Review

After 48 hours of game time, hundreds of glitches and millions of rage quits; I finally reached 100% completion on Deus Ex Human Revolution on max difficulty in a single playthrough. I’ve never quit a game this often and yet still come back to complete the task. I wasn’t a fan of the game so I will write a review of things that annoyed me.

Nonetheless I still feel like I owe this game a huge thanks because I’ve never felt this accomplished for reaching 100% in a game before. I am not comparing myself to other gamers. But by my own standards and skill level, this achievement really feels like an accomplishment.

I should first note that the game is actually pretty good and entertaining; however, the reason why I didn’t enjoy it as much as my friends who recommended it to me did; is because I have a very distinctive playstyle when it comes to stealth. I don’t use abilities, weapons, skills, upgrades; I go for pacifist and don’t get detected bonuses at all times. The main reason I didn’t enjoy Deus Ex was that it didn’t really let me play it the way I want to.

The game definitely promotes stealth gameplay, especially on highest difficulty. Very low resources, little to no ammo, enemies 1-2 shot you; stealth is basically the best way to go. Thus, for a game to support this kind of playstyle to just drop you in the middle of a boss fight without warning is completely unacceptable. I didn’t even pick any weapons or ammo during the course of the first chapter knowing I would NEVER need it until I faced my nightmare Barrett (first boss), I had to simply reply the first chapter just to get some guns and ammo... I am hopeful for the future game though, as I read that Mankind Divided will fix this problem and provide options for ghosts and pacifists to handle boss fights.

That being said, a particular achievement regarding DLC made me feel truly at my element, the game also gave me the option to take down the boss non-lethally so I was really happy with how the DLC went, I wish the same thing applied to the base game.

I’ll briefly list the other annoyances. The game relies too much on hacking, yes I’m aware it’s optional but for someone who wants to complete it fully, it’s still too much. I’m definitely sure I spent 10 of my gametime just hacking stuff. Energy; Adam Jansen is supposed to be this badass superhuman with amazing abilities but once you take down an enemy (lethal or non-lethal) he needs to take a break to eat a chocolate or wait for energy to recharge... Really?

Glitches; the most frequent one I ran into was menu getting locked. I couldn’t save, load, exit the game etc. F5 for quick save didn’t work either. You simply had to run in and die to fix it. Another glitch was mainly a room randomly going hostile even though I was completely out of sight. There were no bodies to be found, no cameras to detect me, I was nowhere to be seen; despite all of this the whole room went hostile and shot at my exact location even though I was hiding behind the wall (happened twice).

AI acted quite funny at times. When I used cloak and sprinted, the 2 guards I passed right next to me weren’t alarmed at all but a sniper located on a floor above us went all the way downstairs to check where the noise I made came from. At least this made me laugh as I really needed it after all the frustrations.

I won’t spoil it of course but endings were not utilised very well. There are 4 different endings in the game (one ending can only be unlocked if you made certain choices, rest of the 3 endings are always available regardless of your choices) and you can unlock all of them by simply pressing a button! Yes just a simple button! All of them can be done in a single playthrough no matter what kind of playstyle you used to finish the game.

Mankind Divided review is in progress :)