Deus Ex, HR

[Art Blade]

I need time which I don't have plenty of, currently. The game sounds really intriguing  :)

[Binnatics]

This game sounds indeed pretty intriguing, and nice. I imagine a sort of dark knight having to break into a HUGE, traumentous fort. I wonder what's hidden in there, and something tells me it will be a princess, in need of a brave resque 8-X
I friend of mine told me about this game to come, and he told me he had done like 30 playthroughs in Deus Ex 1. The sequel (DE2) was kind of crap he said, and this new one should be IT again.
Reading Fiach's posts on this one, and Fraggers posts of the first game, really makes me curious.

[Fiach]

Heres a pretty good video as it shows the stealth aspect, its interesting because, if you notice, the guy doesnt dick around skulking in corners, the stealth is very fluid.

Using non lethal "takedowns" and a stun gun, plus not being seen on a mission gives you extra XP at the end because you were like a "ghost".

The video also shows the hacking system in depth.

You will see him take down two people at a time, this is a skill you buy, you start off with a skill for just one person takedowns, but you can expand it to take down more enemies in one go.

When jumping from a great height, you will notice a golden glow, this is the Icarus skill, which allows you to survive a drop from any height.

Enjoy :)

Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Smooth Operator: Tai Yong Medical #1 (Infiltration) + eBook + Praxis

[Art Blade]

Nice. I watched a couple more videos on YT (different uploaders) to get a better understanding. Looks cool and still reminds me of AP but a lot more advanced in every aspect. :)

[Binnatics]

Don't know, now that I saw that video... seems all a bit too smooth, the graphics I mean. Like walking in a world where no one has ever been before. And the hacking.... it takes time. I think it would have fit better together if the environment was more... Manhunt-like.
I'm confused now :-\\

[Art Blade]

There is one thing I fear: One playthrough or two, done. Of course you have choices and side missions, but generally speaking it doesn't look like you'd get many different paths (that was great with AP, many ways to play).

[Fiach]

With the correct upgrades I find it faster to use the hacking than use the keyboard to enter a password, plus it gives XP.

The mission in the video played out totally different for me, definately not that smooth, either it was edited or the guy had run that area a few times or used a guide, but mine was totally different, with hacking computers, taking over cameras and robots to do my dirty w@&k for me, I also turned off the lasers in that room where he followed them as they moved, so between robots clearing all the enemies and no lasers I was free to just saunter around looting and hacking stuff. I dont have the Icarus skill, so I never found some of his items, one of which allowed him to walk up to soldiers and talk to them, I had to take them out with stealth. In fact, I preferred my go, I still got ghost XP though.  :-X

But either way I'm enjoying it, it is like a very enhanced AP, if AP had maybe a year more in production, it would be as slick as this, the girls are much hotter in AP though :)

[Art Blade]

It sure is very present on my radar.  ^-^

[deadman1]

It sure is very present on my radar.  ^-^

I just started to play it yesterday and I can wholehartedly recommend it.  :-X

[Fiach]

Glad you are enjoying it mate :)

[Art Blade]

Thanks, deadman :) Have fun :)

[fragger]

I picked up DEHR for half-price a couple of days ago. I thought I posted about it here the other night but the post seems to have gone astray... maybe I didn't time it well and it got lost in translation during the relocation. Or maybe I just stuffed up, it was late at night I was a tad groggy. No biggie, I've played some more since so I can write some more about it.

So far I'm having a lot of fun with this. The original Deus Ex was one of my favourite games, and I'm happy to say that HR appears to have recaptured a lot of the atmosphere and character of the first game. I played DE2 briefly on a friend's PC when it came out years ago and was singularly unimpressed, so I was approaching this one with a bit of trepidation, but for my money they've done very well with it. So far, anyway – I'm not enormously far into it yet.

It seems to be good value. I'm about sixteen hours in and I'm still in the first main area of the game (part of future Detroit). As with the original, this is a game that rewards exploration, patience and observation. I'd describe it as more of a stealthy RPG than a shooter, as was DE1, and like that game you can go in all hell-for-leather and guns blazing if you like, but not only will that approach almost certainly make you dead very quickly but will cause you to miss out on collecting XPs. Being stealthy in the DE games is always better than being argumentative in terms of reaping future benefits. Besides, there's not a lot of ammo to be had at first and your weapons aren't hugely effective until you start upgrading them – and yourself. As with DE1, your guy is bionic and you can "upgrade" yourself in a variety of ways. For that you need as many XPs as you can collect as these can be traded in for new "augmentations" or upgrades of existing ones, of which there are quite a few. Some augs enhance your physical attributes while others are really skills, e.g. hacking. Maximizing XPs means exploring, paying attention to your surroundings and interacting with other characters. Finding hidden areas will yield additional XPs, as will being merciful – nonlethal takedowns can yield XPs, lethal ones won't, generally speaking.

Sneaky close-quarter takedowns are fun and the most satisfying to pull off. There are a few weapons to help you out in this regard, such as a short-range stun-gun, sort of like a Taser, and a scoped Tranquiliser rifle for longer distance knockouts. But the best, albeit riskier, way is to sneak up on enemies and physically knock them out, and for that your guy has some cool moves (just make sure no other enemies can see what you're doing, or wait until they're out of sight or have their backs turned). When you're close enough to an enemy you can choose to perform either a lethal or a non-lethal takedown. Whichever you choose to execute, the program randomly picks an animated move and goes into a third-person view so you can watch yourself in action. My fave is one where the view actually stays first-person and I see my left hand reach out, grab the baddie by the shoulder, spin him around and land a wicked right-cross on him with my augmented metallic fist. That just has to hurt... Once you've biffed someone out you can loot the body (inventory space permitting) and/or drag the body out of sight, Hitman-fashion. Although that doesn't always seem to be necessary as a couple of times I haven't had time to hide the body, yet another baddie coming on the scene hasn't reacted to the sight of his prone colleague. But more often than not they do, and this is why you should hide the bodies – if they're unconscious and are found, they can be revived. But as long as they stay out of sight, they're down for the count.

The world is interactively useful to an extent. Enemies react to sound, so at one point I hid behind a door then picked up and threw an empty box down a corridor to lure a gang member away from the balcony he was on and where his buddies could see him, then snuck up and put him to sleep while he was out of sight of his mates. DE1 was actually friendlier in this regard as you could pick up anything that wasn't nailed down and throw it, but HR is more limited in what you can interact with. You can interface with any computer or terminal you come across, and keeping a sharp eye out may allow you to find logins, codes and passwords stored on iPhone-like devices which may be left in desk drawers, dropped behind furniture, found on looted bodies, etc. If you can't find a code you can still try and hack a PC or terminal, which is done as a kind of minigame in a style similar to that found in games like Alpha Protocol. Without going into the details, the more XPs you invest in the Hacking aug and upgrades, the better you'll be at it.

It can pay sometimes to take the time to talk with sundry characters. For instance, there are quite a number of civvies wandering or hanging around the city streets during the first few missions, and interacting with any of them will yield responses. Most will only have a throwaway line or two to say, but occasionally someone will offer more info. I came across a group of hookers at one point and interacting with them produced the usual hookerish propositions and such, but one actually turned out to be an undercover cop who I used to w@&k with (my guy is an ex-cop) and who was trying to set up a bent detective who was doing illegal biz with the local gangs. I agreed to help her out and this led to a whole swag of side missions, which in turn led to more XPs and thence to greater augmentation. And money – you can find and earn credits which you can then use to buy stuff from various shady personages found around the traps. You can sell your extraneous gear to them too.

Like DE1, HR is relatively linear, but with some scope for freedom of action. Exploration will very often reveal more than one way around a particular area, for example – it's worth keeping an eye out for air vents, drains, manhole covers, ladders, jumps, and so on. These are usually highlighted in yellow, but might be tucked behind other things. For instance: one augmentation that can be bought is extra arm strength, and I found that with that aug I was able to pick up a whole dumpster, move it aside and uncover a hole in the wire fence behind it which gave me alternate access to another area. In some instances you can do main and side missions in varying orders. It's not an open-worlder, but it's still more than strictly corridor.

The storyline is quite good and twisty thus far. This is a prequel to DE1, with some of the main characters from that game in earlier roles, such as Joseph Manderley, who was the player's boss briefly in DE1 and who in this game works for Homeland Security. It's starting to look like they and FEMA are up to no good (they never are, in conspiracy theory circles) and there's a looming threat of secession from the Union of some states and resultant civil war (these were mentioned as past events in DE1). According to some of the electronic newspapers I've come across, Oz too is at risk of civil war as the Northern Territory is threatening to secede from the Australian Government. I had to laugh at that – nobody there is ever sober long enough to plan a war and they're all too busy clouting each other in the pub to ever find time to fight with anybody else. I put it down to the climate and the crocodile piss they drink ::)

DEHR is very nice to look at graphically with richly detailed environments, good character animation and some cool effects (I can't seem to get any screenies, sorry). Like DE1, the game is set in a future dystopian Blade Runner type of world, but without the crowds. There's no passage of time of day or anything, in fact it always seems to be night-time. Once again, just like DE1 - and Blade Runner, for that matter.

Well, back to it. I've just gotten into an area that's crawling with a small army of well-armed paramilitary types and a scary-looking patrolling combat bot (a combot?). Dunno how I'll manage to sneak though this place without being seen. But I thought the same about the last area I came through, and I got through. It's all a matter of observing, planning, sneaking and discreetly cracking the odd skull...

[Fiach]

Glad you are having fun mate :)

The bots can always be switched off by hacking terminals, kinda rocks when you turn them against enemies, but it alerts the guards to your presence.

I found the combat annoying I felt the game forces you to play in a stealthy manner, which to me is not a Deus Ex ethos, I felt I had no choice in the matter  :(

TBH, I never finished the game, I played to the last level and just cba continuing, I kinda wished it was shorter as all you did was enter a warehouse/office complex, stealth through, plot exposition, rinse/repeat, I never felt I could engage in a blastathon, I spent a huge amount of my playthrough just exploring, trying to put off engaging in the story :(

[fragger]

Cheers Fiach :)

Re the combat, I must admit I did try to fight it out with that first bunch of military types one comes across in the warehouse courtyard instead of trying to sneak around them and got my bum well and truly kicked for it. I did get them in the end but it took a couple of gos and I still got pretty beaten up, and that was with a body armour-type aug. I agree that the game does appear to be more heavily weighted towards stealth in this version, from what I've seen so far. DE1 was biased towards stealth also but at least you could become pretty adept at combat with the right skills if you chose to go that way. That might come at the expense of other useful skills as you could only ever earn so many skill points, but it was nice to have the choice.

Actually that's one thing I miss from DE1, the separation of augs from skills, so that you developed both independently of one another. In HR skills and augs are all lumped together in the same category, augs. Some of the augs are combat-related such as aim-steadying or whatever they call it, whether that would make a difference or not I don't know. And whether I want to sink XPs into those augs at the expense of more useful ones.

Early days for me. I'll see how it goes and whether the sneaking around gets too repetitive, but at this stage I'm really enjoying it 8)

[JRD]

These are some pretty detailed reviews from both of you guys... thanks a lot Fiach and fragger!  :-X

It seems a bit like Splinter Cell but with some RPG elements. I don't know if you ever played any of the SC games but those are linear stealth-spy games with some hacking, lock picking and body hiding. I played the first one and enjoyed a lot so I got SC Double agent and SC Chaos Theory on a STEAM sale last year. It got old pretty quick and I never finished the second game (the third one is not even installed yet).

DE:HR sounds like a very nice game but as in any stealth game it gets old too. I guess one can only have so much of stealth before wanting to experience some action, which is usually not easy if you are meant to stay in the shadows to succeed in the game  :-(

Great report fragger... keep 'em coming and I hope you enjoy the rest of the game.  :-X

[fragger]

Thanks JRD :)

Still having fun with it, but I must admit it is becoming a trifle long-winded the further along I get. Fiach is correct in that you are generally funneled into a stealthy approach, and when you do have to fight you pretty much have no choice there either - well, none when it's a boss. Unfortunately the game doesn't have a terribly good feel to it combat-wise. My advice is to pack at least one heavy weapon such as a "Heavy Rifle" or Plasma Rifle, stock up with as much ammo as you can find for it and save it for the boss fights, of which there are a couple, and for the double-cross-and-ambush situations, of which there are also a couple. Try and hang on to some frag, gas and/or concussion grenades too, they can be helpful in these sitches. The rest of the time: sneak, sneak, sneak.

There are some very long and linear stretches, such as when you have to make your way through the corporate headquarters of a huge biomedical outfit in China. After a while, the whole find-the-air-vent-to-sidestep-the-guards routine pales a little, as does the large amount of hacking you need to do. Well, you don't really need to hack every single PC and terminal you find (and in some places there are a lot of them) but as you never know which one might yield something useful like a code or a password to somewhere else, there's a temptation to do them all, which can be greatly time-consuming and repetitive. I guess that after a playthrough or two (assuming there are subsequent 'thrus) the player will know which ones to look at and which ones to ignore, although I'm inclined to think about hacking my way through only when I need to and be done with it. Often too I'll hack a computer only to find the login and password for it somewhere else later - or find codes and passwords to machines which are God-knows-where, probably ones I've hacked already. Another piece of advice I'd offer is build up your hacking skills as early as possible, concentrating mainly on the "Hack Stealth" and "Hack Capture" categories.

Some of the conversations are unnecessarily long as well and tend to belabour the point. I just tried to save the life of a PI who ended up dying anyway (more or less scripted) but he sort of reminded me of Jimmy Durante in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World - just when I thought he was about to croak he'd start blathering on about something else, which began to spawn thoughts along the lines of "Just get on with it and kick the damn bucket already - I've got a game to play!" ::) You don't have to wait for a character to say all his or her lines however, you can skip to the end of each comment. As far as I can tell, choosing your responses (when you get a choice) doesn't appear to make much of a difference to the way things pan out - in fact I'm starting to wonder why they bothered with it at all. Alpha Protocol is way ahead of DEHR in this regard, way ahead.

Overall the experience is wearing a trifle thin and I can't see this one having a huge amount of replay value. I am enjoying it and graphically it's cool to look at - the aforementioned corp HQ in China is quite spectacular once you get up out of the slums, it's sort of like one city built on top of another. I have to see the story through (I have no idea how close to the end I am, or even if I am close), and I probably will play through it a second time one day. But not until after I've had an action-packed African holiday - after all that creeping around I'm pining for the wide open spaces ;)

[Fiach]

I think you go back to china a second time.... not too sure on that, but iirc, you go to Detroit twice and china twice as well.

Dunno, I dont think it has a replay value, because, you will get all Augs before (long before) you finish, if you are dilligent and search drawers, also get the smash through walls aug, which will get you a couple, but I would say 50% of them are total trash.

But, as the game makes you play a certain way, you are not going to get anything significantly new on a second go.  :(

[fragger]

Yep, back in China now and about to try and smuggle myself on board a ship of some sort. I've almost gotten all the augs and I agree, about half of them are pretty much useless. DE1 was much better in this regard as there was no way you could get all the augs and upgrades in a single game so it encouraged you to experiment and set yourself up a different way each time, and to be more selective.

I said earlier how choosing different responses didn't make much difference, what I meant was to the game overall. On occasion, it can make a difference within a mission. I took a side mish to take out some augmented ex-military bad boy but when I heard his side of the story I let him go and he subsequently helped me out later by putting in a word with his recent employers, thereby reducing the number of enemies I'd have to face afterward. I'd earlier tried saving the game and bumping him off instead and it did make it somewhat harder to get through another semi-related side mission. But I still think the optional response business is largely a waste of time in DEHR.

I really do like the look of the game, a lot of w@&k has gone into it, plus I like the concept and the story. It's just a pity that some other aspects of it are so weak. Combat generally sucks, most weapons feel too imprecise and not hard-hitting enough. I do like the 10mm pistol though, now that I've upgraded it and fitted it with a silencer. It's a bit reminiscent of my good ol' 6P9, the way I can take out a baddie with a single headshot and leave the other guys scratching their heads wondering where the shot came from.

I managed to grab a screenie via the slightly laborious method of hitting PrtScr, Alt-tabbing to the desktop, firing up IrfanView and doing a clipboard paste and save. Honestly, I don't get why some PC game devs don't seem to consider adding screen capture functionality. I would have thought it was in their interest for just this reason - so I can show my mates what the game looks like and basically provide a bit of free visual publicity. Maybe this game actually does provide a capture command but if so I can't find it anywhere. DE1 did, so I don't know why this one doesn't.

Anyway, here's a picture showing one of the cool-looking parallax backdrops. Some of them are quite spectacular and lend themselves very well to the immediate surroundings.

[smg id=3750 align=center width=600]

[Fiach]

Pistol was my favourite too :)

[Fiach]

Crikey how can devs keep getting it sooooo WRONG????

New DLC.... They strip away your powers, christ combat sucked when you had all your powers, wth will it be like now?

http://www.deusex.com/themissinglink

[fragger]

Combat with no augs? Sounds like exasperation city to me :-\\

Dunno about that DLC... I'm sort of tempted to get it out of curiosity. I did enjoy the game, I just wasn't inclined to go through it all again anytime soon. I think it looks interesting, but it's like movie trailers - with judicious editing they can look great, too until you actually see the movie

It didn't appear to say at that site whether the DLC cost anything or not and I don't particularly want to log onto Steam right now to find out in case it starts updating my games (I'm in the middle of a good game of Civ V at the moment and I don't want it interrupted). Any idea about that, Fiach? Because I certainly wouldn't be inclined to pay for the DLC - if it's free, then I might give it a go. Maybe. If I feel sufficiently masochistic sometime.

[Fiach]

Free DLC??? Why that idea is soooo crazy.... It just might w@&k!  8-X

€10.99, guess they are not crazy after all  >:D

[fragger]

 

I guess not ::)

That's a shade under AUS$15.00. Umm... Ahh... Nah. Not worth it.

But thanks for the info :)