Deus Ex HR Review (Onlive)

Written by Erik Kubik, kube00 Tuesday, 11 October 2011 05:00

Deus Ex Human Revolution is more than a game, its an experience. I remember playing the original game back in 1999 on a Windows 98 machine with a 16 MB graphics card. I was impressed by the choices the game gave you. I could pick and choose my direction, and ultimately how the game should end. The second game in the series, titled Invisible War, was a lame duck sequel. But the third game in the series, known as Deus Ex Human Revolution, copied all the good parts of the original while intjecting the series with new ideas. Simply put, Deus Ex Human Revolution is a fantastic game.

Where can I start? I played this through Onlive. I experienced very little lag or graphical tearing. From my experience it felt like I was playing the PC version on a medium range gaming machine. The story is great. It weaves and flows around Adam Jensen, the augmented protagonist who’s trying to get to the bottom of a deep conspiracy surrounding himself. The RPG elements, like putting experience points into different pillars or branches such as stealth, hacking, combat, and social are fantastic. This allows gamers to pick and choose what they want to focus on. Some of the augmentations include hacking faster, surviving long drops, cloaking, jumping further, picking up heavy objects, x-ray vision, turning your body into a weapon, being more persuasive, as well as taking down multiple enemies in melee combat.

I really wanted to go stealth, which is something I tried to do in the first game but after the first two levels I dumped all my stat points into combat and hacking. This made getting experience easy due to the fact I was exploring, hacking everything, and taking on every enemy head on. No sneaking around and hiding bodies for me. The AI does a pretty good job of hearing noises, and being aware if you are a threat. Ideally you could make some noise in another corner to lure one enemy away and then take him down and hide the body. Or you could load up on grenades, hack some turrets and convert them to your side, grab your shotgun and take on the guards.

The game is lengthy. If you want to you can can explore everything, talk to every NPC, and do every side mission. This, along with the story, should take you well over 40 hours. Every mission can be taken care of in multiple ways, which makes the game very open ended. It gives the players a lot of choice, something I really liked. Many modern games are so linear unless they are a sandbox game like Saints Row 2 or an RPG like Oblivion or Fallout 3 .

By biggest gripes? Sometimes the load times were long. I wish the inventory management was better and automated. One only has so much spare room for a few guns. The game forces you to pick and chose what items you want to carry. Also, I wish Human Revolution had the sword featured in the first game. Its the only weapon you would need.

Another gripe is that some of the boss encounters felt cheap. Cheap in the sense I used lots of rockets and my typhoon augmentation. This augmentation lets you use your body as a giant bomb. Spoiler alert this helps in boss fights a lot.

Deus Ex Human Revolution is a fantastic game. This could be GOTY for me already. With enough content to warrant several playthroughs, Deus Ex HR could keep gamers busy for months.