Inhuman Revolution
Or, How I Learned To Stop Whinging And Love Being A Cyborg
Or, How I Learned To Stop Whinging And Love Being A Cyborg
[I Totally Asked For This]
Okay, Human Revolution is 2011's entry in the Deus Ex series. Set 25 years before the original game, it suffers a severe case of "Bad Prequel Syndrome" in that it has a considerably higher level of technology than the original (later) episode.
I didn't get on with it at first, and that's not counting the shours of horrifying frustration trying to make the horrible online part of it work, that thing you've probably heard of that would be more aptly titled 'Scream'. It's not like I was trying to run it on an exotic platform either, just the current 64-bit windows, i.e. their primary target platform in this day and age.
But I digress (and that happened an awful lot while writing this page). The original Deus Ex - and also System Shock 2 - started with nice training areas where you could play around and get to understand the
game mechanics without any rush or danger.
Instead, DXHR starts in the office of your ex and she gets increasingly whiny and frustrated if you don't do exactly what she says, when she says. This proved exceptionally difficult for me as my graphics card - while more than a match for Oblivion - wasn't quite up to the task and until I had turned the detail and resolution down it was like a slideshow where Jensen staggered drunkenly around the room and was impossible to control.
The net result was that Ms. Reed stood in the corner constantly complaining while her ex-boyfriend was spinning around on the spot staring at the ceiling and going "Woo! Look! I'm in the future!"
The next problem was opening the door. I ran up to it, looked for a button, nothing. Tore the office apart looking for a keycard or panic button. Nothing. Meanwhile, Reed was becoming more and more impatient, utterly ignoring the fact that her friend had obviously either suffered a stroke or dropped acid.
In desperation I went to ask her how to open the door, at which point she opened it herself and the game chugged into a sort of cutscene-stroke-tour where Adam whinges continously about the military tech they were developing. Reed is then about to confess something plot-critical to Adam when the rather obnoxious sysadmin appears and ruins the moment forever.
Eventually Dave Sarif - your boss - sends you to investigate a fire in the labs (which look eerily like the medical level in System Shock 2), and that is when things fall apart.
As mentioned, Deus Ex had a nice training mode where you could learn to shoot, open doors, climb ladders and other skills which might perhaps be vaguely useful later on. Human Revolution does no such thing and instead shoves you straight into a deadly situation with no explanation nor aid and the result of this was that Adam would turn a corner and suddenly be shot in the head by the enemy before he had quite figured out how to fire his own gun.
This happened with horrifying frequency, dragging the 'tutorial' out over a period of several hours of frustration and why-am-I-playing-this-anyway while I struggled to come to terms with the fact that one or two shots from the enemy would kill Adam dead, while it was only possible to kill an invader by emptying my entire stock of ammo into their head which made things particularly ugly since there was more than one of them.
Finally, after having been shot in the head on more occasions than I care to think about, Adam somehow reached the final room of the labs, only to be greeted by a cutscene where he was shot in the head yet again. This might have had a little more dramatic impact had it not already happened three dozen times before, but after that the intro credits run while a rather gruesome surgical procedure occurs before the game starts proper and you are finally allowed to see how many health points and bullets you have left.
You're then sent off to one of the factories (which hasn't been outsourced to the third world) where the
employees have been taken hostage. You're offered the choice of being allowed to kill people or not, and
whether you want a long-range or short-range weapon.
Remembering Deus Ex and Return to Castle Wolfenstein, I said 'long range' expecting a lovely sniper rifle with which to slaughter unsuspecting terrorists from a distance. Instead I got the combat rifle, which looking back was one of the major sources of my woes.
Since there was no tutorial on the game mechanics, the first proper mission was made significantly harder than expected until I finally worked out how to make Jensen climb down ladders without falling off and breaking his head.
As in the training mission, the terrorists show a disturbing refusal to die when shot between the eyes, much like the creepy French guy in Tomb Raider who had to be shot point-blank in the head with two magnums no fewer than 42 times before he finally keeled over (yes, I counted).
At this point I should probably mention two things which may help explain this curious phenomenon. Firstly, the combat rifle does about as much damage to someone as throwing a metal bolt at them, even when fully upgraded. Secondly, the difficulty levels are radically different from the original Deus Ex. This is why.
STALKER has several difficulty levels, so I chose 'Medium', a strategy which has served me rather well for the last 27 years or so when playing a new game for the first time. One of the things which I have been quietly moaning about for some time is the fact that a head shot should take someone down pretty much straight away, which it only does in precious few games, such as Deus Ex.
STALKER takes this to the opposite extreme in that the enemies also have this power, and so you will die very, very quickly if you try to play it like practically any other game I've ever seen. STALKER seems to do a pretty decent job of simulating this kind of warfare, the problem being that it's no actual fun, not least because you have about three rounds of ammo and if you do what I did first time around, no other means of combat at all.
The guy in STALKER cannot punch people and if you don't do exactly what the game tells you to begin with you miss out on the knife - and so I was reduced to throwing metal bolts at my enemies which is just as effective as it sounds. Needless to say I have become a lot more forgiving of unrealistic guns, except where it's completely round the twist like in Human Revolution.
The main trick with STALKER is that the difficulty levels are mis-labeled. They are not "EASY", "MEDIUM" and "HARD", they should be "HARD", "NIGHTMARE" and "DIES OF A HEART ATTACK BEFORE LEAVING THE BUNKER". Ren, who suggested the game, later remembered that he always plays it with a mod that rebalances the gameplay - and which only works on the original Russian version.
But back to Human Revolution. You don't get "EASY", "MEDIUM" or "HARD" in that either, you get the cryptically-named "Tell me a story", "Give me Deus Ex" and [look up name], each of which has a description associated with it.
Anyone who has played 'Fate of Atlantis' will know that that game too has three options, and each one is almost a different game with the same theme and outcomes, but is otherwise entirely different.
"Intelligence" is a very hard point-and-click adventure centred around Indy that I got terminally stuck with, "Fists" is something like a beat-'em-up which I can't really be bothered with, and "As a Team" is a point-and-click adventure where Sophia tags along as Indiana's sidekick, and that is how I usually prefer to play the game.
Finally, anyone who has played System Shock will remember that its difficulty levels can reduce the amount of storyline in the game, an idea which fills me with dread.
The descriptions given in Human Revolution heavily imply that it goes the same way as Indiana Jones, and as "Tell me a Story" sounded like it would be a sequence of cutscenes all strung together, I chose "Give Me Deus Ex" instead. This turned out to be "Medium" in the STALKER sense of the word, i.e. "You enter the room and suddenly fall dead for no satisfactorily explained reason".
To cut a long story short, I restarted the game in "Tell me a Story" mode and had a much better time of it - with no other apparent differences in gameplay. It's entirely possible that on subsequent playthroughs I will run through on medium anyway and wonder what the problem was in the first place, but c'est la vie.
[Get Rotund]
Anyway. Takedowns are achieved in DXHR by pressing 'Q'. If you gently tap it, he will knock them out or throttle them into submission. If you hold it down too long, he will gruesomely murder them with his metal blade thingy. You get more bonus for knocking them down without killing them, but it must be borne in mind that if someone finds their unconscious body they can revive them.
In this game it is shockingly easy to accidentally shoot your unconscious foe in the head or leg while trying to loot them - probably because it uses the same control for both actions [double-check that]. Fortunately this seems to have no overall effect on their wellbeing, very much like in the original Deus Ex (where you can only kill an unconscious person by physically destroying their entire body).
Anyway, you will probably find a bunch of hostages, and hopefully prevent them all being killed by the death-trap inside. The foreman mentions that his wife has been taken as a human shield.
Then, once you have bumbled your way into the server room, you will meet someone strange who kills himself. It's almost painfully obvious that they were acting under remote control or otherwise against their own volition, but somehow Adam Jensen misses it. However, he does notice certain other things which he mentions to Zeke later - which I still don't understand myself.
As mentioned, you will ultimately find your way to the hostage situation. I talked Zeke down and let him go. Given Adam's apparent track record with hostages this seemed the far better approach, but somehow Sarif is unimpressed and you don't have any option to point out that virtually all of his staff survived the attack and he should be Very Grateful.
As you turn to go, you are paged by reception and told to report to your office where someone is being blackmailed. This eventually leads to you promising to break into someone else's house in order to steal the evidence they were using to blackmail them.
Finally, when you leave the building, you are collared by Mrs. Reed senior, who is less than satisfied with the official reports about the death of her daughter and wants you to perform yet another break-in. Sigh, add it to the list.
I dealt with the blackmail first, it's fairly straightforward and I promised to try and secure a legal supply (but never figured out how, maybe I missed it). While trying to locate the appropriate place I accidentally found an arms dealer, who proved to be a very handy person to know. For all my bitching about DXHR not allowing you to blow people into kibble and having very odd ideas about weapons damage, the fact that you can now sell your ill-gotten gains is astonishingly useful.
Around this time, Bas pointed out that he had found a sniper rifle in the roof of the garage where the other arms dealer lives. Many hours were spent trying to construct a tower of oil drums in order to climb up there. Better success might have been achieved by using wooden crates, as the tower would start to teeter when 3-4 drums were placed and would enter resonance and collapse when the fifth one was added. Eventually I gave up and broke in using a special lockpick doodad which is only available in the preorder version of the game, but I'm sure there's a better way.
[Tower of Babel]