The end of year rush is upon us and from now until Christmas we are guaranteed to have video games coming out of our eyeballs. At least a couple of great games will be hitting us every few weeks so our pay packets or pocket money are sure to take a hit. Either way you are going to need some spare cash over the coming months to keep up with everything going on. In September alone we have Bodycount, Fifa 12 and Gears of War 3 so we can expect to have quite an eventful few months.
The initial release schedule has been started off with the third instalment in the Deus Ex Sage – Human Revolution. The series gives players the opportunity to work through and multi-layered story however they see fit. The game centres on Sarif Industries Head of Security, Adam Jenson, who is brutally attacked at the start of the game and augmented to save his life. The game follows his quest to find out who attacked him and why.
The game itself is perfectly well balanced; if you want to be direct then pull out your Machine-Pistol and go in all guns blazing, feeling discrete then sneak passed the security. Deus Ex really does put decisions in the player’s hands. Each quest gives the gamer the chance to chart their own path through the levels depending on your gaming preference. There is no wrong way to tackle each area.
Hub cities are large and well designed to give off the cyberpunk environment that the whole game design follows. The sense of scale and environment design really gives the sense of depth and immersion that games rarely provide these days. The game brings with it an interesting mixture of issues like transhumanism, bionics, conspiracies, mega corporations and cyberpunk.
Another benefit of this open game approach is that you can write your own stories through your individual gameplay decisions. In Human Revolution you can be seen as a brutal one-man army or a game where you're simply never seen at all.
The upgrade systems work through augmentations that give Adam a benefit in the gameplay. You earn these as you gain experience in the quests; from sneaking through a tunnel to brutal takedowns, each action gives you some sort of input and none of these create a deficit in the gameplay. You can learn to jump higher, punch harder or think faster that all support the different playing styles and in game opportunities. If you can jump higher you might be able to reach that overhead ladder or if you can cloak you can access an area that will close for good should you be seen.
The only downfalls I really experienced where the sometimes lacking AI and the NPC animations. These can become especially bothersome during conversations where the characters movements do not match up to the conversations being had – if someone seems angry in the conversation their body remains stale as they gently rock from side to side. The only other issue is the long load times that give Mass Effect 2 and Bioshock a run for their money. Installing this on the 360 Hard-drive though for 6.8GB stops this from ever becoming an issue. The frame rate can suffer too in areas of high action but I found this to be fairly irregular during my stealthy playthrough.
All the gameplay elements of Human Revolution have their own ways of helping the player and make this a perfect start to the release calendar. It isn't a perfect game, but the bottom line is that it offers so much gameplay, a wealth of beautifully realised features and so many possibilities that the less successful game elements don't put a deficit on the overall experience.
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