Icarus is like the least subtle of all imagery ever guys

I never played the original Deus Ex. I believe a friend of mine I grew up with loved it, but I never recall actually installing it on any Pc I owned. I had a weird space in my life where I played friends SNES and PSX games while other friends bought pentiums, then I saved up and bought an Athlon when those were finally boss. I feel like DE fell into that gap. The first Quake game I installed on a PC I owned was Quake 3. How weird is that?

I'm not really certain if that took away from or added to the deus ex experience. There's not a huge list of "Best game ever!" PC titles, but the original sits on that shelf. Supposedly, anyway. Is HR one of the best titles ever?

You couldn't fault them, on the most part, for making a serious attempt. Right from the moment the credits flash up on the screen the game is smooth, crisp and well made. It has few moments of feeling buggy or out of sorts with itself, with most of the game at a consistent level of quality and polish. The game just feels like someone actually went over it and cleaned up all the crap that just about every game has, actually paid attention to how things flowed and fixed those things. The graphics look better than they are, as though GASP attention was paid to how to set things up to look better. Sound quality is asotundingly good, with great music and mostly good voice acting. The fact the dweebs and feebs aren't well voice acted honestly doesn't hurt it so much. I mean, that's what normal people sound like.

Cyberpunk is near and dear to my heart, and Human Revolution is probably founded with at least some love for the much shit on genre. I read Neuromancer when I was young enough to not realize that was a sex scene, and I've probably been grumbling about how debased the concept has been ever since. Human Revolution holds strongly to the genre and on the most part keeps its head above water. You've got a decent hacking minigame, guns, cyborgs and some jacked up asian super cities. Cyberpunk always has to have crazy asian super cities. That's what white people think of you, Asia! You're gonna build craaaaazy cities!

Which is actually to say the setting and sets are cyberpunk, but the story is not really effective in that regard. The story is good, certainly not great, but at least subtle enough that you won't instantly guess every single element of the ending from the get go. A tremendous number of ideas are lobbed to you with the slowest of pitches, and the ending, well the ending didn't really do anything for me. I actually sort of hoped that it would simply let you go back to Detroit and talk to the characters about your choice, get their impression you know? Is that so difficult? I also don't really care about referencing the next game. No seriously, you don't need to. If you make a game in the same world, you do not need to "set up" the next game. Especially in a fucking prequel. Storylines do not need to be tied together if you do your job right, things just happen as they will.

I really don't know why writers do this. Ok I do know. See, when you're writing something from beginning to end, you get this smug moment when people realize something from the beginning tied neatly to the end. That's tricky and it's subtle, and people love the shit out of it. It doesn't fucking count when it's a prequel though, which is not to bitch at Human Revolution itself for doing it but just in general. Fuck you, Dune Prequels.

I didn't really pay too much attention to the pure narrative or think too hard about the plot. I like Jensen himself, but I found most of the other characters hard to care about or like. Except the one that died, man, I liked that character. Apparently I could have stopped that death though, which makes me feel a little bit stupid. I think I actually could have too, but the game conspired to make it look like it wasn't preventable - I thought I'd done it, then death triggered and I realized a minute later some dork was still alive. More information game, please? Oh and I really liked the IT guy, he was actually sort of well represented. Yeah he's a douchebag, but he's helpful and actually gives a shit under his thick douchebag exterior. Your boss on the other hand seems like a wang the entire game through. Also there's several characters that are supposed to be SECRETLY something but it's about as secret as a punch to the kidneys.

The game's combat is extremely varied in both quality and style. I found myself using the cover systems only sometimes. Sniping out of cover is tricky and some situations called for more traditional Doomesque usage of cover - which is to say ungracefully sprinting behind walls like a screaming child - but when you do use the cover system either because you should or just strictly because you can, it's pretty great. In fact my biggest problems with the cover system is the enemies make little use of it and you often just ... Can't. Level design often seems like it was set up to punish you for it. It's a serious pity because when you're allowed to use it, you have this neat set of controls that allow cover to feel streamlined and reasonable with far less goofy button presses or sticking to walls at random.

The other problem with that is seriously, cover as a concept works only insofar as if the two opposing forces both agree to abide by it. You see, the agreement here is that generally speaking two people both don't want to die. It's a concern, see, because bullets make you dead or just hurt real fucking bad. Enemies in Human Revolution seem to have mixed concerned regarding both being shot and how much they dislike being shot. Enemies just don't care, they stand in the middle of the room and gun you down as you unload repeated shotgun shells directly into their mid section. This is a very weird feeling. The game is pretty good about enemies feeling 'like you'. They gain almost all of your abilities over the course of the game - they cloak, snipe, have better armor, immune to EMP and some grenades I think - and use guns in much the same way. But they seem to just take a random amount of damage without any really good visual indication that they were damaged or how much damage they're going to take. There's a point in the game where you fight the 'asian super city thug' enemies and I swear their heavies have the most life of all non-boss characters in the game. It's really confusing, since they look like poor people clad in hoodies with machine bits and the PMC heavies are wearing what appears to be a tank. They take less damage to kill and actually seemed to have access to less augments.

Than street thugs? What? God, so confusing. It actually represents the biggest spike of difficulty in the game and then the game was incredibly easy going forward. Very strange.

One thing I find more funny than outright bad is the people who complain about boss fights being combat oriented. I mean there's two big things about this that make me laugh. First, the boss fight people complain about it "is bad" if you have most likely all but two augments you may not have really picked up as 'the key' to beating him, since there's no suggestion you're going to fight this guy or what he's "Weak to" so to speak. If you have those two augments, he's actually probably nowhere near as hard. If you didn't happen to magically clue in, it's hard no matter what you do. The second thing is people are a little bit silly about 'stealth runs'. See, the thing is, it's a shooting game. You know going into it, on a personal level, it's a game about bullets entering and exiting things. The idea that you'll never have to fight anyone in a spot you can't stealth or stun your way through is actually a little juvenile, if not outright buffoonery. If you completely specialize in any element of the game, the game punishes you pretty harshly, so I'm not really sure why you're supposed to get a free pass for ignoring combat skills. It's a combat game!

I didn't ignore combat and the first boss was still something of a chore anyway. I'm not so sure how the later bosses would be, but complaining you didn't have an easy time of running through the game on your "I specifically made illogical and stupid choices" run is just stupid complaining. Especially if people warned you about it.

Boss fights are a bone of contention for the game and on the most part I would definitely say the first one overshadows much of the game's flaws in pure shittiness. It really isn't a well designed fight, mostly because as I said the game isn't very good about telling you how much health someone does or doesn't have. Maybe one of the augs I didn't get would offer that option, but it didn't seem like it was among the abilities. The later 'elite mercenary' boss fights are pretty neat, not really great but at least something interesting to them. There's also what I imagine is sort of a boss fight against two security robots? That was pretty funny. I didn't have any "anti tank" sort of weapons on me whatsoever, so I just widdled them down with a revolver and a chain gun.

While I think the first boss is probably the game's low point, it's over and done in less than an hour. On the other hand, the game's two very poorly thought out parts resonate through the entire game. The first thing is the energy cell system. Augments take power, and that's fine. I can deal with that conceptually. The problem is, you have 1 energy cell that actually regenerates. Later cells redline and do not regenerate, which is extremely annoying. You have to concede huge chunks of inventory space in order to eat to refill these and I mean that in a direct sense. I'm not sure they ever regenerate. Maybe after boss fights. This is atrocious, because you burn through cells pretty quickly doing just about anything. And then you have to eat candy bars to be able to do them in all but the most obnoxious of ways, which is to say standing with your head to a wall waiting for your one regenerating cell to regenerate. It's really strange too, because it's not like you wouldn't use the candy bars if you had fully regenerating cells, you'd just spend less time tediously waiting for the one cell to regenerate. It made takedowns far less enticing - if you have only a single cell, you can't use stealth to get into melee with an enemy full stop. It doesn't work, because augmented stealth chews up energy. So you have to eat candy bars nonstop and that leads into the next problem.

The inventory system is really, really bad. I'm not entirely certain where the Diablo style block of blocks system first arrived - I know it predates Diablo, but that's the game I can remember fucking with it the most. In Human Revolution it's just excrutiating, everything bad about it is bad. You can't reload a gun from ammo on the floor without dropping something, and you can't drop something from the item pick up screen. So if you want to pick up six rounds of revolver ammo from a security card, you have to open your inventory screen, drop something to make space open him again take the ammo reload the gun then pick up the discarded item. This is quite literally the worst inventory system I've ever seen. The fact you have to reload guns outside of combat is an annoying chore to begin with - I don't just mean you have to reload while sneaking around, that's fine. But Jensen doesn't reload his guns between levels, which is just absurd.

The thing that really stands out about this is you just can't wrap your head around why it functions the way it does. Fundamentally speaking the Diablo system is just a ridiculous fantasy and used because in reality picking up four suits of armor to cart back to town to sell is just so far removed from a reasonable system that no one's brain coughs on it. You've already ridden the donkey this far just keep fucking going. But human revolution is actually pretty reasonable much of the time, yeah you have regenerating health but beyond that the game isn't so super fantasy ridiculous that the inventory system fits. What I would have done is probably allowed for one sidearm, two medium weapons and a single heavy weapon - which is basically what you can reasonably carry anyway - and then slots for particular items, without forcing me to play tetris with crap in my backpack. The reason this is so frustrating has to do with the game's open ended nature coupled with its entire lack of willingness to give you any idea what is coming out. Do I need these EMP grenades? Will enemies be vulnerable to gas? Will I have a spot to lay down mines? Will I need access to repeated take downs? You really have no idea and there's no easy way to even change preparations without going back three saves and twenty minutes of your life. If you're going to give me all these options AND saddle the energy regenerating system with a massive inventory hog in the shape of candy bars I have to stockpile to use effectively, you really should streamline the inventory system. See the thing is, the game is fun, but inventory tetris isn't, so making me fuck with it isn't helpful.

And yeah you totally can just stick to two or three guns, leave lots of space cleared out and be fine - But that takes away from your options in a way that has less to do with the game's challenge (beyond having not enough ammo in a pure attrition sense for fighting robots or nonsense like that) and more with having less fun. Picking the precise weapon for a job rather than spraying shotgun rounds at long range or using a revolver to kill a robot (ugh) doesn't actually make the game much harder, but it sure does feel tedious. Giving you a set reasonable limit and then perhaps some idea which guns you're going to need would be helpful. You'd still likely end up with inventory problems anyway. The other issue is that weapon upgrades can't be removed from your weapons, so you end up wanting to keep your upgrades armaments to keep upgrading them. That takes away from the drop and grab style of play, unless you want to use unupgraded weapons the whole game.

The weapon upgrade system in general was sort of muddling. I'm not sure if you lose upgraded weapons if you drop them or if they're considered always upgraded. The augment system, though, is really good and really well thought out. I do wish there were slightly more long range combat augments, something to improve your range or damage or something like that. But beyond that I felt like they offered you a toolset that expanded what you would do but didn't force you into doing things. That and many of the augments have in and out of combat options, which feels good. One of the things I hate about games offering you 'new skills' is those skills often have use either in combat or out of combat, with no overlap, making them feel considerably less useful.

All in all, I think this was one of the best titles I've played in recollection. It certainly has a share of flaws, many of which probably should have been removed in development, but it lacks those major flaws that games tend to have. It is rarely tedious and never gratuitous, which works nicely for me.