Now don’t get me wrong, Deus Ex Human Revolution is a brilliant game. The universally high review scores speak for themselves. But I’m not here to stroke the game’s already bloated ego. I’m here to deliver a brutal aug-enhanced body blow. The time for sycophantic gushing has passed. He may have metal arms capable of crushing steel girders, but Adam Jenson doesn’t frighten me. No sir. It’s time to get nasty. So then, here’s a list of things I disliked about Deus Ex:
Adam Jensen’s Voice
The lifeless, nasal drone that passes for Jensen’s voice is a constant source of irritation. Clint Eastwood was clearly the inspiration behind the protagonist’s gruff drawl, but that doesn’t stop him from sounding like a listless sat nav. Cheer up ya miserable bastard, you’ve got robotic arms for goodness sake.
The Hacking System
Hacking stuff is supposed to make you feel like an uber-cool secret agent, right? In theory, yes. In Deus Ex, no. I felt like an inadequate, perpetually bewildered idiot. Without the maxed-out stealth hacking augmentation – which effectively renders you invulnerable to detection - I’d have cracked. The majority of people I’ve spoken to love the hacking system, so I guess it’s just me, and this makes me hate it even more.
Bugs
The occasional bug is forgivable, especially in a game as ambitious as Deus Ex. But when those bugs interfere with the core gameplay mechanic, things start to fall apart. On more than one occasion, while hiding from pursuing aggressors, I’ve witnessed NCPs walking straight through closed doors. And more often than not it’s the very same door I’m cowering behind. What should have been a wonderfully tense game of cat-and-mouse degenerates into a comical farce. Like I said, the occasional glitch is pardonable, but walking through closed doors? C’mon already!
The Third Person Cover Mechanic
Okay, hear me out on this one. The third person cover-mechanic employed by Deus Ex generally works very well indeed. Darting from cover to cover, unseen, right under the noses of your enemy is empowering stuff. Slipping out from the shadows to brutalise an unwary guard never gets old. In fact, skulking around a laboratory and picking off unsuspecting lab technicians with a silenced pistol reminded me of GoldeEye's sublime Facility level. However, in the thick of an all-out gun battle, with enemies homing in on your position from every angle, flicking between the third-person cover-mechanic and the traditional first person perspective can be jarring and a little disorientating.
Character Models
The distinctive gold and black colour scheme that permeates Deus Ex’s cyber-punk environments is often beautiful. The same thing can’t be said for the storefront mannequins that populate the game’s four cities. Every character you encounter has the same hideous waxy pallor and robotic mannerisms. If I were feeling charitable, I’d suggest that these unsettling character models were a deliberate attempt by Eidos Montreal to convey the increasingly blurred boundaries between man and machine. But I’m not, so I won’t.
Loading Times
For a game that is so much about the delight of experimentation, with often fatal consequences, the loading times punish you. Even on a high-end PC, they clock up 20 to 30 seconds; running off disc on 360, I sometimes sat there waiting for just under a minute. Here’s a tip: if you install the game to the 360’s hard drive, the loading times become bearable.
Boss Battles
Gah! Those horrible fucking boss battles! The freedom to decide how you deal with the numerous denizens of Deus Ex is without a doubt the game’s greatest strength. So why in god’s name did Eidos Montreal think it was a good idea to strip you of this choice and force you into fighting some monumentally awful bosses? These confrontations add nothing to the game. Quite the opposite; they take away. They fall into the tedious category of ‘single enemy with a zillion hit-points’ that every shooter has employed since the days of 8-bit. Like the final boss of Bioshock, they feel completely at odds with both the tone, and the praxis of the game. See what I did there? Bosses should have been excluded.
The Dialogue
The dialogue leaves a lot to be desired. It’s functional, sure, but it comes across neither naturalistic, nor as proper drama should. This, plus the shonky facial animation – the lip synch is like a badly dubbed seventies kung fu movie – limited my ability to empathise with the characters in any meaningful way, which is why my usual ‘second time through, be an arsehole to everybody’ became the modus operandi for my first run instead.
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