This is part one of a six-piece blog series that shows my in-depth impressions of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I'll publish one post on a different topic about the game every day this week through Saturday.
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Part 3: Universe and relationships
Part 5: Augmentations and controversies
Deus Ex: Human Revolution takes inspiration from many games (and films) that I've personally experienced and countless more that I haven't. At first glance, Human Revolution is cosmetically built on a Matrix-meets-Blade Runner foundation. Under the black and gold, self-titled cyber-punk exterior it plays like a laundry list of great games. It has Metal Gear Solid's radar, enemy alerts and patrol patterns. Rainbow Six: Vegas and Splinter Cell: Conviction are felt as you hold the left trigger to stick to cover and click the right thumbstick in to aim down the sights. Crysis, its sequel and Splinter Cell: Conviction pop up here and there when you decide exactly how you want to proceed through a section. You can slide around cover, cloak and sneak or open fire and alert guards while picking them off during intense standoffs. They make you the hunter. Alpha Protocol and Mass Effect are seen (or heard, rather) during the handful of well-placed conversation battles. Resident Evil 4 rears its head when you open the grid-based inventory and move stuff around to fit in new pickups. When you wander around city hubs and see nonplayable characters walking around, talking to each other and going about their daily lives, Fallout 3, Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay and The Darkness are all lurking in the corners.
Human Revolution has a way of improving upon these aforementioned games' mechanics, as well as hurting a few of them. An improvement shows during the conversation standoffs. The responses you make Adam Jensen, the protagonist and player-controlled character, say are rarely the cookie-cutter good/neutral/bad responses of Mass Effect. They're based in emotion. One response's label might be "criticize" while another is "empathize." It works like Alpha Protocol in the sense that you have to understand what type of attitude will affect the character to whom you're currently speaking. Being short and argumentative with one person might get you what you want, while getting angry with another might result in an innocent person's life being taken. In Mass Effect, though you can choose the renegade or paragon options, both paths usually lead you to the same thing. That's not true in Human Revolution.
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The silver-tongue challenges are rewarding, but the character animations and motion capture direction leave a lot to be desired. It's obvious that the spoken lines and body animations weren't contextually matched whenever you see multiple characters looping the exact same handful of body movements no matter what he or she is saying. It's hard to take a woman seriously as she's sobbing over a deceased coworker when her body language is screaming (and squirming), "I'm restless!"
The lip synching is god-awful and you'll see Jensen fold and unfold his arms more times than you can count. Eidos Montréal definitely should've directed the conversations a lot better, a la Mass Effect 2. It's pretty embarrassing for a game in 2011 to have such stilted body mechanics and no dedication to good lip synching – especially after announcing itself with some of the best and most stylish trailers I've ever seen.
Another mechanic Human Revolution borrows but doesn't quite nail is the inventory system. When you move stuff around in the grid, there isn't a dedicated "pick up" button as there is in Resident Evil 4. Instead, you highlight an item, open a side menu on it, select "move" and then move it. That's one button press too many. There also isn't a side section to temporarily store items in while you're adjusting everything. Luckily the game has an option to drop stuff to free up space, but if you want to pick the item back up to reorganize, you have to exit back into the game, pick it up, pause again and then reorganize. Thank goodness there is an option to have the inventory auto-organize everything so you don't have to manually deal with it most of the time. I'm anal-retentive enough to turn it off and assemble it myself, though. Guns up top, ammo under them, health on bottom-left, hacking tools in the bottom-center and grenades on the bottom-right. It still makes me wonder why they'd have the grid system at all if you can set it to auto-organize.
Eidos Montréal included a separate quick inventory by holding Y (or Triangle on PS3) and selecting what you want from a radial menu, so you don't have to enter the gridventory and fumble around with the weapons to select one as you did in Resident Evil 4. It's not the first game to feature a radial menu, but it's welcome because it keeps the game running smoothly. However, nearly the entire time I played Human Revolution, I wanted the radial menu to be activated by one of the bumpers, not the Y button. That's one of a few control issues that I almost never got used to, even after I had spent tens of hours with the game.
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One giant advantage of a grid inventory is that you can carry lots of stuff. You're not limited to one sidearm and one rifle like most games. Numerous times throughout the campaign, I would be holding a pistol, a stun gun, a combat rifle, a tranquilizer sniper rifle, health items, ammo, grenades and more with a little space left over. I can definitely put up with an imperfect inventory that let's me carry a lot of stuff. Once again, I felt Fallout 3's presence when I had more than two options from which weapons to choose.
None of these issues here broke the game experience for me. I can easily look past looped animations, bad lip synching and a somewhat clunky inventory system because the meat of the game isn't contained here. Human Revolution is nearly a classic case of a game that does a few things wrong, but there's so much great stuff everywhere else, that I can forgive its missteps.
Photo from Deusex.com