Few games do so much, so well, and for so long as Deus Ex Human Revolution. It's a proper gamey game for proper gamey gamers - 30 hours of shooting and sneaking, levelling up, conversation trees and moral dilemmas - and when it's over you can go straight back to the beginning and play it like the pant-soiling psycho Adam Jensen was never born to be.
And Deus Ex won't care. Adam Jensen is whoever you want him to be and the game never pats you on the head for being a hippy humanitarian or slaps you on the wrist for being a bodychopping nutcase who got lost on the way to Modern Warfare 3.
It waits, it watches, and it tucks away dialogue and situations recorded and designed for only the most extraordinary playthroughs. It makes you think that, yes, you were supposed to execute the hostages and stab your girlfriend's Mum in the street, smashed off your robo-tits on bad hooch. Eidos Montreal planned for that kind of maniac. They planned for everything.
It begins with a tutorial. Before Jensen gets Boddickered by unidentified mercenaries working for unidentified shadow men working for the Illuminati, he's a soft and squishy human man in a world busy sawing fleshy bits off and welding new metal bits on.
The world of 2027 is in the midst of a conflict about the nature of humanity itself; on one side are those who say everyone should have the right to modify their own bodies, on the other are purists who believe humanity should stay human. Before the assault on Sarif's HQ, Megan Reed and her team were only hours away from announcing a breakthrough which would allow access to Augmentation technology for everyone, without the lifelong Neuropozine prescription to prevent rejection.
Defending Sarif's HQ, Jensen learns a few things about Human Revolution's Metal Gear stealth and Rainbow Six combat before getting driven through a window and shot through the head as everyone dies around him.
With the tutorial done, there's still more to teach. Jensen is rebuilt with all the tools at Sarif's disposal and returns to work six months later to shut down a purist terrorist takeover on the company's Detroit manufacturing plant. He's given a crash course in his new Augmentations - hacking, localised radar, upgrades, even talking - before being thrown out onto the streets of 2027 Detroit where he meets Megan's mother and finds out his old neighbour had his dog put down while he was on the slab. Shit.
The first of several major city-hubs, Human Revolution's Detroit is dense in a way RPG's never are; it's rammed with stuff like Bioshock's Rapture, but you're free to go anywhere you like, take on any mission you fancy, and throw things at anyone you want. The hubs are big spaces, full of opportunity and secrets. No sci-fi can hide from Blade Runner forever but this is the first game to treat that cyberpunk template as a template, not an endpoint.
There's that same conspicuous Blade Runner rich/poor divide, the optimism up high and misery down low, that eternal night, and the clash of high technology bolted onto aged architecture but it all feels new. Everywhere there are fictional future-brands, discarded papers, loitering strangers, and the kinds of detritus that makes the world feel like someone lived in it before you showed up and started punching people.
Snoop around and a suicide in a dead-end alley will lead you to an illegal Augmentation chop shop and an upgrade kit. In the sewers there's a dumping ground for files the police would rather went away. The internal combustion engine is a dead scene so an old petrol station is home to an arms dealer.
Every part of the world feels like someone at Eidos Montreal had a sit down and a cup of tea and a long think about why that space exists, who might be there, and what they might be doing in it.
Forget immersion - and you'll be getting great big boatloads of that shovelled all over you - it's all about stuff to do. Deus Ex is filled with it. It's a 30-hour game, except it's not. Not really. It's a 12-hour game if you whip out your machine gun and stomp your way across North America and the Far East with less respect for human life than a Michael Bay movie, but you probably won't because of all the stuff to do.
There are hour-long sidequests around every corner and XP rewards for exploring the world and finding its secrets. There are things you'll want to stop and look at for minutes at a time because you won't believe someone designed a 'Forever ' Post-It note and stuck it on a desk where only one percent of players will ever see it and even fewer will ever get it.
Even in the linear levels between the city hubs you're given space to move and choices to make. It looks like a shooter and plays like a stealth game but Deus Ex is a proper RPG where you'll have to make real choices every time you walk through a door.
Sometimes you'll fight, sometimes you'll hack, sometimes you'll hide, and the game will trick you into thinking it all matters because the world is just so convincing.
When you meet the men who destroyed Jensen's body and murdered his friends it takes a will of iron not to instantly pull a gun on them. After walking in Jensen's shoes for ten hours you'll think, yeah, maybe they do deserve to die. You'll break your zero-kill streak and murder someone because they deserved it rather than because the game insisted.
Only four characters in the game need to die by Jensen's hands, in the game's four boss fights, and those moments are Deus Ex at its weakest. For five minutes you're locked in and forced to do a specific job; for the rest of the time you're free and every choice you make has some small consequence.
Somehow Deus Ex is always one step ahead of you. You're in the midst of the next great flashpoint in human history - by the game's end Jensen's actions will have defined the future of humanity's evolution - but Deus Ex knows you; it knows you'll go nosing around the ladies' toilets and it'll have something in store for you when you do.
And that's quite a trick. Deus Ex is a long and largely nonlinear game, but it somehow wraps a neat little bow around the story no matter how you choose to play. Bioshock treated you like the biggest dick under the sea for excavating manaslugs from zombie children but Deus Ex isn't here to judge your completely arbitrary/borderline psychotic take on morality and justice; it just wants you to do your own thing.
There are big choices - moments when conversation leads you towards an obvious branching path. In those moments you'll weigh up the options as if they really do count because those decisions will go on to define your next 30 hours of Alone Time. There are smaller choices to face, too - every room you enter makes you select between craftily hiding and sneaking or just good old running and gunning.
Stealth is encouraged by enemies who'll shoot through Jensen's wafer-thin armour in seconds and the game is better if you like to hide, but Jensen has the tools to fight his way out of any situation so long as you've Augmented him for it. In a firefight it's as good a shooter as any recent Rainbow Six (from where Eidos Montreal robbed Director JF Dugas and its third-person cover system), with punchy weapons and aggressive AI.
The moment you're spotted the AI goes to work with a vengeance, a handful of soldiers suppressing Jensen and one or two flanking around to flush him out. It's the same response over and over but it feels smart and always feels life-threatening.
There's an Achievement for a zero-kill run and another for never being seen, but Deus Ex is at its best when you're adapting to the situation at hand. Some fights you'll win with the force of a nettled Schwarzenegger, others you'll win by letting a hacked drone win it for you, and then there are those you'll win with half a dozen silent takedowns. Some fights you simply won't be bothered to fight at all.
And all this took ten years. That's how bastard hard it was to make the original Deus Ex. It was so complex and so ambitious only one studio ever attempted it, and even Deus Ex's creator reckons he didn't get everything right. By Warren Spector's own admission, he's a developer who does new things because they're so new, and he's happy leaving others to perfect his work.
Mass Effect, Bioshock, Riddick and more have all had a good go, but Human Revolution is the first game to pick up exactly where Spector's team left off and to do almost everything better. Where Deus Ex's AI was dumb, Human Revolution's feels smart; where Deus Ex's combat was lightweight, Human Revolution's is angry and aggressive; where Deus Ex's stealth was clumsy, Human Revolution's is precise.
Dubious mechanics couldn't stop Deus Ex from being a great game, but Human Revolution replicates the original with none of those caveats. It's a great shooter, a great stealth game, a great RPG, and a great world in which to spend 30 hours of your life. On the few occasions Human Revolution gets it wrong you'll forgive it, because this amount of variety and creativity hasn't been done so well in a storydriven shooter for a decade - and it's about bloody time.
Check out the massive five page Deus Ex: Human Revolution review in issue 109 of the newly redesigned Xbox World, which goes on sale on September 1. Subscribe to get it delivered to your door before it hits the shelves.
Want a second, third and fourth opinion? OXM's Deus Ex: Human Revolution review gives another look at the 360 version, otherwise read PSM3's Deus Ex: Human Revolution review and GamesMaster's Deus Ex: Human Revolution review for PS3 and PC versions.
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