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. Large hub sections allow you to talk with people, pick up side quests, and search for hidden surprises and goodies. You’ll gain experience for everything you do, from finding new locations to taking down enemies. The game has no traditional leveling system; it simply gives you a point to upgrade your augmentations when you reach 5,000 experience points, then takes your experience level back down to zero.
Depending on how you upgrade augmentations, you can be an armored tank, a stealthy assassin, or something in between. You’ll never be told how to complete a mission, you’ll merely be asked to accomplish a goal and then set loose on it. My personal advice: Beef up your hacking skill early, as it’s the easiest way to unlock many opportunities in the game’s opening sections. It doesn’t hurt that the real-time hacking mini-game is genuinely enjoyable and can provide some tense moments when you need to break into an area quickly.
The weapon system is likewise refreshing. You have limited slots in your inventory for weapons, items, and ammunition, and the only way to upgrade weapons is to install a series of kits that give you bigger clips, silencers, and laser sights. This makes juggling inventory space interesting: if you need to drop your assault rifle to make room for something else and then you move to the next area, that gun you’ve upgraded is gone. I loaded my handgun with upgrades and turned it into a silenced, laser-sighted killing machine. I kept it with me throughout the entire game, and it began to feel like my personal sidearm instead of a generic weapon or throwaway upgrade. You’ll also find or recover everything from stun guns to sniper rifles, along with some increasingly exotic weapons.
And oh, the gunplay. By holding the right mouse button, you switch to a third-person mode to use cover, and you can slink along walls or duck behind barriers, blind-firing to clear the way or popping up for a moment to take down an enemy with a clean shot to the head. While your health does regenerate, it hardly matters given the brutality of the gun battles; bad positions usually have few ways out. You’ll die often, and before you beef up your character with augmentations, death takes only a shot or two.
The gunfights in Human Revolution aren’t quite chess, but they’re a long way from checkers—especially when you learn to move silently and take down two enemies at the same time, by hand. The third-person cover system wasn’t shoe-horned into the game, either, and it makes sense in a deep way. Depending on play style, Human Revolution feels like a great action game or a slower-paced role-playing game.
