Super Nerd Sunday Presents: Reflections on The Missing Link!

What if you made an expansion that was essentially what your game should’ve been in the first place?

This is the question answered by Deus Ex: Human Revolution: The Missing Link which is, on the one hand, a travesty of colons and dashes thrown together in the cruelest imaginable fashion in order to create a title and, on the other hand, a fucking incredible piece of gamesmanship. I picked up a copy of DEHRTML, as I’ve affectionately nicknamed it, during a Steam sale a while back for about five bucks along with some other mission packs that were pretty interesting at the time. Even though I breezed through it at the highest difficulty level, I can see myself being really, really happy with The Missing Link, even if I’d bought it for the full fifteen bucks. Why, you ask, rhetorically generated reader figure? Because this is a snapshot of the game that Human Revolution should’ve been through and through.

The Missing Link is pure Deus Ex energy. It’s fun, it’s well crafted and moves fast, rapidly plopping you you into a bunch of corridor fights and stealth puzzles you have to work your way out of. All in all, it’s more of what made Human Revolution great, refined and repackaged efficiently. But what really sets it aside is the manner in which it addresses the single most unfortunate aspect of Human Revolution’s design: the boss fights.

To those unfamiliar with Deus Ex: Human Revolution, here’s a quick summary. It was a great game that reappropriated the spirit of the first Deus Ex by giving players almost complete freedom in terms of how they chose to traverse the world around them and solve the problems presented to them. Players could stealth, think, converse, fight or hack their way around obstacles as they desired. There was a lot to do and see, and multiple approaches to nearly every objective, and whatever you wanted to do would probably fit into the game world somehow. That is, up until the boss fights, when all options were stripped away and players were forced into a fast paced, close quarters fight with a tough as nails enemy who could take multiple rockets to the face without issue. It was essentially a great game that occasionally broke itself, removing all the elements that actually made it great in favor of forcing players through a middling cover shooter against a terribly balanced opponents that substituted well crafted AI with mounds of hitpoints and damage that were shunted unapologetically into the player’s face. What I’m trying to say is that it was a remarkable, fantastic game, except for the times that it morphed into a frustrating mess, basically during boss fights that felt jammed into a structure that didn’t want or need them.

The original Deus Ex never actually presented players with any unavoidable fights. In fact, players could actually go through the entire game without killing a single enemy, if they chose. Human Revolution spiced that up for the modern audience, and did a pretty good job of it at that, except for the inclusion of a series of totally shoehorned boss fights that almost destroyed the good will that the game itself built. Human Revolution also had some problems with its ending, but that’s a whole other story, one that isn’t really related to The Missing Link at all. Because here’s the thing: The Missing Link gets rid of boss fights. Kind of.

In their place there are escalating challenges, essentially arena challenges, which put the player into an environment where all the skills they’ve been cultivating are necessary to survive. Rather than being asked to battle one mammoth opponent you’ll be placed in a security system ridden silo chamber filled with guards who are all on the alert, searching for you with rifles, automatic weapons and plenty of rage. It’s Deus Ex par-excellence, the essence of what makes the game fun, escalated and, in one case, timed, with a delightful digital red clock ticking steadily down while a villain taunts you. And there’s something incredible about stalking your way through a room full of heavily armed and armored goons without firing a single shot, taking them down one by one and then slipping into an isolated and locked down command post to finish off their leader.

It’s a boss fight which essentially recognizes what makes Deus Ex great, and invites that into this new setting of escalated stakes and challenge. It’s what the boss fights in the standard Human Revolution game should’ve and, looking at Missing Link, could’ve been.

Let’s be fair: I’m being kind of catty here, and it’s entirely because The Missing Link successfully overcame my single greatest qualm with Human Revolution with so little apparent effort that I find myself reflecting on Human Revolution and wondering what the game could’ve been if this mentality had guided its overall design. It makes me wonder if a patch is in the works somewhere to remake the boss fights in Deus Ex: Human Revolution into the sort of delightful action puzzles that make up the rest of the game. The Missing Link is a return to form, and its brevity is really the only thing I found disappointing. Thanks to The Missing Link, I think I’m going to play Human Revolution again, maybe even from the beginning. Which is fucking bullshit, because I wanted to do a bunch of other shit with my summer, but it’s going to be fantastic bullshit when I get around to it.

But, praise aside, The Missing Link does have some nitpickable aspects. While the story is fantastically indecipherable DE conspiracy theory schlock through and through, exactly what you’d expect from the series and perfectly suited to the tone of play. But the Easter Eggs in Missing Link, that is to say normally inconsequential extras that intrepid players can seek out for fun and profit, actually tie into the story in a way that feels…cheap. There’s even an Easter Egg that removes a difficult and crucial choice at the heart of Missing Link’s climax, a choice that was far more interesting to me than the one I was asked to make at the end of Human Revolution. It’s a bit of a puzzling choice, but I suppose this sort of thing occupied the original Deus Ex as well, spawning scenarios like the “no kill playthrough” which required occasionally bending the rules of the game. There are also woefully few reasons to select many of the upgrades available during The Missing Link. If you choose to blow two of your very limited Praxis points on the Social Enhancement perk, you’ll find that there aren’t a lot of occasions for you to use it. Armed guards make poor conversationalists, apparently. The developers seemed to know this, though, and even put in a brief, winking moment at the conclusion of the expansion to drive the uselessness of this upgrade home.

I guess what I’m struggling to get out is that Deus Ex: Human Revolution: The Missing Link: Travesty of Colons was fantastic. It was a brief, well crafted snippet of a game that perfectly embodied the best elements of the venerated franchise it sought to resurrect and showed some canny design that, while seriously good, didn’t take itself too seriously. The only criticisms I can genuinely muster aren’t really about the game itself but nitpicky moments within it that seemed slightly off. Well, that and that the expansion was so solid that it made me look at Human Revolution with a renewed measure of disdain. Just when I thought I was over how Human Revolution done me wrong, The Missing Link does me so good I can’t help but remember the old times and the heartbreak. Damn you for making me love again, Missing Link.