Why did DICE bother making this campaign?

I just switched off Battlefield 3‘s campaign, and it’s the last time I’ll ever play it. No, I didn’t beat it, nor did I finish a 100 percent achievement run. I turned it off because I believe it’s one of the most unoriginal, cheapest, tacked-on campaigns I’ve played. It deserves no more of my attention at all, whatsoever, when I have about six games that eclipse it in greatness sitting on my shelf next to it.

I didn’t think I would dislike it this much, as it’s my first time playing a Battlefield game. I always knew the games had a heavy multiplayer component and fan base, but being the single-player champion that I am, I wanted to give its campaign a shot.

Originally, when I put it in for the first time, I was immediately blown away.

When this happens with a game, I always hear Yahtzee Croshaw’s voice in the back of my mind saying that it’s OK to assume a bad game won’t get better, but also remember a good game might not always stay good. If I had a dime for every time I played a game that started great and went downhill, I’d have a few dollars in my wallet.

Battlefield 3 is no different.

First things first, though — I was totally onboard from the second, literally the second, I turned on the game. The title screen was engaging and the menus were very slickly designed. I’m not always one to critique, or even pay attention to, a freaking menu of all things, but it’s all part of the package, after all. I give Battlefield‘s menus and title screen a hearty thumbs up.

When I pressed the Start New Campaign option, I was immediately immersed. The game cuts frames in of a train running on tracks with spliced in black frames that feature EA and DICE’s logos. It was all well put together, and it flowed with a sense of urgency. You see through the eyes of an unknown character as he runs down a street toward the side of a bridge. It’s nighttime with an urban backdrop.

“It’s not a brown desert…” I thought, pleased with the setting.

The character then vaults over the side of the bridge and lands on the moving train.

“This is just like Mirror’s Edge!” I thought, not expecting to see any trace of a previous DICE title here.

That small dose of Mirror’s Edge kicked my interest in the game up a bit. I certainly wasn’t expecting any of Battlefield to transform into a primary-colored parkour playground, but the similarity in that sequence alone gave me hope.

As I paced through the train, blowing enemies away with a Beretta I picked up off a dead body, I kept noticing how great everything looked. DICE sure wasn’t fucking around with visuals.

After the subway shootout, which concluded with a cliffhanger, I was flashbacked to what the meat of Battlefield consists of — military shooter in a desert landscape. I wasn’t thrilled about it, but I kept playing. I mean, really, I didn’t expect the entire game to be in an urban setting.

In the next level, things heated up again.

There’s a section where you’re walking up a flight of stairs in an unstable middle eastern building with squadmates, and the lights keep flickering. You’re not exactly sure what’s at the top, and gunfire is rattling outside the thin walls around you. I encountered a sense of fear that I don’t normally get in military shooters. Battlefield was doing something right. I think the visuals and the excellent sound design helped fuel my dread during the sequence.

As I pressed on, the game got less interesting. It became a follow-the-leader simulator with almost every waypoint being “follow” or “move” after someone in your squad. It contrasted heavily with the dark, redemptive, lone wolf opening. And it was for the worst.

This is what Battlefield 3 became to me: some interesting moments wedged into boring missions.

I never felt like an important piece in moving the nearly incomprehensible story along, either. Whenever all you’re doing is following orders and following your teammates, as you control an entire roster of different, nonspeaking people, it’s hard to feel important.

What baffled me most was the intense contrast between the main protagonist, Blackburn, in the prerendered cutscenes and Blackburn in the missions.

The story is a cliched interrogation sequence where as you tell your higher ups what happens in overarching, between-mission cutscenes, you play through Blackburn’s explanations as the missions. Every once in a while, you play as someone else who has a side role in the plot. I suspect these sections are here to pad out gameplay because they consist mostly of terrible, boring turret sections or tank driving missions. They drag on forever and serve nearly no purpose to gameplay or story, other than feeling like slightly playable cutscenes.

Anyway, when Blackburn is being interrogated in the well-directed, prerendered cutscenes, he is active, argumentative and has an attitude. When you play through his eyes in his multiple missions, he never utters a word. The least DICE could’ve done was baste some of that personality over from the cutscenes to the gameplay. That at least would’ve made his attachment to the numerous soldiers he fights alongside more engaging. As it stands, there is no attachment, and I realized this during a sequence where a few soldiers die around you. The game action pauses as a friend mourns over them. I didn’t realize I was supposed to remember, much less care about, the people who died.

“Boo hoo,” I mocked. “Let’s get on with it.”

Battlefield also has the problem where it chases after realism so hard that it’s completely unfair. I’m not opposed to having a character who dies after getting shot about four times. Rainbow Six: Vegas is one of my favorite shooters, after all. I am, however, opposed to enemies who are unreasonably accurate shots at all ranges with every weapon and who know exactly where you’re standing behind breakable walls when they fire through them. And I could do without enemies that are designed to look bafflingly similar to your AI-controlled teammates.

Put the fragile player-controlled character together with the ultra-accurate enemies, teammates who I swear picked up blanks off the truck instead of live rounds and a busted checkpoint system that places you multiple minutes back most times you die and perhaps you will understand why I have no intention of turning it back on.

What hurts more than anything is that this garbage campaign comes from the same people who developed one of my favorite games of all time — Mirror’s Edge (which also had cheap moments in its campaign, I’ll admit).

I felt like DICE lead me on during sections of the campaign, too.

The visual design is strikingly similar to Mirror’s Edge in some parts, including a lengthy indoor shootout when you play as a bad guy. Well designed offices are washed out and punctuated with bright, primary colored walls and pillars. Even the desert scenes are more white and blue than brown.

There are also vaults that seem like they’re ripped straight out of Faith’s (runner) bag of moves. I didn’t mind.

It’s like people on the Battlefield team also wanted to make another Mirror’s Edge instead of the umpteenth multiplayer-focused military shooter and they pulled every string they could to get those similar details in there.

If nothing else, I appreciated them.

What kept me playing past the aforementioned office level was the hope that more Mirror’s Edge design aesthetic would pop up. Save for some vaultable objects here and an overall washed-out palette, nothing else caught my eye.

For what it’s worth, the least Battlefield did was give me a few intense moments here and there surrounded by a thick fat of monotonous shooting gallery sections.

At least now I know what the next Mirror’s Edge will look like.

For those of you wondering exactly what sent me over the edge, and made me stop playing:

I was at the end of one corridor with enemies spawning continually from a door in the back. Once it was cleared, no thanks to my teammates, I proceeded to a shooting range where real enemies popped up alongside paper ones. I died twice in here due to the enemies’ laser sights always landing, with pinpoint accuracy, in both my character’s eyes at the same time, ergo blocking his vision. Both times I died, I had to fight through the long corridor of enemies because, in a move of pure and simple bad design, a checkpoint wasn’t placed just before the shooting range area, even though there’s a significant break in action before it.

My third time through the range, I slowly and carefully cleared all the enemies out. As I breathed a sigh of relief, I turned to my left just in time for an enemy to rush through the door at me.

In Battlefield 3, every time an enemy comes within a five-foot radius of you, an unstoppable sequence happens where the enemy pulls a knife and stabs you once, causing you to die immediately. There’s no way to counter this move, even though most player-controlled characters have a quick-time-event-laced hand-to-hand fight with an enemy at scripted points. This unbreakable stab happened at the very end of the range scene, and I spawned, after a loading screen, back to the beginning of the long corridor of endless enemies.

“Fuck this game.” I said and turned it off. If it weren’t for my boyfriend wanting to play online multiplayer I probably would’ve destroyed the disc.

All photos from Battlefield.com

I’ll tell you exactly what kind of game Rage is

If you’re curious about or haven’t played Rage yet, I’ll tell you exactly what kind of game it is. These are my impressions from about five-and-a-half hours with it.

Rage is like a “lite” version of Fallout 3 and Borderlands. It has a quest system, which is very similar to Borderlands‘ (down to the text menu that pops in, asking you to accept it), looting, different ammo types, weapon/armor/vehicle upgrades and an interface to build items, but they’re all lacking the depth that’s found in the other titles.

It’s in an open, post-apocalyptic setting, but it doesn’t encourage you to explore. It also doesn’t aspire to get past brownish-orange in its art direction. It’s save system is exactly like Fallout’s, in the sense that it only saves when you enter a settlement or exit back into the wasteland. You can save at any time, but it’s easy to forget to. The first time I died, I had to play nine minutes of gameplay to get back to where I was. This immediately set off my WTF alarm.

It wasn’t the only time.

My WTF sense tingled again when I discovered you can only have your own weapons in the game. In the opening section, you’re tasked with entering enemy territory and killing bandits. I had this shitty starter pistol (an id staple), and I kept killing bandits who were equipped with these sweet-looking 1911-style pistols. I wanted one, so I looted the enemies I killed. In Rage, the looting process is simple. You kill someone, press A over his or her dead body and you receive — with no menus required — usually money or ammo. It wasn’t until I downed a handful of enemies when I realized their weapons fade away when their owners die.

Yes. Rage is that kind of game.

It’s also the kind of game that doesn’t think headshots are one-hit kills. I know, I know … bear with me.

I was pew-pewing away at enemies who were shotgunning me down, and I couldn’t take their weapons after they died. Great. Worse yet, is the lack of explanation for this. I know id wants me to play by its rules and use the in-game currency to buy weapons and ammo from shops, but the writers could have at least made up a reason for the disappearing guns. In Metal Gear Solid 4, it was explained perfectly why you couldn’t use soldiers’ guns. Oh well, no one at id bothered to write a cohesive plot, so I probably shouldn’t be concerned with the finer details.

Rage is the kind of game that looks pretty from far away, but breaks up close. Every time I turn my head, textures pop in — no exaggerations. Rage’s dusty brown wasteland looks well rendered as a big picture, but when you’re running around in the thick of it, it’s easy to spot low-res, ugly textures everywhere. And ugly textures look even worse when they’re right next to detailed ones.

Rage spreads itself over many facets of gameplay instead of nailing a single one. It also imitates a lot of games, but isn’t as good as any of the games it mimics. It’s part first-person shooter, part open-world, part RPG and, oddly enough, part racing and vehicle combat. I get the feeling from reading interviews and previews about Rage that id put a lot of its eggs in the combat racer basket. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but combat racing isn’t exactly the golden ticket id hoped would separate it from the rest of the brown, post-apocalyptic first-person shooters on the market. A great story could have done that, but it seems those are rare in the genre.

On that note, almost hours in, there is no story to be found. At all. You, the nameless, voiceless protagonist, were put into a cryo-like capsule to survive a meteor on its way to Earth. When the meteor hit, the capsule malfunctioned, and you wake up way after your scheduled time. People in the capsules around you died, and there’s a stagnant battle happening between civilized people and bandits outside. Without having any idea who you are, someone from the closest human settlement rescues you, puts a gun in your hand and asks you to do important missions for his town that no one else can handle, without backup. Apparently, some governmental task force known as the (creatively named) Authority exists, and they’re repressing the people. There is no evidence of this repression in the game world, aside from people telling you. I’ve had no contact with any arm of the Authority in my five hours of playing.

I’m amazed that in 2011, companies with AAA, colossally budgeted games can’t muster up even a hint of a story. It’s a shame that people who spend their $60 on games stand for this. It’s very possible that I just haven’t made it far enough yet for things to kick in, but I don’t care. In the first half hour of Bioshock, you’re introduced to the main antagonist and the most immediate main threats of the game. Get on with it, Rage.

I can only assume a chunk of the buyers are in it for the gunplay, which isn’t even that stellar, either. Among the popular comparisons to Borderlands and Fallout, I’ve detected two other games that I wasn’t expecting — Bulletstorm and Timesplitters.

One class of enemies always runs at you with sharp, melee weapons. The way these characters are physically designed and programmed reminds me of the endless drones of melee-based enemies in Bulletstorm. Rage also has Bulletstorm‘s rather frantic gunplay. Enemies move quickly, so I’m constantly spinning and trying to get my sights on them before they cut my balls off. It also takes a massive amount of bullets to kill each enemy. I’d kill for a boot-stomp-like melee attack in Rage instead of its delicate gun-butt thrust.

Because aiming down the sights doesn’t seem to do shit for your accuracy, I fire from the hip most of the time. Mechanically, this reminds me of Timesplitters, an excellent FPS that was born before they all became gun sight museums. Rage also has a slightly cartoony look to it, which further reminds me of Timesplitters and Bulletstorm. They’re all paced similarly, too. Even though id wants you to take Rage seriously, I can’t. Bulletstorm also had this problem.

Despite this entire entry containing complaints about Rage, I have to end on a baffling note — I’m enjoying the game more than I dislike it. The design decisions that rub me the wrong way really bother me, but not enough for me to put down the controller. For the life of me, I can’t quite articulate why I’m still playing it. It’s something new, and I guess I need something to play now that I’ve beaten Deus Ex‘s first DLC add-on.

I have a feeling I won’t beat Rage. It’s a novel, yet flawed, game. It’s the type of game I know I’ll get tired of soon if it doesn’t show me something new and interesting. The way it’s going now, I predict it probably won’t. It’s another brown, first-person shooter in an open world no one asked for. We needed another of those like we need another zombie apocalypse game.

Where is Doom IV?

Photos from Rage.com

DX: In closing

As the end credits rolled after I finished Deus Ex: Human Revolution, pictures of developers appeared next to the scrolling words. Normally, I might find this cheesy (such as in Vanquish’s over-the-top credit sequence) but seeing the well dressed men and women who had spent years of their lives working on this game, who created a world for me to live in and experiment with gave me chills. My eyes teared up. I wanted to reach into my television and shake everyone’s hand who appeared on the screen and say, “Thank you for making this piece of art. Thank you for letting me play around in it for tens of hours. I appreciate your hard work, and I look forward to booting it up again for a new (and much different) playthrough.”

Since then, I’ve already beaten Human Revolution again and I’m, yet again, looking forward to starting a third playthrough to dig into some achievements and test out augs I still haven’t tried. In my second playthrough, I told myself I’d go guns blazing, but sneaking around is so satisfying I only rarely went loud. I was, however, far more lethal while staying hidden.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution isn’t a perfect game. I understand why people might not like it, and I recognize underwhelming gameplay and design aspects from it. With that on the table, I have to say that, without a doubt, it’s one of the best games I’ve ever played. It also helps that it seems tailor-made for what I want in a game.

It had the same effects that Heavy Rain had on me as I played that. Heavy Rain introduced me to things that games had rarely done before. It played like a movie, was completely focused on narrative, and it rarely reused sets. Human Revolution has an attention to cohesive design that I’ve never experienced in a game, and it has beautiful design to flesh out the world and communicate ideas. I expect it to be a long time before I’m struck by breathtaking visual design in another game.

For Human Revolution to be Eidos Montréal’s premiere game, they certainly have something to be proud of. Whether they move on to a sequel in the Deus Ex universe, a remake of the original Deus Ex or something completely different, I have faith that it will be another winner.

I suppose I can end this marriage proposal of blogs with tradition by getting down on one knee and presenting the ring.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution, will you take my hand in marriage? I promise to love and cherish this relationship forever.

Hopefully, Agent 47 never finds out about this.

Photo from DeusEx.com

DX: Augmentations and controversies

Eidos Montréal definitely throws one concept in your face during most of Human Revolution — the semi-racial (if I can call it that) divide between pro-augmentation and anti-augmentation groups. Nearly the entire crux of the game is built around this divide. Adam Jensen is an interesting piece of the puzzle because most of his body is made of augmentations (his arms, legs and a chest cavity), but he didn’t request them. They were installed as an emergency procedure to save his life after he was attacked.

The game presents you with situations that let you decide whether having augmentations is the right thing or if humans should remain pure without them. There are pros and cons to both sides in the universe, and people on the streets just love shouting their opinions about it out loud. At the end of the day, there is no right or wrong side to the argument. This adds a layer of complexity to a two-sided conflict that some games lack. In Bioshock, for instance, it’s pretty easy to gather that, if you harvest young girls, it’s bad, and if you save them, it’s good. In InFamous, stopping a robbery is good and killing protesters is obviously bad. Human Revolution is not so black and white. The apparent ripples of both arguments’ effects can be seen more fully as you explore the game territory, but for the sake of keeping this light on story content, I’ll not divulge any information.

As for the augmentations themselves, or at least the ones available to Jensen, I found them to be serviceable, but not necessarily outstanding. Everything you can buy is pretty standard — dermal armor, cloaking, silent running, see through walls, jump higher, etc… However, some of the upgrades were a little ridiculous. One example is an arm perk that lets Jensen lift heavier objects. The fact that there’s a way to wirelessly upgrade the amount of heft Jensen can lift in the game is unreasonable. Another is the punch through walls upgrade, which was shown off in an early trailer for the game. It sounds great in theory until you discover you can destroy the weak walls with explosives or … wait for it … shotgun blasts. So really, the upgrade just lets you see weaker walls easier. There’s also an augmentation under the “arm” section (augmentations are divided up by body part) that opens more inventory space. How does Jensen store all of his stuff in his arms, why is his inventory an augmentation (as opposed to a bag or backpack) and how would he wirelessly upgrade how much stuff his arms can carry without changing his character model? I would have welcomed Jensen’s mechanical limbs morphing and altering depending on which upgrades you choose — after all — the gun models change when you upgrade them. why not the arms?

Along those lines, another pie-in-the-sky idea I had while playing was to customize what Jensen’s augmentations look like. It would have been neat to have an Armored Core-like interface to select different physical augmentations, or at the very least, add different colors/skins for them. The amount of different augs you see in the wild during a playthrough makes it a shame that Eidos Montréal didn’t include a way for you to change Jensen’s. They could’ve used a system like Mass Effect 2′s, because it left room for customization but was nowhere near being over-the-top.

When I was first acclimating to the augs, I was put off by the battery system that they run on. You start off with two batteries. Some aug abilities drain a full battery immediately, such as melee takedown, while others, such as cloaking, drain the batteries over time. The base battery always recharges (albeit slowly, unless you upgrade how fast it recharges) but none of the others do. After playing Crysis 2, where your suit energy meter takes mere seconds to fully replenish, I found this unacceptable. The feeling was compounded by the fact that one of my favorite aug abilities — stealth takedowns — drained an entire battery instantly. “What the hell?” I originally thought. “How is this game going to not give me a dedicated melee button and then drain my batteries for hand-to-hand takedowns?” I found it unreasonable.

However, after I got deeper into the game, I decided it was actually a really smart system. If Human Revolution had a dedicated melee button that didn’t drain energy, it would be super easy to run through the game and punch everyone out. And, considering Jensen uses his mechanical arms for the takedowns, it does make sense that it would drain his energy. Given his battery limitations, I had to use my head during encounters and decide how and when I wanted to split up my takedowns, stun gun and (if I absolutely had to) lethal weapons. Human Revolution makes you use your noggin, and I appreciate that. Some gamers don’t. I’ve seen a handful of tweets that dismissed Human Revolution because it’s a “stealth game” instead of an action game. Human Revolution might not have the most responsive gunplay out of any first-person shooter, but it’s only a stealth game as much as you want it to be. It’s sad that people dismiss it so easily because it’s not a beat-you-over-the-head shooter, such as Call of Duty. There are plenty of shooters out there like Call of Duty, why not try something new? It’s unfortunate that gamers dismiss one game because it makes you think and plan encounters instead of completely running and gunning (which you can still do, if you like.)

Upon finishing the game, I thought back to the package as a whole with its slight disconnections between themes in early trailers and how they present (and don’t present) themselves in the game.

Trailers for Deus Ex: Human Revolution are largely punctuated around Adam Jensen receiving his augmented upgrades and they show him having an issue with them. It’s almost like they’re haunting him. In the launch trailer, he mentions to himself that he isn’t sure if the mechanical limbs make him unleash his body’s potential or if they make him less human. Do they only exist to make it easier for him to kill? How easily can he misuse them for the wrong reasons?

When it comes to playing the game, Jensen never seems to have these issues. There is one, single moment after a mission when his pilot, Faridah Malik, asks him how he feels upon completion. He has dialogue options to play it cool and act as if he had to do what he was assigned no matter what, act as if he’s not sure about the augs or he can acclimate to them and tell her the missions went surprisingly well with his new limbs. Aside from that, there is no question in the game about how Adam personally feels about it. It’s up to the player to decide how he or she feels about using the augmentations.

My friend Parker said he thought the augmentation upgrade system as a whole represents a moral dilemma. Do you buy and use upgrades that only make it easier to kill people? Or do you buy ones that make you stealthier to avoid casualties? Which one works to better humanity and which one fuels anti-augmentation activists arguments for pro-humanity?

In a way, the trailers present themselves as a thesis for how you can view the moral landscape of Deus Ex: Human Revolution as a whole without the game forcing it down your throat. I suppose the drawbacks here are Eidos Montréal expecting people to watch all the trailers with open minds and assuming that they’ll pay enough attention to the game to birth ideas about what it all represents. The game world becomes more cohesive if you see the trailers before playing because they paint the moral package even broader without including the good vs evil decisions that drag good games down.

Photo from DeusEx.com

DX: Bosses

The boss battles in Deus Ex: Human Revolution are a ubiquitously agreed upon area where the game reaches its ultimate low points. These battles are the emptiest, most irrelevant and unnecessarily difficult parts of the entire package. They funnel you into situations that are unlike anything else in the game. You can’t sneak around or fool the bosses, and you can barely melee attack them. For the most part, you shoot them and hope that you can scavenge enough down time to let your health recharge before they come back for another attack. Or hope that you have some Praxis points left over to get some life-saving upgrades that the game sometimes pigeonholes you into wanting/needing.

The worst part about the boss battles is that the writers and designers clearly weren’t on the same page about things. The first mistake is that the boss battles were outsourced to a secondary company — Grip Entertainment. A collective pat on the back is in order to everyone at Grip for hand crafting the worst sections in the game. But the problems go beyond the outsourcing.

It’s painfully obvious (like much of the game) that the designers put a lot of thought and work into making the bosses look incredible. They’re some of the most physically interesting characters I’ve seen in a while, yet they get nearly zero screen time and no story.

Imagine if in Metal Gear Solid the only time you saw Ninja (or Gray Fox) was when you fought him in Otacon’s lab and then never saw him again. No dialogue, no backstory — nothing. Wouldn’t you feel robbed of a great character’s narrative?

Human Revolution handles its bosses like that. They show up, you kill them and then never speak of them again. I honestly feel bad for the men and women at Eidos Montréal who sat at their computers for months (years, maybe) and drew/designed these characters. They are disrespected by every other facet of the company and Grip certainly didn’t do them any favors. You don’t get to learn anything about them. I can’t even remember their names because the game doesn’t bother to develop them at all. It’s such a shame to waste time designing such beautiful characters only to have them on the screen for about 2 percent of the entire experience. Such a shame. When you put it into perspective up against a series such as Metal Gear (from which Human Revolution draws a lot of inspiration) that has multiple bosses per game, all with intricate backstories and personalities, I felt robbed of a chance to know these characters and their motivations. The game never even makes it clear for whom or why the bosses are working. They’re just some sort of hired mercenaries working for money, I guess.

Jonathan Jacques-Belletête, the art director for Human Revolution, has admitted that one of his favorite game universes is Metal Gear‘s. It’s obvious that Metal Gear Solid has influenced much of Human Revolution, but why not let the narrative arcs of the characters come over as well? This problem isn’t the bosses alone, either. Although the relationships among characters in Human Revolution is intriguing, the arcs for each character never go anywhere. Adam Jensen does a lot of the course of the game, but he never changes, or is changed, by a bit of it. He’s the same person at the end that he was when the game starts, just with some metal where flesh used to be. I think the writing is generally pretty good here, but there’s an extreme lack of character arc and motivation going on that could have been added to thicken the players’ attachment to the characters. It might be somewhat rare to find video games that change their characters over the course of the game, it’s not impossible.

Photo from DeusEx.com and Konami.Jp

DX: Universe and relationships

Every environment in Deus Ex: Human Revolution is fascinating and downright beautiful. I would trust its art director Jonathan Jacques-Belletête to design my house, my car, my furniture and my entire wardrobe. The polygonal pattern (or “triangular awesome sauce” as Jacques-Belletête always refers to it on his Tumblr) that lies at the core of the creative design is present in every facet of the game. The title screen shows polygons falling to create an image. In the game, desk cabinet drawers are slanted in convex/concave patterns, office building windows mimic the slanted polygons and, hell, even passers-by on the streets have hardened, polygonal patterns on their slacks. At this rate, I wouldn’t be surprised if the composer, Michael McCann, wrote the musical notes in little triangles on the sheet music. Human Revolution, hands down, has the most cohesive and well-realized game world I’ve ever stepped into. And I was never not glad to be in the universe Eidos Montréal had set up. I respect that it has its very own stylized thing going on among a plethora of games that strive for nothing more than brown, near-photorealistic graphics. In the art book that came with the Augmented Edition of the game, Jacques-Belletête wrote, “Art direction in videogame [sic] shouldn’t only be making things look pretty, it should also be about communicating ideas.” I couldn’t agree more.

When the opening credits start up, one of the first names you see is Art Director Jacques-Belletête’s, and it’s easy to see why. If he dreamt up every scrap of what exists in Human Revolution‘s world, he deserves some kind of lifetime achievement award. You can tell that he pays attention to more than just video games. He’s cognizant of art, design and fashion, among other things. He’s just the kind of well-cultured-hipster powerhouse that can breathe such beautiful design into the visually stagnant video game industry. Not only is the universe beautifully realized and completely visually cohesive, it’s actually lived in. It’s hard to find environments in open-world sections of games that resound with people really living in them, beyond simply walking around.

If you take a look in anyone’s office or bedroom in a building, there’s stuff everywhere. Stuff. Their stuff. There are paper stacks, sticky notes on desks and walls, coffee cups, pens, parcels from mail carriers and more. People live and work in the settings in Human Revolution, and it’s so filled out. If you hack someone’s computer you might find a hilarious email that contains more character than some game protagonists after you spend hours with them. Eidos Montréal have created a world here that oozes with life. And although it’s a world set in the future on a different timeline than the one we’re living in, it’s still tied to the past. Like I mentioned, there are sticky notes all over people’s desks and real books next to eBooks. It’s nice to see that Eidos Montréal crafted a universe that isn’t completely independent from where it evolved.

The relationships among characters is also key, even if they’re not always full and deep. I got great pleasure out of the squabbles between Jensen and his techie sidekick Frank Pritchard. Anytime Jensen got uptight with Pritchard and pronounced his full name “Fran-cis” like a mother warning a child, I giggled. The voice cast isn’t all spot-on, but the main characters, especially Stephen Shellen, who voices David Sarif, deserve recognition.

Another relationship that I constantly found interesting was the one between Jensen and Megan Reed, a prominent researcher at Sarif Industries, who Jensen is assigned to protect early in the game. It’s obvious they had a past, but everyone sort of dances around the issue when they discuss her with Jensen. Pritchard seems to be the only one ballsy enough to call her Jensen’s ex-girlfriend, but I can’t help but wonder if it were more than that. The fact that their previous relationship isn’t dragged out onto the table in its entirety might annoy (or relieve) some players, but I found it intriguing that most NPCs sort of gloss over the details. Not everyone knows what happened between Jensen and Reed in the past and not everyone wants to talk about it. They usually respect Jensen’s privacy (or are ignorant of his past) when she comes up in conversation. However, if she does, it’s easy for Jensen to get heated about it, which says something about the way he feels about her.

After I finished Human Revolution, I thought back to how many groundbreaking moments the game had. This was something I regularly anticipated while playing, because I felt like I was always waiting for them to happen. Human Revolution did have some moments that had me covering my mouth and saying, “Oh no, I cannot believe this is happening!” but it never had that explosive, balls-to-the-wall, action-packed instance I craved as a gamer.

Human Revolution succeeds at being the perfect slow-boil game. Certain moments get intense, but the climax isn’t necessarily about kicking ass and blowing shit up. It’s the kind of game that, like a great movie or book, makes you think about it long after you’re finished. Although the game is largely about the conflict between people who have chosen to augment their bodies with machinery and the human purists – it feels real. This is something I could see happening in the future.

And even though I was never blown away by a large-scale, climactic battle, I never felt inferior in the robotic legs of Adam Jensen. As Arthur Gies mentioned in his IGN review, no matter how I was playing the game, I always felt badass.

I found myself more satisfied by the design elements in the universe, rather than by action. I’d walk into an office lobby, see a walkway lined with beautiful, red polygonal sculptures and be in awe. Lighting fixtures and characters’ outfits would take my breath away. Human Revolution is far from the most technically beautiful game out there, but it’s art direction is the most visually inspiring of any game I’ve played. Walking into a room and being entranced by how a desk, lighting fixture or someone’s bulletproof vest is designed will take me a lot further than one climactic gun battle could ever dream to.

Photos from Deusex.com

DX: Choices without consequences

When you strap into Deus Ex: Human Revolution, you are definitely playing by Eidos Montréal’s rules. Thank goodness, the rules aren’t as strict as they probably would be if someone else developed the game.

Take the stealth vs killing options — in some games, if you choose (or are forced) to start a mission with the intention of not being seen, it would punish you for breaking stealth. In Human Revolution, you can break stealth whenever you want and kill people with no punishment. Sometimes a few more enemies will show up or you’ll gain the attention of a sentry robot, but it’s nothing more than a slap on the wrist, assuming you’re equipped for the situation. Even if you’re not, it’s not too difficult to hide again and wait for the enemies to calm down, just like in Metal Gear Solid.

If you are detected, Human Revolution does a pretty good job of segmenting the gunfights, too, as long as you’re not in the middle of a city hub wreaking havok. If you’re in a building, it’s likely that only people in the immediate area will be alerted to your presence and open fire. A similar stealth system was used in last year’s Goldeneye 007 remake and it worked beautifully. Human Revolution even has the Shink! sound effect when guards become suspicious, much like Goldeneye.

Unlike Fallout 3 and Mass Effect, Human Revolution has no morals system. You’re not penalized for killing people. It feels more like Crysis or Hitman in this regard. Even NPCs in the streets can be killed for no reason and you’ll never see a karma blip in the corner of your HUD that tips moral scales for you “being bad.”

In a generation where developers have adopted moral balances to keep you in line, it’s refreshing to see Human Revolution leaving only your own judgement to fight with. Can you live with murdering everyone? Then do it; the game certainly won’t judge you.

If you’re a softy like me, you can choose to incapacitate by weapon, by hand-to-hand takedown or bypass almost all the enemies in the game without shedding any blood. Here, Metal Gear Solid pops up again. However, unlike Metal Gear Solid, Human Revolution forces you to kill off boss characters. Perhaps they deserve it? Human Revolution never really gives you enough information besides “They’re trying to kill you, so kill them first” to decide. Oddly enough, after one boss battle, someone asks Jensen if he wants to save the boss before s/he dies, all during a nonplayable cutscene. He says maybe, yet the game never gives you, the player, the option of saving or killing the boss for good.

One of the only decisive factors for going guns blazing or stealthily has to do with the XP you get for both choices. You gain more XP for incapacitating enemies and for reaching the end of sections without being seen or setting off alarms, but it can be offset by the amount you get for killing enemies with headshots, and taking out robots and turrets. This is the only drawback with the XP system is that it almost encourages you not to be seen and not to kill by awarding you more XP for it. On the other hand, you get no XP if you completely ignore enemies, so you should probably do something with them. What you do is up to your own imagination.

Photo from Deusex.com