Thursday, August 25, 2011

Mashbuttons reviews Deus Ex: Human Revolution

  

Well folks it has been a while since my last review and though I have enjoyed the slow summer, I am ready for the AAA games to be thrown at the masses and doing back to back reviews. Square Enix broke my casual Mortal Kombat and Black Ops habit by placing a shiny new PlayStation 3 retail version of Deus Ex into my mailbox to critique and get my impressions to you, my faithful um...fans? Now that I am off my little soapbox, lets get down to the game, where you take on the role of recently augmented Adam Jensen, ex SWAT, newly appointed security specialist for an experimental biotechnology firm. Well, it seems to really hit the fan, because the scientists you are hired to protect get killed, so of course your job requirements change a bit, especially now that you are augmented like a more futuristic Robocop. Now you are tasked with figuring out just why this had to happen all while choosing the path of your liking to determine mankind's fate. 


When I first started the game I wasn't too sure what to think mainly because Mr. Jensen did not have much in the way of skills aside from cover and shoot, but it doesn't take long for thing to get heated and the meat and potatoes of the story to come out and slap you upside the head. Once augmented in your Robocop/iRobot form, you have the potential to build your character however you like, with over 50 different augmentations and 20 customizable weapons. The character customization adds enough variety to keep you coming back for more, but even without it, I was hooked. Without giving anything away and because storyline changes based on your actions and interactions, the story is great, and by great, I mean awesome and refreshing with twists and a conspiracy filled plot. There is something for just about all type of gamers, whether you face your opponents head on or take the time to stalk and stealthily take out anyone that stands in your way, you are rewarded by XP and points to allocate towards augmentations(attributes), furthering your ability to alter mankind's destiny. This is a first person shooter that relies heavily on cover if you plan on staying alive, the part of gameplay that I liked was that enemies actually react to where you hit them, the AI is smarter than that seen in similar shooter, and weapon recoil can be unforgiving depending on the firearm, unless of course that is a focus of your augmentation changes, personally I chose to level up my hacking ability. I am not able to go into the boss battles, but I would have to say, there is good reason for that story wise, what I can say is wow, the fights along with the enemies are pretty epic.

The bad, well that list is a short one. My biggest or shall I say longest lasting gripe with the title is the load times. Luckily they don't occur as often as they did in Fallout: New Vegas, but I would suggest to those Xbox users to install the title to the hard drive as numerous comparisons found on the interwebs show that it will reduce load times pretty significantly. PlayStation 3 users have to load to the hard drive and that takes about three gigs of space. Aside from the load times, the other issue I had was with the yellowish tint of the world. It is rather drab, but think adding additional filters or a chance to remove the filter would be satisfying as you would be able to see the world as a more brightly lit Blade Runner setting over the drabness currently seen. Lastly, this isn't really a gripe with the game so much as I felt that it would have been more entertaining to play from a third person perspective, but knowing that the first Deus Ex title was a first person game, it was holding true to the original.

All in all, Deus Ex is a great end to the summer gaming drought and will hold strong with the other AAA title coming out in the next couple months. Though there were some small gripes with the game, it tends to only with with the aesthetics and does not effect the gameplay. Human Revolution also contains quite a bit of replay value as the story develops and changes based on your interactions with key NPC's, making this a go to game for fans of the shooter RPG genre who are waiting for the release of Mass Effect 3.

No comments:

Post a Comment