


The later ones, especially, are fearsomely hard, which is fair enough, but they force you to take a single approach, which is completely anathema to everything the game stands for, and is particularly irritating once you get used to the freedom of approach which the rest of the game gives you. The boss-battles are the reason why Human Revolution hasn't quite managed to achieve our ultimate five-star grade. It would be handy if you were given a bit more guidance as to what augmentations to buy, though, particularly in the build-up to the boss-battles. The augmentation tree is a gamer's dream, giving you access to a vast array of futuristic abilities – such as temporary invisibility, punching through walls, resistance to EMP blasts and electric shocks, the ability to fall from heights without sustaining damage and lots more. You earn Praxis points with which to buy augmentations through hitting experience point milestones, or you can buy them from so-called LIMB clinics. Jensen's ability to add to his base level of augmentation is at the game's core. And anyway, there are so many ways around each obstacle that the guns-blazing approach seems, frankly, a bit rude. And there's a great first-person shooting engine, with a wide choice of weaponry and explosives that can be upgraded – although the AI is sufficiently unforgiving that, if you encounter a significant number of enemies, your chances of survival are minimal. Once Jensen has been suitably augmented, he can use psychology and charm to talk the info he seeks out of people – again, the game possesses a more logical and less hit-or-miss persuasion system than any previous games. A rather excellent hacking mini-game lets you acquire control of turrets, cameras and security robots when you find security stations There's a great stealth engine, which lets you creep around, take down enemies and hide them, and get to otherwise inaccessible places by crawling around ventilation ducts. Visually, the game is fantastic, making heavy use of a futuristic palette of black, gold and orange married with environmental design reminiscent of Blade Runner – appropriately enough, as that film also explored the removal of boundaries between human and machine.īut it's the gameplay that blows you away: it really does let you play however you prefer. Story-wise, Human Revolution is unimpeachable, impeccably exploring what would happen if, in the near-future (it is set in 2027), humankind became able to cyborgise itself. After a military-style raid on the Sarif HQ results in the death of its top augmentation scientists (including Jensen's ex), you embark on a quest to find those responsible, which naturally escalates into a twist-heavy uncovering of a monumental conspiracy. You play Adam Jensen, head of security at Sarif Industries, a Detroit-based company specialising in human augmentation and weapons design (the latter pays the bills for the former). Previous iterations of Deus Ex – in common with pretty much all other games that set out to support multiple play-styles – never quite lived up to that ambition. As a franchise, Deus Ex's overriding concern has always been to offer an antidote to single-path games, and to let you navigate it using your chosen play style, be it stealth, gun-toting brute force or strategic nous manifested in activities such as hacking.
