#Deus ex too dark series#

They do have in-game advertising, but I can't say it bothered me in context. Human Revolution's are bigger, more complex and far, far richer with things to do and secrets to find. The positive one is the city hubs: both games have large, open urban areas you return to after several missions. There are two differences, one positive and one negative. 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. But also like Deus Ex, the levels themselves feel like places.

#Deus ex too dark series#

Like Deus Ex, Human Revolution is still a linear series of levels. Next: Where it falls short, and what it does better. Because he exploded, and I was using him as cover at the time. When a minigun guard destroyed Gunther a few fights later, it hurt. Then I sat him at the top of a ramp to pelt fire at a whole gang, while I snuck up behind them and extended the fist-chisel blades of my robot arms. I carried Gunther into his own control room to let him mow down the guy who should have been monitoring him. Once I hacked into his controls over the shoulder of a sleeping guard, he was my friend for life. In a potentially fatal game of What's the Time Mr Wolf, I'd shuffle the box a few feet closer to Gunther each time he swivelled away, and duck behind it when he looked back. Cardboard doesn't block a turret's bullets, of course, but it does block vision. I was only able to get to his control console by shuffling past him behind a cardboard box. Even turrets are now physical objects that can be picked up, moved and thrown. The AI in friendly areas now has a flimsy concept of suspicious behaviour, and you can build a hilariously conspicuous cardboard-box secrecy fort around a security terminal to hide your criminal hack. It makes up for that by interlocking it with other systems in entertaining ways: the slick, surprisingly natural third-person cover system lets you hide behind any vertical surface, including the ones you've placed there yourself. Human Revolution has that exact system вЂ“ though the more cluttered levels mean it takes a while to learn which objects you can move. If you can pick up a box and stack it to reach an alternate route on the first level, you can stack every similar box in the game and reach anywhere physically possible. 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. And if your ears are still ringing from the last gunfight, you can slip through the next area quietly.ДЄnd these are just the routes the developers have planned. If you're bored of vents, you can open fire. If stealth gets too hard, you can find an easier route. The pleasure of that freedom is that it leaves major elements like pacing, challenge and variety up to the player. The man-sized air vent is a clichГ©, but honestly, it never stops being satisfying to bypass a locked door or a group of enemies. The main thing Human Revolution gets right is giving you options: every mission gives you a labyrinth of ways to get to your objective. And lastly, what it does better than the first game ever did (amazingly, loads). Secondly, the few things it misses (not that much).

So I'll talk about it in three parts: firstly, everything that Human Revolution recaptures about the original Deus Ex (quite a lot). It is, I guess I should mention, the best game I've played in four years. Human Revolution is a prequel: a global conspiracy thriller set at a time when replacing your body parts with high-tech prosthetics is a violently controversial new trend. Despite a sequel in 2003, the first is still considered by me, this magazine, and a lot of our readers as the best game ever made. The Deus Ex games are first-person shooter RPGs that let you approach your objectives in a way that suits you: direct violence if you enjoy it, stealth if you don't, and throwing heavy objects around if you like getting caught, beaten and shot.