Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Heartbroken by a Cyborg
It's not often that I drop a game so close to completion, but Deus Ex: HR just drained my patience. It pains me so, because I do like immersive sims quite a lot. They are what I describe as 'videogames at their purest' - gameplay comes first, second, and third, to bring to life a truly interactive toybox that incentivizes creativity over efficiency.
Human Revolution brings you into a cyberpunk universe in the role of Adam Jensen, born out of a long lineage of stoic, sarcastic protagonists that ruled the kingdom of RPGs for nearly twenty years back then. The story revolves around two pillars:
- A conspiracy involving this mysterious paramilitary group that attacks you, kills your girl, trashes your place, and only leaves a 4% tip on the way out.
- The age-old cyberpunk debate around the ethics and psychological implications of reckless mechanical augmentation on humans.
Not bad, uh? I agree. My problems, however, didn't take long to appear. First, I found the pacing of the main story quite dragged out; each chapter will net you mere crumbs of information. Soon I found myself a donkey following a carrot, simply wishing for a conclusion that refused to manifest. Lastly, I have to say the discussion around augmentation was pretty shallow for what it was; even Cyberpunk Edgerunners had a better demonstration of the dangers of dehumanization and disassociation, and that was a short-length anime, for Christ's sake. There was no edge, no spice. I saw someone describing the story as "baby's first deep game," and despite being a harsh comment, it's not completely baseless.
What about the gameplay? Talk about the gameplay, ya dumbass! Aight, let's. It's fine. Strangely enough, I'd say the level design was way better than the actual mission design. Let me exemplify: there's a moment in the game where you travel to Shanghai. The city itself is gorgeous, a stunning rendition of an eerily pretty dystopia, so detailed you can almost smell the poor. The quests you do there, however, are so bog-standard it almost seems like a waste. Go here, take out this guy. Go there, steal that item. No flair, no special way of completing them, barely any narrative roleplay. Soon enough, it becomes apparent your 'million approaches' are just different directions to achieve the same thing. Remember Dishonored, where you can either kill a dude or brand his face so he'll become exiled, and later on you can find him, walking amidst the sick and poor, to bring you that sick sense of karmic justice ? That's what I'm talking about. Dishonored has a mean-spirited sense of justice that can make even your pacifist playthroughs feel incredibly somber. Human Revolution has two options: the clearly right one, where you act as a normal, functioning adult, and the sick fuck who kills just because.
If anyone is curious, I dropped the game about halfway through the Missing Link DLC. You see, in the Director's Cut of the game, which is the only available version up for purchase nowadays, they forced what was previously a 4-hour long DLC as a bonus chapter right before the climax of the story. Could I have just pushed a bit more, to finally have the satisfaction of ending it all? Sure, but frankly, life's too short. I'm not gonna force myself to trudge through hours of gameplay for some imaginary sense of achievement.
Perhaps one day I'll come back and give the game another shot.