Gamesmaster Review Highlights:
Few games do so much, so well, and for so long as Deus Ex : Human Revolution. In any other year, we'd have our Game Of The Year winner locked down before the end of August, but with the likes of Skyrim hitting the shelves in the next few months, Deus Ex is in for a bit of a fight, and a sneak, and a bit of a chat, and a punch-up, and whatever else you fancy doing, really.
The pre-credits tutorial sets the stage for almost 30 hours in Human Revolution's take on 2027. It's the most credible videogame world since Bioshock's Rapture - every location telling a story about what happened before you arrived and what might happen when you leave. Over those 30 hours not one minute is wasted.
In every city hub there are half a dozen side-missions to complete alongside the main missions; you'll be tasked with recovering evidence from a body in a police station morgue, but find yourself taking down a corrupt cop, investigating your ex-girlfriends disappearance, stealing weapons from gangland territory, and doing anything but the job in hand. Every missions plays differently, and every mission can be played however you want.
Enemy AI puts up a tremendous fight, moving a couple of men to flank while the rest suppress as a group. Augment your armour and electromagnetic shielding, install a rebreather to cope with gas grenades, and improve your arms to takedown two enemies at a time and you'll become an unstoppable killing machine. You can rack up a bodycount in the hundreds, or collect an achievement for not killing a soul.
Human Revolution is a proper RPG where you have real choice about everything you do. You'll make decisions you'll have to think about for minutes at a time, weighing the possibilities; you'll break your zero-kill streak and murder people because they deserved it rather than because the game forced you; you'll risk your life and the lives of others to save characters you've genuinely come to like. It's like a game filled with branching paths where every decision feels like a decisive moment, and a game where the results are always satisfying no matter what path you take.
But we've seen this before, after a fashion. Back in 2000, the original Deus Ex changed everything. With the help from System Shock 2, it forged a template the best developers would crib from for the next decade. That game wasn't a great shooter or a great stealth game, the AI was thick, combat was lightweight, and stealth was often as much about exploitation as skill. Somehow though, even with those problems, the whole was greater than the sum of the parts. Human Revolution, however, has no caveats; it is a great shooter, it is a great stealth game, and those parts come together to make it a great RPG. It's a once-in-a-generation kind of game, and the first game in a decade to do everything the original Deus Ex did, and to do almost all of it better
+ Freedom - Even great games only offer a handful of choices. In DE : HR you make choices in every new room.
+ Replay value - Once you're through it, you can do it all again playing with a whole new style of play.
+ The enemy AI - The enemies are merciless. They suppress, they flank, they kill. Don't stay still for long.
+ 2027 - Eidos Montreal's world of 2026 is the best original sci-fi vision in years, in any media.
- Bosses - There are three lousy boss fights in the game, and one almost good one. All are unavoidable.
Graphics 89%
Gameplay 93%
Accessibility 80%
Lifespan 90%
Innovation 94%
Overall 94% (not an average)
Summary - An incredible piece of game-making; it's the revival Deus Ex always deserved.