tools for non-lethal and lots of tools for murdering the entire population of Prague in as loud and conspicuous a fashion as possible and using any or all of them is entirely up to you. This makes the player feel doubly powerful, not only because the improved augs finally transform you into the mechanical marvel you should have been in Human Revolution, but also because the freedom to choose is an inherently powerful thing.

This degree of choice is usually more than supported by the level design. I will admit to being extremely down on Mankind Divided’s level design on my first stealthy runthrough; the hub area of Prague had a fair amount of hidden areas in it but it all seemed to be small, inconsequential standalone stuff whose presence didn’t really bolster the game at all. As you progress through the plot you explore most of the map (but by no means all of it) and you see the various set-piece areas it has to offer, most notable of which are a theatre and a bank. I thought that these areas didn’t fully unlock until you triggered the relevant piece of plot that required you to go there, but before suplexing Mankind Divided through a table I thought it’d be a good idea to do a second anything-goes run where I deliberately tested the game’s limits – and I was very pleasantly surprised, because it turns out you can go pretty much everywhere in Prague from the moment you get out of the tutorial as long as you have the right augs. You can also kill a lot of plot-relevant people and the game will adapt: on my first runthrough I got a hint as to the next location for the plot by eavesdropping on a conversation between a mob boss and his lieutenant. This was towards the end of the story, so one of the first things I did on playthrough two was to shoot my way into the mob boss’s compound and shove a nanoblade through his chest. I was impressed that the game let me do this at all — I thought he’d be some sort of special NPC that’d only spawn when I had the relevant mission active — and when I had to go there for plot later he remained dead and I instead got the information out of his computer. It’s a comparatively small adjustment, true, but I like the fact that it’s so organic; I’m so used to games making it very explicit what I can and cannot do that even this relatively minor side-character existing in the game long before the story required him to without the protection of the bulletproof glass so beloved of most AAA titles was still a very refreshing experience.

The bank is another example of how freeform Mankind Divided can get, and probably the best one. All the time you’re wandering around Prague you’re picking up information about the bank and codes for various safes in the vault, and so you’re naturally wondering when the plot is going to ask you to pay it a visit; the interesting thing here, though, is that you can complete the game without ever breaking into it at all. This is surprising considering it’s possibly the signature location in Prague, with multiple floors, multiple vaults, plenty of security to crack and plenty of secret routes to find. The other interesting thing about it is that if you do decide to break into it the amount you get out of it will directly correlate to how much time you’ve spent exploring wider Prague. There’s two main vault areas in the bank: the executive safes, which are simple containers that can be broken into easily if you have a fully-upgraded hacking skill (although getting into the vault that houses them without alerting security is pretty tricky), and the corporate vaults. As you’d expect in a dystopian future where corporations wield increasing amounts of power, the corporate vaults are where the real goodies are to be found – but they can’t be broken into. Instead you need to find the keycard for each individual vault somewhere in Prague, and since three out of the four vaults are not (to my knowledge) part of any plot or side mission you’re going to have to get your exploring on if you want to walk away from it with a full haul.

Prague itself I have mixed feelings about. It’s a very depressing hub area in which to set a game compared to the glowing streets of Detroit, and it doesn’t do itself any favours by apparently ripping off Half Life 2’s City 17 in terms of both look and feel. I get that this is intentional: the golden age of Human Revolution is over and Prague is the game’s main method of communicating that, with constant evidence of discrimination against the augmented and an ever-increasing police presence. In a way it captures the prevailing cultural zeitgeist just as well as HR or the original Deus Ex did, it’s just that the current zeitgeist is “Everything’s a bit shit, really” and that’s hardly a compelling atmospheric hook on which to hang your environment design. There’s certain bits and pieces — like the bank and everything surrounding it — that really stand out, but they only do so when you take a step back and consider how it all fits together, and that’s something that very much went over my head the during my first playthrough as I had the tunnel vision common to all players exploring an environment for the first time. Most games use this to their advantage to make their environments seem larger and more detailed than they really are, but Mankind Divided has the opposite problem: if you don’t have the post facto perspective granted by hours of exploration then Prague initially comes across as a collection of recycled apartments, recycled tiny shops with tiny basements, and recycled storage containers with secret entrances. They’re not particularly fun to visit on their own, and it’s only when you understand how they tie into the wider environment that their point becomes clear.

Probably the worst sin committed by Prague, though, is the division of the city into two halves: the aug ghetto and the somewhat nicer commercial district. Getting from one to the other requires you to sit through a fairly lengthy loading screen. I accept that loading screens are a fact of life and am usually prepared to put up with them; however Mankind Divided takes the piss slightly by having its missions constantly ask you to travel from one environment to the other and then back again for no real reason. There’s one particularly good one towards the end where Jensen infiltrates the red light district to get an update on the main story and asks his confidante to meet him back at his apartment; cue one lengthy loading screen for the payoff of a minute-long conversation. To get to the piece of the story immediately after this Jensen then has to meet his pilot at the helipad – which is right next to the sodding red light district he just came from. Basically there’s a method of structuring your missions/quests so that you can minimise a player’s exposure to loading screens, and you could use Mankind Divided as a case study for how not to go about doing this.

That’s the good and the ugly out of the way, which means that it is now rather unfortunately time for the bad news: mechanically speaking this Deus Ex is a triumph and probably the best the series has ever been, but narratively it is an absolute clusterfuck. For starters it does the one thing AAA RPGs should never, ever do, which is to assume that the person playing it will have played all of the other games in the series (including the shitty phone ones) and/or read all of the terrible tie-in fiction and that it’s perfectly fine to introduce characters and groups from these games with little to no explanation of who they are. Mankind Divided doesn’t quite reach the nadir that Mass Effect 3 did (I still shudder whenever I think of that Mary-Sue space ninja) but it’s this attitude that it doesn’t have to waste time filling the player in on missing backstory that contributes to much of the main plotline’s general feel of incoherence. It’s a problem exacerbated by the generally mismatched nature of the game; outside of Prague (and in more than a few locations within it) Mankind Divided strikes me as a game that suffered some development troubles. The missions are bolted together in a jumbled, ad-hoc way that’s usually a classic symptom of the developers being forced to a deadline and having to assemble the story out of whatever they had lying around at the time. It doesn’t flow at all. For all its flaws Human Revolution at least managed a story with a distinct beginning, middle and somewhat wonky  end, whereas in Mankind Divided the story is just a thing that happens until it doesn’t.

That last part isn’t just a figure of speech. The most infuriating thing about Mankind Divided is that towards the end of the game it does slowly seem to be drawing towards some sort of point. The first two-thirds are really rocky, but it’s finally managed to establish its characters, their motivations and who the bad guys are and what they intend, and it looks like it’s going to set up a fairly decent final act where all of these hanging plot points are going to be resolved. It is just at this point where the story is getting its shit together, and you feel like the general incoherence is starting to give way to genuine mystery, that the game ends. The story doesn’t, I should hasten to add; Mankind Divided just throws an end boss at you and calls it a day about five to ten hours before the story wraps up. They might as well have just replaced Adam’s growly introspectiveness in the end cutscene with a splash screen saying “Buy the DLC! Coming soon!” since that’s clearly where all of these hanging plot threads are actually going to be tied off³.

It’s not all bad, I suppose. There’s still some surprisingly good and subtle storytelling in here if you know roughly where to look and are prepared to do some digging (like Task Force Director Miller’s backstory and motivations) but almost none of it relates to the actual main plotline. Meanwhile the rest of the narrative reeks of a rush job – there are “major” characters who show up once in the tutorial and then vanish again until the very final mission, locations which are very heavily lampshaded but which you never get to visit, and locations which aren’t lampshaded at all and where you do nothing plot-related outside of the opening cutscene, and which seem to have been thrown in to extend the game’s running time more than anything else. I’m going to give Eidos Montreal the benefit of the doubt and assume that this mismatched structure wasn’t intentional, and that they simply didn’t have enough time or resources to finish the game properly; either way the effect is the same, though, and that’s to ensure that the story concludes in just as unsatisfying a manner as it begins.

It ends so badly, in fact, that my original verdict on Mankind Divided was that for all the mechanical improvements it made over Human Revolution it was almost worse than Invisible War; having a crap story is the absolute kiss of death for an RPG no matter how well the rest of it is designed. It was only once I tested the game’s limits on the second playthrough that my opinion of it mellowed somewhat; there is much to recommend it if you’re willing to take your time and fully explore the Prague environment, but on the other hand I really wouldn’t blame anyone for not putting in the effort since it’s not immediately obvious there’s going to be any sort of payoff. It doesn’t have the immediate story hooks to drag you in that Human Revolution did — or story hooks of any kind, really — and to get the most out of Mankind Divided you have to be interested in doing things for their own sake rather than because they’ll have any significant payoff plot-wise. Fortunately for Mankind Divided you’re probably already that kind of person if you’re playing Deus Ex in the first place, and so my third place ranking of it is more a function of my high opinion of the original DE and HR than it is Mankind Divided’s own numerous flaws. While it might not be a great or even a good Deus Ex game, it is at least still recognisably Deus Ex. Just don’t play it for the story.

The post Thoughts: Deus Ex – Mankind Divided appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

The post Sunday Soundtracks appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

After my pathetic begging last week I got asked several questions; thanks if you did so! I’ll be answering them at the rate of about one per week, so I should have them all done by the end of the month.

Adam Benton asks

I know this is a rather difficult question, and one you’ve probably answered before, but what game/tv/film depiction to you think is one of the most accurate glimpses of the future?

For example, on the one hand we have Mass Effect, which postulates some crazy advanced technology but seems to keep it within the laws of physics (as much as I know). On the other hand we have BSG, which has less crazy technology but does have dogfights in space ships which – as your most recent post suggested – is unlikely to happen.

We have to work with a given value of “accurate” here, since nearly every single fictional depiction of the future has taken certain liberties with present-day physics in order to make their universe easier to portray/easier for us to understand. Your examples are a good illustration of this. Mass Effect does no more than pay lip service to real-life physics with things like mass drivers and the Normandy’s stealth technology. It gets worse as the series progresses and the writers change and Bioware is less concerned with a coherent universe and more concerned with THRILLING PLOT TWISTS, but even in the first title the mass effect fields, kinetic barriers, even the gun tech which is dressed up with a fair amount of technobabble handwaving – all that stuff is pretty much space magic. As for BSG, which is a gritty, grimy, “realistic” take on sci-fi, even the humans have got things like artificial gravity and FTL travel, which are acceptable concessions to narrative necessity, but they’re also running the Galactica on what appears to be the futuristic equivalent of a 486 processor, which isn’t.

Most accurate, therefore, is only going to be a relative title. Every sci-fi story that’s been shown on a screen of some form has taken liberties with the science, and for good reason; nobody wants to watch a show where it takes a minimum of four years to travel to the nearest star and you get repeatedly fried by solar radiation on the way out of the solar system. You’re more likely to find accurate sci-fi in written form, where it is known as “hard” science fiction; a good example is the Red/Green/Blue Mars trilogy, where the first book (at least) is a decent jab at how we might believably go about colonising Mars, but which is nonetheless an absolute nightmare to read because the characters are all crap. There seems to be a tradeoff: you can focus on the characters and character conflicts and use the science as an enabling device and tell an interesting story, or you can focus on getting your science as right as you possibly can, but you can’t do both, which is why the people who make films and tv shows tend to focus on the former.

As a result the most scientifically accurate depiction of the future is going to end up being something which mentions the science as little as possible. The less it talks about it, the less likely it is to be caught out in an outright contradiction of what we currently know to be possible. Something like Blade Runner would be a good contender; there is only one scientific concept stated overtly in the film (that it is possible to make androids that look, sound and act just like humans) and even that doesn’t outright break science. Everything else is shown to the viewer or mentioned in the background; we are never told explicitly how the flying cars work or why there are wars going on in the offworld colonies. We just know that they exist, and that, at least, is something that falls within the bounds of the scientifically possible.

Therefore the question is more a literary one about how sci-fi narratives are constructed than it is about scientific verisimilitude. If I absolutely had to pick, though, then it would come down to a choice between two titles, and both of them are video games.

Alpha Centauri.

Otherwise known as The Game That Got Me Into Astrophysics. Alpha Centauri’s tech tree is a thing of wonder: exhaustively researched, initially grounded in “real” science and advances we suppose to be just around the corner, like fusion and superstring theory, and then as the game progresses branching out into truly fantastical technologies like teleportation and singularity engines. You can probably quibble about the timescale – I doubt humanity is going to have working anti-gravity devices by 2300, for example – but while it is somewhat suppository it is at least based on the probable direction we think science might be headed in over the next couple of centuries. The stuff you actually do in-game is also pretty damn convincing; the terraforming mechanics in particular are a work of art, scientifically speaking. Of course, Alpha Centauri is working with the advantage that as a 4X it doesn’t really have to bother itself with telling a story (although unusually for the genre there is the skeleton of one in there). If you want a viable future world that does work with that constriction then you should look no further than…

Deus Ex

Not Human Revolution or Invisible War, which both ventured into what would have been space opera had any of it actually been set in space, but the original dystopian world of tomorrow. Like the best sci-fi stories, it takes just one big scientific concept – the incipience of nanotechnology as a viable… uh, technology – and bases its entire structure around examining the social and personal effects that this advance might have on people. There’s some of the other near-future tropes in there as well – sentient AI, robotics, cybernetic augmentations – but this is all stuff that genuinely is going to happen within the next century (Deus Ex is set in 2052). Nanotech is the big pill that the audience is asked to swallow, but once they have, every other fantastical device in the game – think the Dragon’s Tooth sword, Denton’s augmentations, the Universal Constructor – follows on naturally and logically from that one scientific leap. In other words, if we had functioning nanotech we really could do all this stuff, and that’s why I think the world of Deus Ex is the one that’s most connected to the world of today: it takes only one liberty with science, and even that is not completely out of the question. Nanotech is possible, if perhaps not feasible. It’s not even in the same league as some of the things we routinely swallow like anti-gravity, which outright break the established laws of physics.

You’ll notice that both these games have a lot of roots in what is going on in the research laboratories of today. That’s because it’s easier for me to say something is believable when I can draw a straight line between now and the future. If you have something set in the mid-to-far future, like Star Trek, the whole thing becomes far murkier. I can’t make predictions about what 24^th century science is going to be like any more than Isaac Newton could have predicted the microchip. So who knows? It’s possible that some of the things depicted in Mass Effect may actually come to pass given the development of magic 22^nd century technologies. That’s the nice thing about the future: anything could be possible. It’s a heartening thought.

(Battlestar Galactica is still balls any way you look at it, though.)

The post It’s About The Future, Because That’s Where We’re Going. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Not as good as Deus Ex.

Oh, alright. It’s definitely Deus Ex. There were many moments here when I sat back and thought “Yes, I am playing a Deus Ex game!” which means it’s already more successful than Invisible War. The problem is it’s Deus Ex with about a million fiddly, pointless and ultimately teeth-gnashingly frustrating elements added in.

You might argue that this is partially my fault for playing it on the hardest difficulty setting with non-lethal weapons only, but you have to remember that that’s a playstyle the developers specifically point out and endorse several times during the tutorial level. The very first question I was asked in the game – and a deliberate callback to the original – is what sort of weapon I’d like to start with: lethal or non-lethal? A helpful tutorial screen informed me that there were two different types of takedown, one deadly and one not. The game gives bonus experience for non-lethal “kills”, and until two-thirds of the way into the game the non-lethal weapons were the only truly silent ones I had access to so they’re pretty much essential for any kind of sneaky character. There’s even an achievement for playing through the entire game without killing anyone (albeit with some significant caveats, as we shall see) so I don’t think the developers can really complain when I attempted to do something they’d deliberately built into the game.

At first it was fun. More fun than I’ve had in a while, in fact; on the hardest difficulty setting Adam is so fragile he basically dies as soon as he gets spotted, so the challenge lies in never being spotted. I started the game methodically plotting how I’d take out entire rooms full of guards without raising the alarm. As time wore on this became impractical due to the feeble nature of the non-lethal weapons and their extremely limited supplies of ammo, so I switched to simply avoiding the guards, only resorting to violence when I ran across a guard in a position that I absolutely, positively couldn’t bypass without taking him out.

This was a very refreshing, almost Thief-like experience, aided by the development of a sophisticated stealth suite (quite literally since they were powered by chocolate bars) of augmentations – better radar, better hacking, cloaking, and so on. I trundled on through the first third of the game quite smoothly like this, happy in the knowledge that the game was keeping true to the spirit of the multiple-paths nature of the original. And then things ran headlong into a brick wall. A huge, monumental brick wall labelled COMPULSORY BOSSFIGHTS.

(Deus Ex had bossfights too but it’s famous for giving the player the ability to completely bypass the first two with the killphrases if they don’t fancy shooting it out. The only person you have to fight is Walton Simons, and even then you can just toss a couple of LAMs in his face on Realistic and blow him into meaty kibbles.)

Picture the scene. I’ve been serenely ghosting my way through this covert facility, hacking computers, turning off cameras, occasionally tranquilising the odd guard – just generally being as invisible as I can. Then, suddenly, a wild cutscene appears! Adam walks into a room in pretty much the un-stealthiest way possible before getting sucker-punched by some big fucker with a minigun for an arm (note: said big fucker has had like two speaking lines in the entire game so far, so the buildup for this bossfight basically consists of “we’re a third of the way in and we think we should have a bossfight so here you go”).   I then regain control to find myself locked in a room with the big fucker who is spewing hot lead in my direction at a fairly alarming rate. All I’ve got to fight him with are a taser (actually turned out to be moderately useful but only had five charges), a tranquiliser gun (useless) and a 9mm pistol (almost useless) that I was using to set off mines (because the game never explains how you’re supposed to remove the damn things without physically detonating them unless you look at one in your inventory). THESE ARE NOT GOOD ODDS.

Oh, and the game saves the best fuck-you for last. After several dozen reloads where I alternately darted forward to taser Big Fucker in the balls before retreating to shoot him in the head fifty times with my pistol from across the room, I finally triggered a cutscene in which Big Fucker collapses to the ground oozing blood from several orifices. Adam questions him on the Plot, and Big Fucker delivers a line of Exposition before Trying To Take Adam With Him! Adam leaps away, but not before spearing Big Fucker through the head with his non-pointy wristblade thing! Thanks, game! It wasn’t like I’d been going out of my way not to kill anyone up till that point or anything!

(And yes, I did reload to see what’d happen if I landed the finishing blow with a non-lethal weapon and the answer is: exactly the same thing. This guy is hardcoded to be killed by Adam no matter what the player does, which is why the non-lethal achievement carries the rider “Not counting bossfights!”)

This is the most egregious example of how Human Revolution screws up what should have been a fairly straightforward continuation of the first game’s design philosophy: it allowed me free reign to play things how I wanted 90% of the time, but it has this bizarre reliance on traditional cutscenes and bossfights to mark progression of the plot/game during which all control or choice was taken away from me and I was tossed in a pit against my will so that I could fight it out with some ludicrously tough enemy. These are two design philosophies which are completely anathema to each other and here they are both in the same game.

It makes me sad, because most of the time Human Revolution is a joy to play. All the missions and sidequests have at least three ways to complete them, and usually more; the sidequests in particular are very, very involved multistage tasks that are far more varied and developed than I expected. I also enjoyed the persuasion mini-missions – they weren’t particularly deep or anything, but they were an interesting take on the conventional RPG conversation mechanic. Augmentations…

…are mostly good, on the face of it. Unfortunately there’s a couple of problems with the hacking mechanic in Human Revolution which have their root in the hacking implants the player can buy¹, but nearly every single augmentation is obviously useful from the get-go which is quite the achievement. Some of them also allowed for rather unorthodox solutions to some of the encounters the game presented me with; for example, another rage-inducing moment was when the game tried to make me fight off several waves of soldiers while I was waiting for an elevator (hnnnngh) when all I had were seven tranq darts, but after a couple of reloads I realised the Lift Heavy Shit augmentation would let me block off all the entry points with vending machines beforehand and prevent the baddies from ever gaining access to the elevator room. There was another occasion where there were a couple of baddies patrolling an approach point covered by a turret; I couldn’t get to them while the turret was active and I couldn’t shut down the security grid while the guards were patrolling, so I solved the problem by stealing the turret while their backs were turned and pointing it at a wall.

No, the real problem with augmentations isn’t the augs themselves, but rather the way the developers have chosen to limit the player’s use of them. Augs are powered by the ubiquitous energy bar; Adam starts the game with two blocks on his energy bar and can upgrade to five, as well as boosting the recharge rate. But in one of the weirdest design decisions I have ever seen – right up there with Far Cry 2’s malaria – Adam can only regenerate the final block of energy from nothing. He’ll regenerate the others if they’re partially depleted, but once they’re gone they’re gone forever unless Adam eats some chocolate. The supply of chocolate in Human Revolution is limited and the chocolate can take up a fair amount of inventory space, with a jar of nutella (the best energy item) occupying a whopping four blocks, for which it will fill just three energy bars. And the nutella doesn’t stack, either.

At a stroke this one gameplay mechanic sabotages others while placing some extremely artificial limitations on the player. It ensured that most of the time I was operating with only the final block of energy available to me since that was the only one that regenerated on its own, with the other four blocks I’d purchased being permanently greyed out until I found some more chocolate. That renders pretty much the entire line of energy upgrade augs completely useless as there’s no functional difference between having five blocks and having two blocks if you’ve only got the last one filled. It also meant that any aug which required manual activation (thankfully there aren’t many of these) was automatically crippled; in theory the max level cloak meant I could turn invisible for thirty-five seconds with a full energy bar, but in reality I had just seven seconds to play with. Oh, and the energy bar is also used for takedowns so there’s often a thirty-second wait in between eliminating guards while I waited for my solitary energy block to recharge. What exactly was stopping Adam from plugging into a power outlet and getting the energy that way? I don’t know, and I suspect the developers don’t either; I certainly never saw the leet augmented mercenary squad having to stop to munch on a chocolate bar so they could keep their cloaks up. Again, the only reason that mechanic is there is because they wanted to limit my options in a game that’s supposedly all about choice.

Another issue with the augs is that Adam is almost completely incapable of performing basic FPS tasks if he doesn’t have them. Without the leg upgrades he can’t jump more than a foot in the air. Without the lung upgrades he can’t sprint for more than 2.5 seconds. Even with them – and this requires four or five skill points – he can only sprint for 7.5 seconds. I can sprint for longer than that. An arthritic old man could sprint for longer than that. Yet the extensively modified Adam Jensen – who is more machine than man and who has cybernetic legs - runs out of go-juice after eight seconds. This is not the bright transhumanist future I was promised; it’s intensely disheartening to try to leap from the roof of one building to another only to get about three inches of horizontal clearance and then plummet to my death from the dizzying height of two storeys because I didn’t have the Falling Off Things augmentation.

While I’m talking about augmentations I should probably spare a word or two for their visual design, because it is fucking awesome. In Deus Ex mechanical augs looked like real limbs with a coat of silver paint; here, though, they look like genuine working prosthetics with a twist. There’s even a noticeable differentiation between the augmentations available to the general population (nasty, harsh, overtly mechanical), combat augmentations (sleek and state of the art but still obvious), and augmentations worn by the rich and powerful (flesh-toned and/or decorated versions that most closely mimic real limbs). Here at least the artists and animators have done a fantastic job; the constant excellence of the visual design went a long way towards removing the sour taste of the odd gameplay screw-up.

The last thing I should mention is the level design. By and large it’s excellent; there’s been a lot of thought given to providing alternate routes for people who have certain augs – here there’ll be a weak wall I can punch through for a shortcut, here there’s a deep shaft I can jump down if I have Falling Off Things, here there’s a door blocked by heavy things I can move if I have Lift Heavy Shit. Aside from the bossfights I never felt like I had to fight the bad guys; in fact it’s a game I could have quite happily played without confronting a single one. However there are some design elements repeated so often they become full-blown idiosyncrasies. The ubiquitous presence of ventilation shafts is basically what Deus Ex is all about, so I’ll let it slide even if I do question the wisdom of having a man-size air duct connecting an upstairs office with a downstairs toilet. No, it was the constant concealment of the vent covers with one crate stacked on top of another that got to me. It got so that I could identify alternate entry points through a twisted kind of Pavlovian response; any time I saw two crates stacked against a wall the designers might just as well have put a sign there saying VENTILATION SHAFT ENTRANCE HERE.  Similarly the Build A Crate Bridge Over Electrified Water puzzle was cute the first time I did it. In the original Half Life. Over thirteen years ago. I don’t really think it’s good enough to warrant cropping up no less than five times in Human Revolution, though.

This review may sound like a long laundry list of complaints. That’s because it is. From it, however, you might get the impression that Human Revolution is a terrible game, and that’s something it most definitely isn’t. It’s Deus Ex updated for the modern age with everything that entails. Some of the new additions and changes are straight improvements. Some of them aren’t so successful. The latter group are the ones I’ve given most of my word-time to here because criticism shouldn’t really focus on the elements of a game that perform as expected. Most of the time, Human Revolution performs like Deus Ex. I said it at the start but it’s worth repeating: Human Revolution is Deus Ex, and that I’m able to say that about it is by far its greatest achievement even if – ultimately -  it doesn’t quite reach that same lofty pinnacle.

————————————————————

The post Thoughts: Human Revolution. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.