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Deus Ex Human Revolution. Random thoughts on finishing the game.

1. DXHR really feels like true successor to the 2000 classic. All of the freedom of choice is in there. You really are presented with big open world levels and left to figure things out for yourself. The augments feel powerful and for the most part offer useful alternative ways of completing objectives.

2. This freedom of choice is not as surprising in 2011 as it was in the year 2000 but it is nevertheless refreshing.

3. I like the story. I found it sucked me in sufficiently to encourage me to "role play" my character. Not as good perhaps as the Mafia games but nevertheless still far better than most.

4. Getting into my character's role was absolutely the right way to play the game for me. On a normal difficulty I found the game play quite easy for the most part so if I had fallen into the trap of min maxing my character I am sure it would quickly have become trivial to the point of tedium.

5. Although I was role playing a basically moral character I found that he naturally got more aggressive and violent as the game progressed. With chain gun toting mercs gunning for Adam and his friends it would have seemed utterly stupid to perform non lethal take downs on them. Nevertheless stealth was always his most powerful weapon and he did try to avoid harming the innocent.

6. It took me 48 hours hours to finish the campaign. I took my time but that is still longer than most modern games.

7. I found the controls and interface were fine on the PC. I briefly tried a game pad but went back to keyboard and mouse. The only exception was the Map which is awful in either mode. It uses a vertically layered approach which makes navigation impossible in towns and multi-storey buildings and it sorely needs the ability to place custom markers.

8. While the game's faithfulness to the original pleased me I was also somewhat disappointed at the lack of progress in over a decade. The AI of npcs in particular is terrible. Many of them stand in one place for the whole game and parrot out fixed dialog trees. Enemies patrol endlessly in static loops. In many ways it feels like this game could have been made in 2001. Surely AI programming has progressed since then - it would go a long way to making the world feel more alive.

9. I understand the frustration voiced about the games boss fights being so out of character with the rest of the game. I found them challenging enough but I wasn't eschewing violence so I was happy enough to shoot my way through them. The final boss fight was a bit disappointing though. By that stage of the game my character was almost fully upgraded and more than a match for anything the game threw at me. I managed to complete the encounter before I realised what was going on.

Comments

Jayedub said…
I love, love, love DXHR. Loved it so much I played through the game three times in a row, something I rarely do.

I used a gamepad the first time through and it worked really well for playing a stealth type. Eventually I went to the mouse and keyboard and just rebind a couple of keys to make it work for me.

I really hated the boss fights my first time, so much so I thought I was going to quit the game forever. I think the problem is people arepreparedired for the boss fight when it happens. I beat the game on hard my third time and the boss fights were pretty easy by then, all because I did a little prep before the encounter.
mbp said…
Out of interest JD what was your preferred playstyle?
Jayedub said…
I played the non-lethal stealth, the lethal stealth and the guns blazing and I would have the say the most challenging is the non-lethal which I enjoyed a lot.

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