Tags
Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Digital Devil Saga 2, Fallout 3, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, Resident Evil 4
Finished Deus Ex: Human Revolution last night. Liked it, didn’t love it. Yes, it’s been a few weeks, but I was trying to finish Digital Devil Saga 2, whose late game events become suddenly captivating, and whose penultimate final boss demanded a bit of grinding to earn some useful skills.
I’ve never played the other Deus Ex games before, so I don’t know exactly how this one compares to those, though word of mouth has generally been favorable concerning this title as a prequel.
I admire the principles behind the flexibility in the game. I like that a game gives me multiple ways to tackle a problem, be it head on or through clever strategy. It was this same idea that I loved behind games like Metal Gear Solid 3 and Resident Evil 4, which presented situations that could be handled in more than one way or terrain through which there was multiple angles of approach.
In short, it’s nice to have another action/adventure game that does this. The experience as a whole was something of a roller coaster, with rising and falling points of experience.
To be precise, I enjoyed the beginning of the game. Now, the prologue of the game was something of a mixed experience, prior to when Jensen gets his augmentations. I couldn’t understand why I had no melee proficiency, be it CQC or even pistol whipping. Objectively, I still don’t. Once the protagonist is horribly mangled, however, the game does sort of come together.
So to be exact, I consider the beginning of the game to be once the augs are in place (though I think I unwittingly screwed my zero-kill achievement prior to it). Not being a fan of killing when I don’t have to kill, but being one who prefers to get up close and personal with my prey, I chose the stun gun for my default arsenal.
I can’t say the tutorial area went perfectly. I was pretty sneaky but accidentally missed the chance to rescue some hostages since I was still learning the ropes and, frankly, didn’t know where they were. On the other hand, I talked the man who caused the crisis in question out of doing anything rash, so I consider that a win in my book.
Where could things go wrong?
Well, for one, the game-proper could start.
I’ve never had enjoyment mutate into rage in quite such a way. The biggest problem, I feel, with Deus Ex is when the game cuts you loose. A bunch of side quests fall into your lap and one cannot help but feel woefully underequipped for dealing with them.
With so many RPG elements, Deus Ex demands level grinding to get full enjoyment. The plus side to this is that most of this so-called grinding is accomplished through side quests, so a lot of it does feel naturally integrated into the game. At the beginning, however, the demands of these side quests seem disproportionate to what the player is able to do.
Let’s consider the police station. Not only does the main story quest send the player there, but a side quest made available pretty much at the beginning also sends you there.
Without knowing how the game is structured, I was reticent to follow the main mission in vague concern that I might somehow skip or lock-out the side quest. I took to sneaking into the police station, only to discover quickly that it’s damn near the worst place to sneak around in.
Now, with a few augmentations, stealth can be made much easier, just by purchasing abilities that allow the player to be better aware of his/her environment. Had I been given a few free levels at the get-go, I might’ve been able to prep myself a little better. Instead, I found myself scouring the most petty activities trying to get a few more XP so I could get another praxis disk and turn myself into a functioning psuedo-human being.
The other problem, and the police station capitalized on this, was the need for a hacking skill. On a fundamental level, I hate hacking in this game, which is probably not a good thing since it’s virtually essential to get through.
Can passwords be found to bypass the need for hacking? Often times, yes, but in a world even this large and open (and by all means, there are much bigger games than this) it’s difficult to know where to find a particular file needed to open a particular door or computer.
The other reason hacking is necessitated is experience. Using passwords doesn’t grant the player any sort of bonus for diligence, but hacking rewards the player for successfully bypassing systems, especially if they do so while grabbing optional nodes which rewards extra money, XP or software.
In this way, hacking is required more than it isn’t. The problem is, it’s generally less a game of skill as it is a dice roll.
Hacking a computer start the player off on a safe node and requires them to capture adjacent nodes of varying security levels. Just to start, however, the player will need high enough level software to open the program, which in no way makes lower level security any easier to deal with. Once the player has started, more often than not there’s only one adjacent node to begin with, often forcing the player in a straight line which may have a high probability of setting off an alarm.
The alarms themselves are where the dice rolls I mentioned come in. Each node you can capture has a probability of setting off the alarm, giving the player a limited amount of time to finish up, or to back out and try again. The difficulty can be lowered by buying up a separate skill, but at this point you’ll need at least four levels to have access to all the computers and another three just to make sure you don’t set off every alarm. Don’t ask me about fortifying nodes, as I never bothered learning since once I got these other skills it just didn’t seem needed.
Now, of course, Deus Ex has that sort of cyber-punk flair, so I see where hacking almost becomes a major element of the game. I just wish it was a little more skill oriented and a little less dumb luck reliant, especially with so many of the hacking grids seeming to be randomly generated based on many of the layouts I got. Never mind that I can’t count the number of times level 1 security (the lowest of the low) set off an alarm despite my maxed stats.
Okay, hack-rant over. Now that I’ve wasted half the article on it.
The game begins to ease up once you get some levels and buy a few skills, and once you accept (with some tears) that hacking is something you need at the beginning of the game to do anything at all.
Some things are inherently stupid- falling damage makes no sense, as you go from fine to dead within a meter’s difference. Given the heights of many of the locals, however, buying the landing system is something you’ll probably want to do early on anyways.
The only other thing I would probably gripe about is the game’s energy system, measured in batteries. Jensen’s batteries don’t like to recharge. One always will, but one often wants more than one, and none of the others care to, no matter how many of them you have.
I mention this because you can have up to five batteries, as I did at the end of the game. Why does only one recharge? Why can’t I buy an ability to cause a second one to recharge? Why is food the only way to restore anything past the first?
Much of this concern is coupled with a few semi-odd choices in the mechanics. Why, for example, does hand-to-hand combat consume one full battery, allowing you to be a kung-fu-god when you activate it? Why can Jensen not throw a standard punch when he can do everything else? It seems odd that the Jensen teeters between “Killing Machine” and “Magikarp.”
I somewhat understood this control system early on, but it became more impractical as the game progressed. Especially when I had a number of awesome abilities that consumed energy (albeit at a paced rate) only to find I could barely use them in conjunction with one another. It’s bad enough having to hide and wait for my energy to recharge, do I have to be punished by not being allowed to exploit the full scale of my powers when I’m willing to put in the time?
However, I admire the scale of this game. Even when revisiting the same cities multiple times (which feels a bit like the developers recycling environments), the areas that Jensen has to infiltrate are still impressively large and usually well laid out.
The boss fights are somewhat weak, but they’re not really the point of the game. It seems a shame that so much of the design was built around flexibility of approach while the only thing I could do during the boss battles was kill-Kill-KILL!
However, the second boss glitched and her gun was stuck in a wall. 20 shotgun shells in the head finished her off!
…yes, twenty or so shotgun shells in the head. Kind of absurd.
One of the strengths of Deus Ex is that the story seems to be interested in avoiding bias. There’s no real “good” side with the various groups and people you deal with (though one could safely identify a few “bad” ones, on the other hand).
It’s because of this that the actual endings are somewhat of a let down.
Word of advice: if a game is touting multiple endings, especially anything that could be measured in the double digits, don’t trust it. Multiple endings are rarely thought out or fleshed out, and Deus Ex is no exception.
Remember Fallout 3? How it showed some still shots and had the narrator talk about who your Vault Dweller was, whether or not s/he was still alive?
Yeah, it’s that, except this time the pictures are moving.
Still, despite my misgivings, I liked this game. In fact, when those misgivings weren’t rearing their ugly heads, it was really quite fun. I don’t know if I entirely agree with the incredibly high marks Deus Ex received (which were, honestly, my impetus for deciding to give this title a go), but if they do another one, I’ll buy it.
FIrst off: I’m not sure that Deus Ex offers what I’d call the opportunity to grind. That is, the opportunity to do a task over and over again for xp or whatever. It has alot of xp milking, where doing things a certain way gets you more xp, but I also don’t agree that you’d really need to resort to this. There’s simply not that many combat skill to begin with, much less ones that are used in the boss fights, especially once you consider that each boss is basically a puzzle where you need to use some environmental trick to best them.
You mention hacking being a big source of this, but I would be surprised if there were more than 200-300 hackable computers in the game. At around 100xp a pop – most are lower level offering less than that – you’re looking at a loss of 4-6 praxis points if avoid hacking entirely, fewer if you consider the large amount of level one hacks out there (and most of the plot-required hacks are as such.
Most people discussing the game, between boards and reviewers, not only like the hacking minigame’s splendid abstraction of hacking in general, but also find it pretty easy. Bear in mind that the game presents most hacks as doable within the resources it provides: nuke viruses, slow worms, multiple attempts and simply not going for any of the bonuses. I never encountered a situation where you were guaranteed to be detected on any given node, but plenty where hedging your bets was the way to go. And once I got a few levels in hacking stealth, the minigame became trivial and I quickly had a stockpile of dozens of nuke viruses and slow worms. But early on, the game wants you to take your time: plot out your hack, restart up to the max number of times to get what you want.
So I guess I’m not really sure where you hate it on a “fundamental” level. Yes, I would say it’s required more than it’s not, and definitely on your first playthrough you should pick it up just for the extra plot bits, but …you’re not gimped by not.
The MGS-like stealth enhancements are likewise red herrings and in my mind were augs of questionable value. Bear this in mind: the game wants you to slow down and carefully consider each situation. Patrols are predictable, cameras sway back and forth, and you should know when you’re going to waltz into line of sight. Sound detection isn’t worth mentioning as you’re silent when crouched (and there’s an aug for that). But it’s important to take your time.
I’d played it on the hardest setting and never found the combat all that hard, nor the hacking difficult, nor the stealth requiring omniscience. As above, there simply aren’t that many combat-related augments that’ll help you in a stand-up fight. Despite going for a lethal soldier-type character, I found that I had really no way to increase my lethality and only begrudgingly got the emp-immunity aug on the second boss fight.
The tutorial, well… again, take your time. Guards talk about things relevant to the area, including that there are hostages in a room with a trapped door. You and David discuss hostages at length. Fully exploring each area should be what you’re doing by default, especially when something like that is mentioned.
Then the opening side quests. Deus Ex is a game that purports to allowing you to solve any situation in more than a few ways, then lets you build a character disposed, but not limited to, one of those ways. It tells you what to do, usually talking to someone, and gives you a waypoint. Not sure what else to say about that.
I admit people are happier with the game and boosting its score because it’s a worthy prequel and successor to Deus Ex, but it’s still a great game and I think, at least, that its flaws lie elsewhere than what’s discussed here.
I felt early on I needed to grind (or milk, if you prefer) to really get anything out of the game. I could accomplish the sum of nothing with most obstacles that came up (and admittedly, the base requirements for hacking felt the most glaring). It probably becomes less necessary a couple hours in, but at that point I felt somewhat conditioned to take the more rewarding (however extraneous) approach of hacking even if I had a password, simply because there was no intrinsic reward for the acquisition and use of the things to begin with.
As for the bosses… environment puzzle? You’re being far too generous. I think of bosses the likes of Soul Reaver back in the grand ol’ days when I think of environment puzzle bosses. The first boss might qualify, if you do what I did and exploit the luxurious quantity of explosives provided in the room. I’ll concede that the final boss counts, probably more than the rest.
But the second boss? The third boss? Hide and shoot. Considering how much damage you take even with a generous defense boost, your tactic boils down to hide and shoot, with no regard to how you’ve been playing the game thus far.
The third boss is certainly a bit harder if you make an incorrect choice earlier on (which, you’ve likely deduced, I did), and yes, you do need to observe the water on the floor to keep track of the second boss (at least, before she glitched into the wall for me). These are far from puzzle bosses, however.
I will concede enjoying the first boss fight because I was able to use something in the environment against him- in fact, I managed to take him down without firing a bullet. The final boss, similarly, was a little less direct, and was probably more the kind of fight I’d have liked to see the others comprised of.
Concerning some aspects of the stealth, I found myself struggling with camera perspective more than a few times. I do attribute part of this to my disdain for first person perspective, as it has never been a point of view that accurately reflects how one would see things in real life (lack of peripheral vision and such). Having the ability to see through walls and such to track my enemies made things a bit easier and more enjoyable, though I’m sure the game can be played without these bonuses. I just feel it was much more fun and a bit more realized once I acquired them.
With the tutorial, yeah, taking my time would have probably helped. But it was the beginning of the game and I was somewhat excited to get a feel for things. I wasn’t necessarily stopping and listening to every guard and his Shakespearean monologue. And, to be fair, I was expending a lot of stun gun ammo early on, so that’s probably part of the reason why. I wasn’t aware that it was going to be a pain in the ass to acquire for a bit afterwards and likely would have handled things differently had I known. I have little doubt I’d do better this time, though I put a measure of blame on the game’s handling of secondary objectives on the quest markers. I noticed this in particular in the final area with the two rooms full of people I was given the option to find, and ended up reloading once because I’d accidentally skipped one such room without meaning to.
I do agree that hacking gets easier (and even satisfying) once you go a little farther along, but it’s hard to deny that triggering alarms is based on anything other than probability. Yes, you can improve that probability so that, at worse, level 5 nodes have just over half a chance of setting things off. And, yes, we both had plenty of software by the end to make the rough spots easier.
However, most mini-games are more skill dependent. Yes, choosing the level 2 node that’s a bit roundabout versus the level 4 node that’s right in your path is a bit of strategy, but that doesn’t always come up. Some quick thinking comes up if you set off the alarm and have to work fast, but as a whole, this is a game that primarily relies on stats rather than player ability.
And, as I was saying earlier, I saw a number of hack grids that gave me exactly one choice, and at times it was high enough level that short of burning one of my nuke softwares, I had to accept a high risk of exposure. I’m honestly convinced though that at least some of the grids are randomly generated. I saw a number of times where a bonus cube was positioned behind the server node, making it inaccessible since capturing the server automatically completes the hack successfully. I’d concede this less necessarily to bad design and more to the curse of random generation, if this is indeed the case. If the designers did actually design every grid however then… why? What’s the point?
I suppose for contrast I would point out the hacking game in the recent Fallout titles. Yes, you do need a certain level in science to get into higher security systems, but the game itself, while not exactly perfect and indeed a bit trial and error, expects the player to observe accuracy patterns and try to discern the correct password in a limited amount of time.
Like I said, I did like the game, and most of it came together for me within the first few hours of gameplay. I felt at times though that the game was strongly hinting to me that I should be playing a certain way, especially when several side quests right around the beginning demanded my hacking software be around level 3 or 4. While the main game can certainly be completed with just the basic software, I suspect many of the side quests cannot be resolved so easily.
And I’m glad this game is a bigger winner to those who played and loved the original Deus Ex, but what about those of us who didn’t? Should our opinions be precluded. I gave it a shot and enjoyed it despite some perceived flaws; it may be pure win as a Deus Ex prequel, but without that luxury, I have to simply look at it as a game.
But, if you still disagree with my points, I should like to ask: if you feel its flaws lie elsewhere than what I’ve proposed, where do you feel it has come up short?
Grinding early on, I can actually understand the need to do that. In the beginning of the game, they do go out of their way to throw breakable walls, 9-foot jumps, two story drops and level 3-5 hacks in front of you. Some quick saving and reloading for me found that there were very few instances where one skill gave you something another didn’t in terms of access. After that initial area it’s much less an issue, with the most egregious offense being a breakable wall that lead to a door to the hallway I thought I was bypassing. Eh.
I suppose the difference might be that I have a compulsion to do everything, so I feel like milking XP is key to seeing everything the game has to offer, rather than being required to win / play / proceed.
The second boss fight actually is a puzzle battle: you can either shoot her while tracking her in the water, or you can shoot the AI’s power panels on the walls, causing her to short out / seizure on the spot. You need some fancy footwork to avoid taking damage yourself, unless you have the EMP / electric shielding, in which case the battle becomes a cakewalk on any difficulty.
But you’re right: compared to the venerable likes of Soul Reaver, they are no puzzles. Still, what holds a candle to those venerated days?
In terms of what I think is wrong with the game, well…
Stealth is very rewarding because it’s very unforgiving. Guards seem to recognize innocuous sounds as enemy intruders so quickly that I pray for the rent-a-cop that drops his coffee in earshot of his partners. Not only that, but they had a magical ability to put the place on high alarm no matter what, even if they weren’t augmented (where it would actually be explained). More than a few times I headshotted three or more guards in the space of a second (oh yes, I’m awesome) only to have the alarm go off as the second guard witnessed one death (and the third witnessed two).
Even sniping with a silenced weapon from far away would somehow give away my exact position, rather than sending the guards scrambling for cover as I could have been in any of a dozen tactically superior sniping spots.
And you are absolutely right: ammo is retardedly scarce. Artificially so. Going in as a combat run, I found myself running out of ammo early on and had to keep several backups until I dropped weapons I didn’t like in favor for ammo inventory space for those I did. But this is artificial, as soldiers would drop weapons I could only collect ten rounds from. What is this, the Russian army? (you carry a gun and one clip. and you carry a clip and take his gun when he dies). Add to this that the 8-15 rounds you might get off of a dropped weapon sell for nothing compared to selling the weapon itself. Were you interested in farming cash, you’d drop your sweet-ass modified weapon and carry extraneous pistols, combat rifles and so on one by one back to a vendor.
The effect of this scarcity is that I used takedowns more than I thought I would, and horded ammo later on beyond what my doctor would tell me is healthy. The effect of using takedowns made me see that they actually wanted us to use these extensively, and that the game overall favors a nonviolent approach inherently. I’d wanted to be seen as lethal, so I used the lethal takedown which is not only insanely noisy somehow, but also nets you almost half the experience of a nonlethal takedown.
As you remarked earlier, Jensen is an actual character with a past we aren’t given a natural opportunity to examine, which did lead to the weird conversation in the police station where I was consoling a wreck of a man for an event I was only barely aware of.
Then there’s the skill trees / augments. Not very original stuff, and nothing very deep. As above, there’s not much you can do to make yourself into a combat badass, but plenty of tools you can use for infiltration and stealth and exploration. Nothing exciting like regenerating more than one battery, or being able to use your energy-based / nonlethal weapons off of those batteries, or anything really wild. Plus, by the mid-to-three quarters point I’d gotten everything worth having anyway.
Not to mention there were redundancies. Easy radar and seeing through walls? (And why didn’t we get any weapons earlier on to take advantage of that?).Sprinting faster in one tree, sprinting longer in another? Hacking turrets and robots as separate, despite them combined making up a short minority of security hack options? Then the downright useless like node analyze, fortify, marking targets and so on.
These and the game is marred by some technical deficits, like graphics that rely more on artistic direction than oomph, character animations that seem herky-jerky, and the occasional weird transition from first to third person (like using Icarus).
It’s rought around the edges, but it is a methodical, thinking-man’s FPS that’s more in love with its story than its gameplay, though it tries to offer as many options with its gameplay as it can. Just what the COD-y filled FPS genre needs, which might be what fuels its review score as much as it being Deus Ex.
I suppose I should add part of my early on frustration (and perceived need to grind) was fueled by the fact that unlocking new skills required two disks. This sort of hording became less of an issue once you got a few of your basic needs fulfilled, but the choice came down to either getting that skill I want so I don’t die from a fall, or getting a couple of levels up in hacking so I can actually get anywhere.
I’d also like to add that I attribute part of the hacking issue to the corrupt cop side quest, whose storage area I had to break into. As far as I know, there was no passcode to be found and if the wall breaking ability could be used, I wouldn’t know, I hadn’t bought it until Hengsha. But, yeah, it’s mainly just that they throw a lot of things at you at once, when they cut you loose.
The guard alerts, I concur, are Metal Gear Solid 1 levels of bad. What did get to me was when I was dealing with guards who couldn’t possibly have had any augs (owing to the location and the events in the story) and if something happened to one of them, all of them knew. Similarly, I noticed that curiosity with the ammo as well; since I was relying on non-lethal weapons, it was never detrimental to my experience.
As for the second boss… funny, I never noticed those panels. I suppose I must rescind my criticism for that one a little. At any rate, I glitched her into a wall. Who am I to judge? :-p