When I played the first Deus Ex, I was enamoured with the world. There was so much history to the setting, so much thought had gone into the political climate and the state of society. It could be a little heavy handed at times, but it was a world that felt real, not a façade built around giving your character something to do. It was unfortunate, then, that interacting with this world was more than a little frustrating. But then, some people have said, this is part of the charm of Deus Ex. You get to build JC Denton however you want him to be, from a blank slate. Human Revolution proves, however, that this is wrong. Players of the original may grumble briefly, but by the time the tutorial is over even they will agree that Human Revolution isn’t just a sequel, it’s an improvement.
Where so many RPGs go wrong, in my opinion is in trying to be too much like their pen and paper cousins. From the start of the game your character must be a blank slate, so that you can level him up how you want him to be. He is not, in fact, a character, just an avatar for you to inhabit. Adam Jensen, however, is a character in every sense of the world. You may control his actions, but he has had a life before you hijacked his brain.
Let’s begin at the beginning to try and illustrate this. Following a briefly on-rails introduction to the labs in which your girlfriend works, Adam is forced to break out some violence to deal with an armed intrusion by mercenaries. Now, in the first game, to use any weapon effectively required JC to be pumped full of experience points, and he was an enhanced superhuman. At this point in the game, Jensen is just a regular old human, albeit one with a life time of SWAT training. And you know what? He handles weapons just fine. He’s competent even without bio-mechanical engineering, which is both sidestepping an irritating game design trap and nicely framing one of the key points of argument in the plot itself: are augmentations necessary?
There is so much I want to say about the plot, but going too deep would dredge up a mountain of spoilers that you won’t want to hear just yet. Suffice to say, in my play through at least, the story itself was remarkably understated in a way. The majority of the exposition is done through conversations – including the superb argument boss battles that I will talk about shortly – with very little condemned to the pre-rendered cutscenes. For the most part, it’s up to you how well you understand what’s going on. Fail to play an inquisitive or persuasive Jensen, and while you may understand what is going on, you might not quite get why.
via midlifegamer
