Deus Ex Human Revolution Directors Cut Review

I FREAKIN love the Deus Ex franchise and who can blame me? It revolutionized gaming as a whole especially FPS games and action RPG's. Naturally when I came into Deus Ex Human Revolution(which will now be referred to as DXHR because it's just way easier) I had a lot of expections and I'm happy to tell you all that the game delivered! The game takes an "have it your way" style approach with the diverse skill tree it gives you which is basically activating your cyborg augmentations(I get to that once I get to the story)giving you many challenging situations and even more ways to complete them. Are you the kind of guy who likes to go into battle guns blazing? Well then you should pick up the dermal armor and recoil reduce upgrades! Perhaps you would rather take a stealth approach, or you just want to hack a few security turrets to kill off your enemies for you, or even just punch a whole in a wall or climb through an airduct to avoid confrontation all together. This is one of the games biggest strenghts and what makes it all the more better is the fact that the developers put a ton of thought into level design and teach you the rules of the game very well that if you can think of a way to overcome obstacles there is a %99.99 chance that it could work should you execute your plan effectivley. Now right now I'm sure any of you who haven't played the game are drawing comparisons to another great "have it your way" kind of game, Skyrim. Well the key difference is that Skyrim focuses more on where you want to explore(it is open world after all) but doesn't provide to extreme variety in play styles or how you choose to play that kind of style. What I mean is that in DXHR you can be a very stealth oriented player, but not be confined to that style of play because the skill tree is very friendly to players and allows you easy access to the basic skills required for any play style. This even carries over to the boss battles,unfortunatley non directors cut players will be very limited when it comes to how you take down a boss. Rather sadly though this doesn't mean the boss abttles are great. They are by no means bad or terrible, but they can be a little, how you say, confining. As I said before the Directors cut gives you more options when it comes to battleing bosses. By that I mean it gives you 1 more option when in most other scenarios there are several options to take down the baddies. Not to mention I found the boss battles to be boring and kind of pointless other than being used for the story of course. I think I've spent enough time on gameplay at this point, how about we turn our attention to story? 

             DXHR packs an impressive story about Adam Jensen, Head of security for the BioAugmentation company Sarif Industries who used to be S.W.A.T but quit after being given a questionable order. He soon finds Sarif under attack by heavily augmented mercenaries who leave him for dead after brutally attacking him and scientist in one of Sarifs labs. He miracously survived at the cost of getting heavily augmented over the course of about 6 months I believe. This gives him access to every upgrade in the game, but his body needed time to naturally turn them one one at a time unlocking praxis points to spend on said augmentations as you gain expierence by completing quest, killing enemies ect. From here you follow several leads to find the mercenaries and where they fit in the bigger picture which takes you to places like, Detroit, China, and Montreal to name a few. There are also a lot of moral decisions to make through the story especially at the end giving you three tough options to choose between. Another nifty feature is conversations with branching dialouge options that actually have an effect on the game. For example early on in the game you are tasked with getting to a morgue in the local precicnt. You have the option of sneaking in, killing everyone(that strategy is not reccomended), or you can just talk the guard out to have him let you in. That's what I love about this game. It does so many interesting things with its gameplay that affect the story and vice versa. It makes the game unique and helps it to stand out from other games. In the end DXHR packs an impressive story into the mix too, but unfortunatley it doesn't show us the worts of it. When we hear about all of this gross things like harvesters who kidnap people to strip them of their augments and sell them we don't see that. It should have followed Blade Runners example and shown us everything. The last comment was made by Angry Joe in his review and I drew to the same conclusion and whole heartedly agree with what he said. Thankfully thought that is the only negative when it comes to the story. 

           As far is presentation goes the game looks and sounds fantastic. The soundtrack fits the futuristic theme quite well, the color palette consist mostly of gold and black, and the sound design in general all come together and fantastically emersed me into the games world. One small gripe I have with the graphics though is that facial animations are very stiff which doesn't do much for the wonderful looking game. Speaking of wonderful the backgrounds in the game look gorgeous and make the world all the more real. Also I forgot to mention voice acting so I'll do that now. All of the voice actors do an incredible job reading the scripteven Jensens voice actor although I found his voice to be a bit to raspy like Batmans but that is just a minor nitpick. Overall the game does incredibly well and stands up there is one of the best games I've played in a while which is why I'm glad to say Deus Ex Human Revolution earns an 8.5/10 it was worth the $60 dollar price line as it is but now that you can pick it up for $20 you'd be crazy not to pick it up.