Deus Ex: Human Revolution [PS3]

Doesn't let the family name down - 

this is a pretty darn good game.

Slight balance and difficulty issues aside, 

this is the best you're gonna get for

 a high-definition Deus Ex experience.

Welcome To The Future, Mr. Jensen
This week's big review is of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, a futuristic RPG/stealth/shooter that claims to offer a fully-realised world full of dodgy characters, shadowy organisations and morally-ambiguous tasks to complete.

Human Revolution is the spiritual successor and chronological predecessor to 2000's Deus Ex, a game that has been recognised as one of the best games ever made. The original Deus Ex gained widespread praise, not for fancy graphics or technological advances, but instead for its intricate conspiracy thriller storyline that panned out through the course of the game, and the massive variety of ways in which you could achieve your goals.

The story in Human Revolution is that in the near-future the technology to "augment" human beings is becoming widespread, meaning that people can upgrade themselves with implants that allow them to jump higher, run faster, manipulate people with speech, see through walls and so on.

The corporations offering these augmentations are in a fierce competitive battle, hoping to take control of a growing and lucrative market. The governments of the world are struggling to keep up with the change, and legislation moderating the actions of these mega-companies is slow to be enacted.

You play the role of Adam Jensen, head of security at Sarif Industries, Sarif being one of the market leaders in this type of technology. At the beginning of the game, the scene is introduced when Sarif Industries comes under assault from an unknown enemy. During the carefully co-ordinated attack, several of Sarif's leading scientists appear to have been killed and Adam himself is injured beyond healing by standard medical treatments. While he is still unconscious, so against his will, he is brought back from death through the use of some pretty major augmentations.

Now this is an alright start to a game to get you in the mood - it's been done a million times before but we'll overlook that - and it serves to bring the player up to speed while introducing the key themes running throughout Human Revolution.

The only slight issue that I found was that I obviously wasn't paying enough attention during the intro video because from this point on they refer to "Dr. Megan Reed" and other characters as if you're meant to know who they are. As it turns out, Dr. Reed is an old friend of Adam's who is caught up in the assault on Sarif - but I only pieced that information together retrospectively. Maybe I should have been taking notes during the title sequence.

The guy on the right is our cyber hunk hero Neo... er... I mean Adam Jensen.

It's Good Old Reliable Dingy - Damp and Dirty Dingy Detroit!
The first major section of the game is set in Detroit - full of skyscrapers, back alleys and sewer systems to explore. O.K. that doesn't sound too appealing and in many ways it really isn't. If you want to get people engaged in your game then I wouldn't recommend making them try to figure out how the bloody hell you get around the city by wading through sewage!

Detroit is awkward to navigate - until you have earned the upgrades which make getting around easier then there's a lot of running down alleys only to find a dead end, then running through a sewer.... only to find a dead end. Once you gain the ability to lift large objects out of your way or the ability to jump super high then this gets slightly easier, however you're still running backwards and forth around a very bleak and dark city in search of your objectives.

So what is it you're actually up to here? Well for the Detroit section, you're learning the ropes of getting around and the main entities are work in this world - the police, the augmentation clinics, the gangs, the private detectives etc.

You meet up with your boss, David Sarif, who sets you a few basic tasks to complete - obviously you need to start slow after being revived from the dead - so he tells you to break into the city police station morgue. Starting slow, eh David? What in God's name was I up to before you turned me into Robocop?

The dark and dingy streets of Detroit, where you will be spending around a third of your game time in Human Revolution.

You Can Go Your Own Way

With this being a Deus Ex title, the emphasis is on finding your own way of solving objectives and there are quite a few on offer. For example, for the morgue job you can:

• Go in all gun's blazing and kill hundreds of innocent cops to get down to the morgue
• Sneak into the building and then kill a few key targets in order to gain access
• Use stealthy skills like cloaking (temporary invisibility) to simply walk into the morgue unnoticed
• Talk to a police officer who, with the right persuasion, sneakily let you down there

I'm sure there are a few other ways of completing this task - these were just the main ones that I tried during my playthrough. All of the different options are there and waiting to be found, it just takes moving the right vending machine to find a secret ventilation shaft which takes you further into the building. 

The major play styles can be summarised as follows:

1. Talker/Hacker - these are pretty much the same idea - finding the right person or computer terminal to manipulate in order to gain a shortcut through environments.
2. Stealth/Pacifist - slowly and silently moving through levels, making use of augmentations such as cloaking and X-ray vision in order to avoid killing bystanders.
3. Soldier/Fighter - which pretty much involves shooting shit and using your kill-o-death augmentations such as blades coming out of your elbows!

I know that really you could break these down in further and combine different elements to achieve your goal but these are the main gameplay routes you can take. 

Now am I alone in seeing one of these option which stands out as preferable? 

One option which just sounds frikkin awesome? 

Well I thought that the elbow blade kill-o-death option sounded like it would a laugh and so started out my first playthrough aiming down that path - to use guns and other such weaponry to blast my way through the game. 

The error I may have made was to choose the Normal difficulty setting. 

While playing the game through as a pure shooter is technically possible, it's not advisable.

Hollywood Blockbuster Shot Down

In the very first level - the morgue break-in - I tried by bloody hardest to shoot my way in. I used cover every step of the way, mixed it up with my low-level augs, varied weapons to suit enemy type - and still I was shot to bloody death within seconds each and every time. I needed to rethink my strategy.

I didn't really want to play through on Easy because I intended to play through a second time a different way on the harder difficulty setting - Deus Ex Mode - in order to earn all the trophies (achievements to you non-Sony players).

I therefore went back out into Detroit for a bit of a wander around. I found that there is actually a lot of places you can get to around the city, and when the right augments are used you can get even further.

It became clear that a lot of the best equipment and cash drops were hidden down ventilations shafts, the entrance to which was generally blocked by a vending machine, or otherwise an electronic terminal. So I bought the weight lifting perk and upgraded my hacking skill. This playthrough isn't going how I planned.

Although this looks cool now, in about 2 seconds he'll be a bloody lump on the floor.

Attention To Detail

When I started to take this approach, as an unexpected consequence I found that I really liked the little details present throughout the game. Looking at emails, finding secretly written notes, talking to the right people and trying to "play it human" to get them to talk back - there's recurring sub-plots and plenty of back story to be found here.

One fine example is when you look around Adam's apartment building. In Adam's bathroom, there is a broken mirror on the wall - clearly smashed in the centre. Then if you look on your personal computer, there is an email to the building manager, asking yet again in very hostile tones for a replacement mirror which has never arrived. In this email, the manager responds to say that "the matter is out of their hands, the mirror is simply out of stock and as soon as they have one in the warehouse, they will send it to us - please don't take that tone with me". If you then go downstairs and hack the manager's personal computer, I was greatly amused to find an email from the mirror suppliers stating "the mirror has been at our warehouse for over four weeks - if you don't collect it or arrange for it to be sent soon then we will cancel the order". Landlord 1 - Adam Jensen 0. 

Tee hee hee. 

See - it's the little details.

The "Tough" Parts Of The Game

The later security systems that you have to get past are complex and technical - until you find the ventilation shaft that allows you to avoid them completely.

I was then surprised to find that in spite of having to rapidly shift to a more stealthy and non-violent playing style, there were several sections which should have been tough and complex affairs - full of lasers, robots and turrets - that were an absolute piece of piss because they could be navigated with ease through stealth augments and a strange frequency of terrible architects:

I know, I'll have a top-secret secured room that has a ventilation shaft leading right into the guard room. Then to make sure no-one gets through this, I'll station two guards who always keep their back to this shaft entrance. Pefect! Genius!

The upshot is that these sections were clearly well designed to suit multiple approaches, and once you know how to find the sneaky paths through, you are virtually untraceable.

Guards often don't help this - when spotted you can sometimes get away by going into the nearest room and shutting the door:

Hmmm... Shall I  search in this room right here? Nah, that elite assassin couldn't have opened that door... I'd better turn and look in the opposite direction for a half a minute.... Crunch.

Then on the level shown below, where two giant rocket robot machines stalk the hanger bay, I simply sneaked around the level looking at what was available - and found a rocket launcher, several rockets and some fragmentation mines. 

HAH! SOD STEALTH! Time to go boom robot baddies!

And what happened? I blew them to pieces and the human guards in the area lost interest virtually instantly. What? After handing my arse back to me in the police station level, I finally give in and go kill crazy and it's suddenly really easy? Oh bum.

The giant creepy robot crab things crop up from time to time - but always near a rocket launcher.... hmmmm.....

Bossing You Around

Then there's the "boss" levels, and by that I mean the key story characters whose missions you cannot get out of playing through. In the boss fight below, there is no way of stealthing as the fighting arena is so confined that you are likely to be caught out pretty quickly (in spite of the big guy's painfully slow movement). You have no choice but to blast him to get rid of him.

In another boss fight, you have to be immune to a certain type of damage, and the game actually gives you a free aug upgrade if you haven't bought the right one yet. 

In a later boss "fight", you are forced to talk a guy down in front of a crowd in order to get him to reveal important information. This is greatly eased by the use of speech augs, but I understand that without them this could have been very difficult.

Even the final boss requires you to have at least some serious firepower to defend yourself with. Maybe you can sneak your way around and somehow do it another way - I found that the amount of turrets and robot guards meant that it was difficult to get past without reducing their numbers somewhat.

My problem is that for a game that that offers a great deal of choice, it is hard not to be annoyed that there is one particular way that works for each of the boss fights, and even though your choices and augmentation upgrades can help with certain scenarios, basically you need at least some skill in each of the three main disciplines - speech, stealth and soldier - in order to keep the difficulty level balanced throughout the game.

The bloke who looks about ready to pelvic thrust is one of the game's bosses.

Moral Compass

And finally the "moral" side of the game - this was pretty well worked in actually. Although the moral choice system is still present, and it is clear that your choices are leading to a conclusion based on the moral leaning of these decisions, you aren't ever punished for whatever you decide. There is no "right" or "wrong" way to play through, and there are no notable bonuses for either, except that your trophies/achievements will be better if you focus yourself (e.g. by knocking out 100 guards in a single playthrough).

The ending is also suitably open - when you get to the final level there are several key characters who you find are present within the complex. You can therefore go and speak to each of them for one last time (although I didn't quite realise it was the last time so never got to say goodbye to my boss, David... oh how sad). In speaking to them, they offer you a way to conclude the story - be it to contain the goings on throughout Human Revolution, to release the whole story to the media, or to release a modified version of the story... or one other option.

And there isn't any punishment for your choices up to that point, or after you decide which course of action to take, it just determines which ending video you see which ties all of your decisions together. The only problem comes when you forget to talk to one of them right at the end - so make sure you do! I'll have to see if I kept an older save file and go back and chat with old Davey. Then watch his video and then bang - trophy for seeing the 4 endings.

All in all I thought it was well done - and I think it was this crucial point which turned Human Revolution back into my favour. Yeah.... it was pretty good actually. Go give it a try and see what you think.

Conclusions

I didn't really like the way that I was channelled into being sneaky/stealthy rather than going all-out action techno killer. In the end though, it made me appreciate the actual variety on offer - levels are full of nooks and crannies that hold secret items and routes that are  just waiting to be found.

Although the "moral compass" system is present in plenty of games nowadays, I did appreciate not being obviously told which options count as "good", "bad" or "neutral" so you are left to find out for yourself.

When you get to the end and look back on what you have done throughout the game, you can see the success of Human Revolution - the world is there for you to experiment with, but how exactly you choose to engage will change the world that is left behind at the end.

Images in this review are copyright of Square Enix and can be found at:

http://deusex.com/media/images#

^^^Does that web address not make you think of a website for people expecting to receive a shag?

The video in this review is from Youtube and is kindly provided by:

http://www.youtube.com/user/machinima

Final Fantasy XIII-2 [PS3]

The latest incomprehensible, shiny adventure from Square Enix is a much more playable experience than its predecessor.


Exploration and time travel are the key words of the day here - trekkin across space and time to save the future.


New features keep play varied and engaging - and thankfully the combat is still intense and visually stunning.

The ABC on the new J-RPG, FFXIII-2
For those who haven't completed the introductory course in pseudo-Latin game numbering systems, the title of this game is Final Fantasy 13 - number 2 (that being, the direct sequel to Final Fantasy 13).


That means that this game is a Japanese fantasy role-playing title, with a focus on exploration and character development. There game offers around 20 large areas to visit during several time periods, with each specific time and place having unique enemies and treasures to find. Due to the convoluted nature of the story, you will be revisiting these areas several times each in order to get all the hidden story items and complete all quests.

Story: An Introduction to the Beginner's Guide
The story here is that the time line has gotten messed up. Something, or someone, has mixed up time such that there are anomalies everywhere which our heroes, Serah and Noel, 
resolve to sort out. Once a time glitch (or "paradox") has been fixed, our heroes earn crystal fragments which can then be used to open new time periods and find new paradoxes and then sort those out as well.


Serah is the Lightning's sister from FF13, now not frozen in crystal an in need of rescue, but instead heading off to save Lightning, who is trapped in Valhalla in an eternal battle with an  evil time-travelling bloke (what is up with this family - can they not go 5 minutes without some interplanetary catastrophe centred around them!?!).


Noel is a bloke who dreams about Lightning and Serah before falling through the timeline into Valhalla. It is there that Lightning tasks him with finding Serah, and making their way through time to meet up with her in Valhalla (get the 4 o'clock bus, change at Hammersmith, then get off and walk at civilisation's ruin).

The time travelling theme means lots and lots more unpleasantly corny dialogue.

The big bad guy is called Caius Ballard, and is closely involved with a freaky girl called Yeul who sees every possible future. Noel knows Yeul (well, "a" Yeul - er - I'm just not going to go into it) so anyway he gets all emotional about seeing her. Then Sarah does. Then Yeul does.


The scope for puns based on names is so wide thanks to there being characters called Fang, Hope, Snow, Lightning, Noel and Yeul. I mean, the Christmas puns in both Noel and Yeul scream out at me and some sort of drug and spike pun out of Snow and Fang would be good. Some very quickly, and poorly, conceived examples are below but the possibilities are endless:

Happy Noel Noel!

Ah, Happy Yule Yeul!

You got a number for Snow?

Yeah, call this guy. Say Fang sent you.

Cool... I'm gonna get Snow with Fang's help...

O.K. maybe I'm trying a bit too hard to have fun with the characters here but you can cut me some slack - they're all bizarre, annoying and so you just cannot connect with any of them.


On that note, the co-dependant, emotional party of characters from FF13 no longer follow you around everywhere you go, however they do all pop up at some point along your travels to greet you. This offers some closure to their stories - at the end of FF13 everyone celebrated the completion of their journey and then the credits roll. Now you get to see what they got up to in the years that followed - if you were at all bothered which I doubt you are. I wasn't.


The Art of War
The combat is played out in a semi-turn-based style, that being that your team fights enemy characters in turns. The turns are not a fixed "player one fights, then player 2 etc." sequence, but instead an action bar fills up over time and once you this bar has filled sufficiently to carry out your selected action then your turn starts.

Battle sequences have much more variety and play out on a grander scale than in FF13.

Coupled with this, you normally have two other team members who you have indirect control over. You get to choose what they will be doing by selecting the appropriate "paradigm" for the battle. Paradigms are basically the current team ethos, so you can have offensive, defensive, healing, or any combination of these to suit the battle at hand.


Skills are improved by earning Crystarium Points (C.P.) which you spend equally on Noel and Serah's skills. There are bonuses as you level up through the skill trees but how you develop depends on upon the roles to which you assign your Crystarium Points, for example spending points on the Commando role gives big bonuses to your character's overall strength. Similarly, spending points on the Medic role gives bonuses to healing and overall health.


One issue I found was that the characters become very high level very quickly, and from about 15 hours in the game offers no challenge. Even the final boss battle was no problem, as I was level 99 in most roles (the maximum possible!). Perhaps the difficulty level is better balanced if you have not played FF13, but in any case the main story battles were far too easy.


I have yet to play through with the "Paradox Scope" ability turned on - this is unlocked once you have completed the final battle and ramps up the difficulty while you hunt for the rest of the 160 crystal fragments (of which I had found 44 at the time of finishing the main story).


Gotta Catch 'Em All
As you only have 2 team members to work with, you enlist the help of creatures that you fight along the way. Once you have beaten and caught a creature, you are then able to use it in your line-up. This is actually a welcome mechanic, offering some more variety to play and allowing you to vary your combat style without having to make massive changes to Noel and Serah.

The large creature on the right side of the screen is actually on your team!

When you acquire a monster, you are free to upgrade its abilities using upgrade parts found in battles, to make it wear a custom item of clothing, and to change its name to something more memorable. I quite enjoyed the naming aspect, as they had a nice selection on offer - from your "Butch" and "Viper" fighting names, to "Furball" and "Gobstopper" for monsters more comfortable in their toughness.


Again, these creatures get far too tough once you have upgraded them fully. These are upgraded using items picked up in battle or bought from the shop. With careful buying and selling, you can have more than enough of these to fully upgrade whatever monsters you want before the end of the main story - making the final battles a breeze.


The monsters also have unique abilities that can be unleashed in battle - in the form of a Quick Time Event. While not adding much to the gameplay, these have very handy perks that if used cleverly can allow you to turn battles around in an instant. 

The Broken DVD Player Effect
On that subject - now Quick Time Events pop up throughout some of the cutscenes. Mercifully, an effect on screen does warn you when one of these is about to pop up but there are few times when it feels necessary for you to be involved at all. 


A few times, as shown in the picture below, there is a choice to be made in the video. If there were more of this type of event, where different options allowed the video to pan out in different ways, then it may be more engaging. Unfortunately these moments are few and far between, and most events simply have "succeed" and "fail" within the time limit.

Cinematics now include Quick Time Events - now this is what I call progress.

The dialogue choices available are absolutely appalling as well - you sometimes get a 4 way dialogue choice but 3 of these options are clearly "wrong" and you are meant to keep asking until you ask the "right" question. In one case, where I was figuring out what the hell the story was going on about, the conversation went like this: 

Me: Could there be more than one World?

Hope (an old friend): Well an ancient civilisation, which lived in these ruins,

 believed that there was only the one World - this World.

Serah: Oh, so there's just this one World then?

Hope: That's right.

I beg your pardon? What? Just because someone off-handedly remarks that an ancient civilisation had a "One Universe" theory, that means that we can't discuss a "Multi-verse" theory in a place where I can time travel across thousands of years to various places in this World and elsewhere? Fair enough. Alienate me further.


One scene had us walk into the lair of a big bad called "The Arbiter of Time", who told us to get out or we will be destroyed. I believed him. Anyway, we asked him for a crystal fragment (pretending to do him a favour) and he gave us the fragment and told us to leave immediately.


Noel then decides to stand around there for a few minutes, bitching about Serah's boyfriend. Why? Just get the hell out of there! Stupid emo kids.


In most conversations, the best way to go is emo. In fact, one battle doesn't require you to think of a clever strategy, it only lets you win once you have "Screamed at Hope" (who wasn't even in that time period!). It worked though - Hope changed history to end the battle because Serah had a hissy fit. This game is pretty stupid.

I Remember Doing The Time Warp!

The Historia Crux - the new map selection screen - is a
tangled web of areas and time periods for you to explore.

You search across the time line using this menu - The Historia Crux - which is thankfully quite easy to use and functional. The time line opens up and branches off as you unlock more, completing quests and earning fragments in unlocked time periods will open up more areas.


The good thing about this is that you can warp to the Historia Crux from virtually anywhere, and your position in that area will be saved. That means if there is a fragment you need to collect from another time period you just open the Historia Crux menu, travel to the required area to collect the fragment, then warp back to the place you left off. This saves a lot of unnecessary faffing about in later missions.


Conversely, there is an annoying habit in some menus to freeze for about 15 seconds. Just shows the message, generally "Do you want to step into the flow of time?" but doesn't let you select "Yes" or "No" for a really long time.


Anyway, another handy feature is the return of Chocobo! Yay! Not only can you use Chocobo to speed you around the map, avoiding those short battles you once had, and your position with a Chocobo will be saved if you warp out as well.


You can also catch and train Chocobo to fight with you and to use in a Chocobo Races mini game. Apparently you can earn a lot of money on this but my Chocobo is obviously lazy because I got beat every time and lost a lot of money I bet on the bloody thing. That'll teach me to have faith in giant bird monsters....


Should've Gone To Specsavers

Your friendly marshmallow pig, Mog, will help you look for rare items out in the World.

A lot of the main bulk of the game requires you to trek around the World map completing quests and finding awkwardly hidden items and fragments. You find such items by using an old Final Fantasy favourite - Mog - who waves his wand and bring things into reality. 


These are quite carefully hidden as well, items are camouflaged such that finding the buggers takes a long, long time on the more complicated maps. 


One main quest in the second half of the game requires you to find 5 hidden items spread across the timeline, and it is this searching that took the majority of the play time. 
Well, cutscenes and searching. About 40% searching for hidden stuff, 40% watching glass-eyed hair stylists talk about emotions, 10% playing mini-games and a depressing 10% of your time actually spent fighting.


A higher difficulty setting from the start would have been welcome, or I would equally settle for cutting out around 10 hours of the cutscenes. I'm still playing after the main story is complete though, just because for the first time in a long time, I am playing a good old Final Fantasy.

Conclusions

Surpasses its predecessor by far - this has a much more open and exploratory theme - more akin to earlier Final Fantasies.

Although the plot is no less baffling, this is a much more accessible FF adventure and so should appeal more to newcomers to the series.

While it kept me playing to the end, the game was far too easy once I'd upgraded my characters. 
I guess this was SquareEnix trying to put as few people off as possible, but it will not gain favour among the hardcore FF fans.

Images in this review taken from http://www.amazon.com/Final-Fantasy-XIII-2-Playstation-3

I do not own the copyright to these images. And to appease the Amazon gods, go take a look at buying it!