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Deus Ex: Human Revolution Released

Over 11 years ago, Deus Ex became one of the most celebrated games of its time, tightly weaving FPS and RPG gameplay together with a rich cyberpunk story. Today, Eidos Montreal and Square Enix launched a new entry to the series, titled Deus Ex: Human Revolution. A launch trailer is available, and early reviews for the game are positive. Opposable Thumbs says, "Fans can take a deep breath: they will get what they want from a Deus Ex game in this release. The story is dense, complete with twists, interesting characters, and far-flung locations." Rock, Paper, Shotgun largely agrees, and both reviews praise the breadth of choices players have in how they accomplish mission objectives. However, they disagree on the quality of the voice acting, and RPS complains of untimely and oddly-designed boss battles. DE:HR's stealth gameplay and hacking minigame receive high marks, as does the game's overall length and replayability.

12 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. fucking. win. by X0563511 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Played for a few hours this morning - it unlocked 3am EST.

    I have no complaints, and it does indeed feel like Deus Ex. Stable engine too, not a single crash. The only graphical oddity I had was some white "noise-like" pixels in models. I determined this was caused by enabling Tesselation with an nvidia card. Turning it off fixed the issue and as far as I can tell had no actual effect on quality.

    I can rattle off on things that I love, but I'm hard pressed to find a single annoyance. Hell, they went so far as to NOT use mouse acceleration! I'm so used to that failure being included in games that I thought something was wrong for a few minutes!

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    1. Re:fucking. win. by Baloroth · · Score: 2

      It says something about game makers today when praise for a game comes more from a lack of criticism about it than from saying how good it is. Then again, being a Deus Ex game expectations are so high that a lack of criticism is one of the highest praises.

      Based on this Ars review, I ended up pre-ordering it last night on Steam (to get the 10% discount and TF2 items... I love prerdering 5 hours before a game release) and am highly anticipating the end of work so I can play it tonight. I'm glad to see that it isn't only a few critics who like it, although Ars is one of the most reliable judges of PC games I've found (for that matter, one of the better new sources out there).

      I'm so glad Human Revolution is good: like many others, I was expecting it to suck like so many recent games (especially sequels.) I have been looking forward to a Deus Ex game that wasn't badly crippled by the technology of the day like the original was (tons of bugs, some game ending, even to this day, poor shooting and combat, and of course lousy graphics). I assume they have fixed and improved those things in this one?

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    2. Re:fucking. win. by Quiet_Desperation · · Score: 2

      Humans have arms that reach past their waste

      I'd hope so or we'd never be able to wipe.

    3. Re:fucking. win. by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 2

      Graphics and animation was never the strong side of the original epic Deus Ex, so it seems that they've stayed true to the franchise even in that. ~

    4. Re:fucking. win. by planetoid · · Score: 2

      As a left-handed-mouser I'm disappointed the engine can't tell the difference between up/down/left/right/insert/delete/pgup/pgdn on the arrow-columns of my keyboard vs. the equivalents on the numpad. So I can't map everything onto those keys for actions as I do in Source games, thus I have to take my hand off the mouse to do certain functions. But I play in the dark, so I don't always hit the correct key when I do that.

      I hope Eidos patches this.

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  2. I don't know... by Tuidjy · · Score: 3, Informative

    It has not been long enough, but I am not quite agreeing with the glowing reviews. The story so far is great, and the levels/cities are really well designed. The graphics are good, while nowhere near The Witcher 2 or even Crisis/Metro. The great, internally consistent style of the game world more than makes up for that.

    But the combat, oh, the combat. I started both one shooter and one sneaker character, and tried two difficulty levels with each. I have not found a combo that worked satisfyingly. The shooter mode is stupid easy until you crank up the difficulty, and then it becomes a 'pop in and out of cover' chore. (Disclaimer: I despise cover combat)

    The sneaking is immensely satisfying, until you clearly screw up, wait for hammer to fall... and the guard brushes against you and walks on without detecting you.

    It needs work. It is nowhere as bad as Alpha Protocol, or whatever the spy game was called. It is enjoyable, and I do not regret buying it. I hope it will be polished after release, the way the Witcher 2 still is. But even if it is abandoned, the way AP was, it is still worth playing.

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    1. Re:I don't know... by MooseMuffin · · Score: 2

      I've experienced this too. The stealth game works right up until you're detected. If that happens you can usually just sprint back a room or two, and not only will the enemies not find you, they usually won't even leave the room they were in to chase you down the hallway they saw you go down. Also, the boss fights are crap.

  3. Re:I hope so by neokushan · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It really is very very similar to Deus Ex. so much so, you might find yourself thinking "Wait, so they haven't actually done anything new or original, they've just completely ripped off the first game". Then you realise how much you're enjoying it and don't want it to end, just like with the first game.
    Then you realise that 10 years of evolution in games has somehow brought us right back to where we were when the original Deus Ex came out. Truly, a game so far ahead of its time that the only game to match it would be its prequel.

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  4. My main criticism.... by neokushan · · Score: 4, Informative

    ...is something other reviewers seem to like: The Hacking.

    I don't know why it's getting so much praise, because it's a total downer for me. The whole point of Deus ex, particularly when you play stealthy, is that it relies on skill. The skill to know what way to tackle a situation, the skill to avoid patrols and not get caught. However, the hacking comes down to chance, complete and utter chance. You can upgrade your skills all you want, but all this does is lower the chances of you getting caught. It's still entirely down to chance, though.
    It means that you may as well just save before hacking anything, go for it and if you fail, just reload. No skill required. It utterly takes away from it for me.

    The original Deus Ex didn't really do a hacking minigame. As soon as you hacked anything, you were in, but you only had so much time to do what you wanted (more if you upgraded this skill), but at least this still took some skill, it still gave the impression of having to work quickly, to plan ahead what you want to do and practice doing it once you were in. It's such a shame the hacking element in Deus Ex: HR is more of a brute-force thing.

    The rest of the game is top notch, though.

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  5. More like 26 years... by Geeky · · Score: 2

    Or not this Deux Ex then?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_Ex_Machina_(video_game)

    Know nothing about this, just reminded me of my far ZX Spectrum using past...

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  6. Would rather Theif by WorLord · · Score: 2

    Great!

    Now maybe they can stop fooling around with this game and get to the franchise that's actually awesome (Thief) instead. ;-)

  7. Anyone tested it with wine? by Maquis196 · · Score: 2

    This isn't a troll. I want to buy this but wondering if anyone has tested this under wine, appdb reports garbage but they were pre-release versions. Payday on Thursday so hopefully appdb updated with at least a silver before then :)