Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Deus Ex Comes Again!

It’s a bit late, sure, but I couldn’t call myself a video game blogger if I didn’t write about Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and it took me this long to finish it, damnit. There’s been a pretty accurate and appropriate critical consensus about the latest installment of Deus Ex, which I’m pleased to see. Some of the reviews have been incoherent, some fawning in ways I’m not sure I agree with. And I’m absolutely puzzled by the fact that people haven’t compared it to Alpha Protocol, which kind of addressed a lot of the problems that Deus Ex has and did a better job of telling a story, allowing players to develop their own story and letting players develop their character than Deus Ex does, though it does so at the cost of Deus Ex’s frenetic capacity for action and impressive polish.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution plays like an homage to the first Deus Ex, a tremendous improvement over the ambitious mess that was Deus Ex: Invisible War (a brief aside: why is this series so averse to numbering its sequels and so fond of offering up nearly incoherent subtitles in their place?). The touted “four pillars of game play” which guide character development provide players with an impressively customizable experience, especially at the beginning of the game. I spoke with a friend of mine who normally plays FPSes in a “kill ‘em all” style who took an unexpectedly peaceful approach which still differed from my own totally non-lethal approach to the game. Everyone he’d spoken with had a totally different approach to each mission as well, from a guns blazing shootout with the DPD to a stealthy takedown of local gang members. I’m now playing as a ruthless killing machine armed with a revolver in the tradition of Count Zero’s street samurai and the experience is very, very different from my first playthrough, though even with the difficulty cranked up to 11 the shooting approach still smacks of playing the game on easy mode for me.

This touted diversity of play is achieved mostly by making its levels chock full of stuff to interact with and giving players a lot of options on how to move through this stuff and interact with this stuff in order to find other stuff and achieve stuff. There are some skill trees that determine how you can move stuff around or hack stuff and there’s a skill that makes you invisible so you can grab stuff if you want to. There are other skill trees that allow you to take less damage while you kill stuff or recharge your energy faster when you knock stuff out. But it’s not just the wealth of options available to you that make Deus Ex work: a great deal of what makes these various methods of play so great and infinitely usable is that the developers have taken pains to offer many different routes to accomplish each objective, each fitting some sort of skill set or play style, none of which is “better” than any other.

But this also leads to a problem: because the success of their system hinges not only on a painstakingly designed skill system but also on the design of each individual level there are some pacing issues. The most notable pacing problem emerges during the game’s horribly designed boss fights. Each “boss fight” feels like something an executive at Eidos forced into the game, a totally incongruous progress marker crammed into an otherwise fluid experience. Unofficial “boss fights” are wonderfully brief experiences against named enemies and their cohorts, and they suit the plot just fine, but each actual “boss fight” consists of a drag out match against a super-powered enemy with erratic movement and shitloads of health in an arena made by a level designer in twenty minutes. Sometimes the boss fights will occur against enemies who cloak themselves, which is just infuriating in and of itself. But the real crime is that there’s no non-violent solution to any of these arenas.

The original Deus Ex never forced you to fight anyone. In fact you could famously make your way through the entire game without ever fighting an enemy – you could evade even the most challenging opponent through stealth and intrigue. But Deus Ex: Human Revolution wants you to sit down and fight three mercenaries three times. It wants you to associate these mercenaries with an artificial difficulty curve which is absent from the rest of the game and it wants you to care about killing these mercenaries based on their appearance in a brief cutscene at the beginning of the game. It’s a huge problem, one addressed in a handful of amazingly developed “unofficial boss fights” that take place on actual levels and have actual non-violent solutions. If the mercenary fights had been more like these “non-boss fights” they could’ve served as incredible set pieces that players could discuss their approach to and use to shape their overall experiences. But instead they’re just levels with only one solution at hand in them, poorly constructed pieces of level design that lay bare the underlying principles behind Deus Ex.

They’re sort of the real price of admission here: Deus Ex is unquestionably worth the hefty price tag of a new video game. Given how high this bar is becoming for me as my life goes on, that’s saying quite a bit. But the boss fights are tremendous speed bumps. They make me want to stop playing. They were the single biggest contributor to the feeling I had at game’s end that the whole experience was becoming a chore. But they are the only real black mark in the game. Late game level design is a little meh compared to the vibrant settings and meticulously structured areas you’ll encounter in the first few places you wander through, and the developers re-use city hubs a bit too often for my taste. I would’ve liked to see a third hub somewhere along the line, and one or two more new areas that would’ve rewarded exploration and given me some new chances to interact with the world around me in a situation where my choices weren’t limited “run and gun” or “turn invisible and run.”

But how long would it have taken Deus Ex: Human Revolution to emerge as this perfect project? The game already took nearly four years to develop, a fact illustrated in the game’s strangely poignant end-sequence and credits (an aside, I’d say that Deus Ex: Human Revolution has a set of credits worth watching if you care at all how your games are made: a deeply human tribute to the time and effort that Eidos put into making this title) and these rushed bits of game seem less like a failure of design and more like the end result of a hostile development environment becoming more and more of the norm in video games.

Deus Ex is wonderful. It is well crafted, intelligent and provides players with lots of tools to engage lots of interesting puzzles. It has some great fan service, which you can miss if you aren’t watching. It has a bit of a weak overall story (if you don’t catch the plot twist within the first five minutes of the game then you might be asleep) but it’s not really a game that wants to tell you a story: it’s a game that wants to give you an awesome framework to play around in. The story gives you just enough context to let you have fun with the whole thing, gives you a few characters to care about and some forced backstory to “motivate” you.

But never forget: the play is the real motivator. Deus Ex: Human Revolution is one of those rare titles that evokes joy in its players simply through its mechanics. It allows them to make choices, gives them a framework to make those choices meaningful from a game play perspective, and gives you enough options that you simply cannot use all of them during the course of play. While its boss fights are chores and its ending is a bit of a design nightmare the core game is so much fun, the joy of exploration and exploitation so wonderfully sustained throughout, that it is well worth the time and money it asks of you.

Given Alpha Protocol’s middling critical response and poor sales we’re unlikely to ever see a sequel to it. So if you’re like me and you loved Alpha Protocol I’d double down on my recommendation for Deus Ex: Human Revolution. It’s not perfect, but it provides that wonderful sensation that you are truly changing the world as you play, the sensation that you are influencing the environment around you. The choices you make develop in unexpected ways that never feel trite or unexpected, and while a handful of story issues and scripting bugs persist in the final product Deus Ex is so evocative and well crafted that it’s hard to approach it with anything but love.