Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Director's Cut (PS3) Review

 Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Director's Cut (PS3) 7.5/10

Hello everyone and welcome to another game review. I have been revisiting another one of my all time favorite PS3 titles: Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Director's Cut. Human Revolution was originally released on August 23, 2011, with the Director’s Cut version of the game released at a later date. The game was developed by Eidos Montreal and published by Square Enix. In this version, certain parts of the game have been fixed up, items and missions have been added, the DLC ‘The Missing Link’ is present, and the game even added a director’s commentary. This is the definitive version of the game, so I’ll be judging it by this version.

Now, I have a history with this game. This and InFamous are probably my most played titles on the PS3. I have played this game religiously in the past, so I know it almost like the back of my hand and I even considered it to be one of my all time favorite games. Replaying it TWICE now, I finally see all of the game’s flaws and most of the issues with the game aren’t the dev’s fault. I have A LOT to talk about, so let’s begin.

Our story takes place in the year 2027. The world is going through a cyber renaissance. This game is filled with a lot of tropes within the cyberpunk genre. Evil corporations overstepping their boundaries, human augmentation, government secrets, and all of that good stuff. Our story follows Adam Jensen, an ex-SWAT who has been recently hired at Sarif Industries, a bio-tech corporation run by David Sarif, as the new head of security. As Adam and his ex-girlfriend Megan Reed, the lead scientist at Sarif Industries, are preparing to leave for Washington DC to present her astronomical research in human enhancement to the science board, spec ops mercenaries attack Sarif HQ. Adam, barely surviving the attack, gets top-of-the-line augmentations to save his life. Six months later, Adam is called back into work to deal with a hostage situation at a Sarif manufacturing plant, with the intruders being the terrorist group Purity First. Purity First has the firm belief that the human body should not be tampered with. They are an anti-augmentation group. As he is dealing with the situation, he stumbles upon their hacker, who is augmented. This one hacker will send Adam on a wild goose chase across the world to find the people who killed Megan and her science team. As he uncovers the truth of the attack, he’ll find that there’s a lot more to this than a simple terrorist attack. 

The story for this game is good, but it could’ve been so much better. I love Adam’s obsession with finding Megan’s killers, trying to avenge them and everything. I like Adam as a protagonist, but I feel like they could’ve gone further with him. I love that this game is very untraditional compared to other games. Literal corporate warfare. In the real world, corporate warfare means shady business practices, insider trading, and economic warfare with trade routes and resources. In this, it’s legit warfare. Sending private military companies to fight against others. I love the cast of characters. Adam, Faridah, Sarif, Pritchard, Zhao, Megan, and everyone in between. I love Adam and Pritchard’s chemistry. Pritchard is such a dick, but he has a certain charm about him. David Sarif is a personal favorite of mine as well as Malik. 

With that said, this story could’ve been so much more. It’s pretty clear that a lot of content was cut from the game. Story elements, whole maps, and other features. It’s a shame because this game has a lot of potential to tell a very interesting and deep story about the dangers of human augmentation, corporate atrocities, and the horrors of unregulated scientific research. Now, if you have heard about this game or the series, then you'll know that the Illuminati is the source of all of this. This game is full of Easter eggs to the original Deus Ex game from 1999 and is an excellent prequel to it. Bob Page, Gary Savage, Joseph Manderly, references to the Morpheus Project, nano-augmentation, and several other things pop up in the game.

Graphically, the game isn't too impressive. It looks like a PS3 launch title. The in-game character models and everything looks like they need to be touched up. The cutscenes look great though. Had the game looked like how it does in the cutscenes, I feel like it would've made the game a lot more enjoyable. But this is nowhere near the level of InFamous 2, graphics wise.

The art direction for the game is amazingly creative. A common theme with each Deus Ex game is that there's a color theme to each game. Deus Ex 1 is blue, Invisible War is silver, Human Revolution is yellow, and Mankind Divided is gray, kinda like that of the Persona series. The whole aesthetic of the game is cyberpunk/cyber renaissance and the art directors did this perfectly. Just look at Hengsha with a second story to its city or the design of the LIMB Clinics, Sarif’s office, Zhao’s penthouse, and many other places. The overall aesthetic and art direction for the game is easily one of the game's strongest points.

The music is top notch amazing too. Michael McCann killed it with this OST. Everything sounds mysterious and bleak with a hint of action and uneasiness to it. My favorite tracks are: “Icarus”, “Everybody Lies”, “First and Last”, “Detroit Marketplace”, “The Mole”, and “Singapore Ambient”. 

The acting and voice acting for the game is great too. Adam was perfectly casted by Elias Toufexis and David Sarif was played by Stephen Shellen. These two were the best performances here. Special shoutout to Andreas Apergis (Pritchard), Marcel Jeannin (Wayne Haas), and Kim Bubbs (Eliza Cassan). I will say, there were some issues with Hugh Darrow, the millionaire who created augmentation technology. During his social boss fight (I’ll get to that in a bit), they had to do reshoots for this and the new actor neglected his limp, breaking Darrow’s character and game immersion.

Onto gameplay. Human Revolution is a first person RPG where your actions have consequences. Every single thing you do will have an outcome to it. Here’s an example: In the first mission after you come back from sick leave, you have the option to immediately go to Faridah and leave for the manufacturing plant, but if you decide to wait awhile and explore Sarif Industries, David Sarif will start yelling at you to get a move on. If you wait too long, the hostages at the plant will be killed. Stuff like this will happen all throughout the game and it’s one of the game’s biggest features.

The game is open world. You’ll be visiting Detroit, Hengsha, Montreal, Singapore, and the Arctic circle (Detroit and Hengsha twice). There is a fairly large amount of content to do here. There are a bunch of side quests to do. My favorite side quests are: “Acquaintances Forgotten”, “Shanghai Justice”, and “Cloak and Daggers”. There’s also lots of hidden areas for you to find. Finding these will reward you with XP and even some goodies (weapons, ammo, Praxis Kits, and bits of lore).

So there are multiple ways to play the game, which is why I played it twice for this review (and I was hoping to get the platinum). My first playthrough, I was going guns blazing, killing any and all enemies that I see. Using a combat rifle, revolver, stun gun, and, at some point, a rocket launcher. This playthrough was extremely fun, but a bit too easy for me. In my second playthrough, I did stealth and pacifist, using a tranquilizer gun, stun gun, shotgun, and PEPS gun. This run was more tedious as I had to be sure not to kill anyone (except bosses) and not set off any alarms. Sadly, I fucked up somewhere (pretty sure in the DLC) and I was unable to get the “Foxiest of the Hounds” trophy (set off no alarms in your playthrough). This run was tedious, but very easy for me because I did New Game +, making it that I already had all of my augments.

With every RPG, you can customize the MC in many different ways. With Adam, you choose his dialogues, and depending on how you approach certain situations, different outcomes will occur. If you are a dick in a conversation, you may miss out on some sweet goodies. I know this is usually how RPGs handle it, but the way Human Revolution tackles these situations is different from other games that I have played. The game will notice if you are playing aggressively or stealthfully and either compliment or attack you for it. With that said, the game seems to like it when you play more stealthily than aggressively. You can have many different loadouts for Adam. You have a handful of weapons you can choose from and you can upgrade these to be even better. I will say, you only really need one primary weapon and the stun gun. I never found a use for the Heavy Rifle and Sniper Rifle, but I do like the option of having these.

There is hacking in the game, and no. It’s not like Fallout. It’s better. When you start up a hack, you have to maneuver a small map, capturing nodes and loot goodies until you reach your goal. Careful though as you can get caught by the network security. Once you get caught, you are on a time limit to complete the hack. These minigames are very entertaining and easily one of the best parts of the game. It’s such a simple thing but that way the game does it makes it so much more than it already is. There is this one hack at the end of Omega Ranch and it is the stupidest shit ever. It’s the hardest hack in the game and your reward is just a reference to a Megadeth song lol. I wasted so many resources on this damn thing.

So to upgrade Adam, you need to accumulate XP points. Collect enough and these turn into Praxis Points. You can then invest Praxis Points into unlocking your dormant augmentations. Some of these augmentations are a literal game changer (like invisibility and smart vision). 85% of these augmentations are very useful and make Adam extremely overpowered compared to his enemies. That last 15% are useless imo. Some of these augmentations are necessary to discovering hidden paths in the game (ability to break walls, rebreather, EMP immunity, Icarus landing system, and CASIE social aug). Even with all of the extraordinary augmentations that Adam has, it still feels a bit lackluster and could be added upon.

There are two types of bosses in the game. First are your normal bosses. These guys are the spec ops members from the attack at the beginning of the game. In the Director’s Cut, the devs added more content to these fights instead of “shoot at it until it dies”. That’s still the goal, but now you have a lot more to work with here. Take the first boss, Barrett. In this, you can sneak around in air vents and unlock the garage doors. In these, you can find more weapons, ammo, and even turrets for you to use at your leisure. With these additions, you can spice up these boss battles a lot more instead of hide behind cover and shoot. Even with all of this, I still felt that the bosses were too easy. Might just be me knowing how to deal with these guys, but I wish they were more difficult. My favorite boss is probably Fedorovah, the second boss. The second type of bosses are social boss fights. These are arguments for Adam to encounter. All but two of these are skippable, but I personally love going for them as they are a lot of fun. My favorite social boss is Bill Taggert. Confronting him in front of the press was a huge, ballsy move on Adam’s part and the whole conversation is incredibly well done. Another one of my favorites is the bartender in the Hive in Hengsha, where you try to convince him to let you see Tong.

So in the Director’s Cut of the game, you gain access to more content. First is the pre-order mission where you have to rescue Tong’s son, Tracer, from Belltower clutches. This mission just panned out the length of the game and was a nice Easter egg for the original Deus Ex (since Tracer is a character from the game). There’s nothing to really talk about with this mission outside of its replay value. You can approach this mission in MANY different ways and it’s self contained to the rest of the game since it was originally a pre-order bonus.

The second added content is the DLC ‘The Missing Link’. So about 70% through the game, there is a small time skip. This DLC fills you in on what happened here. After Adam leaves Hengsha for the second time, he boards a ship. He gets caught and is stripped of his augmentation upgrades. This DLC goes over his adventures on the Hei Zhen Zhu and the Belltower military base Rifleman Bank Station. Adam, with the help of a double agent, will unravel a dark conspiracy and help blow the lid on Belltower. This DLC is amazing and every time I replay it, I always discover something new. A new path, a new detail to its story, anything new and I love seeing little attention to details like this. This DLC has one of the best plot reveals I have ever seen. It has to do with a certain room and that’s all I’m going to say on it. Commander Burke was a decent villain for the DLC, but nothing to really write about. I do like how he keeps antagonizing you after shit hits the fan. In this DLC, you can tell that the devs applied what they learned from making the base game and upgraded their skills to make ‘The Missing Link’ as good as it is. The DLC looks better than the base game, tighter level design, and excellent rippling effects all throughout the DLC. Also, another thing. There is a trophy for this DLC called “Factory Zero”. This trophy is legit one of my greatest gaming achievements because of how hard it is. So the DLC strips you of your augmentation upgrades right? This trophy says you can not upgrade yourself until you beat the DLC. This challenge run was really difficult, but I would totally do it again because it was fun as fuck. Overall, this DLC is a fun, pain in the ass. My only problem with it is that I wish you can choose to play it either in chronological order or play it after you beat the main story. Because this DLC came out after the base game but takes place in the middle of it, it puts the player in a weird middle ground between the old and new. Going from a polished DLC back to the unfinished base game is just weird. At least give the player the option to run through the DLC either after Hengsha 2 or after you beat the game.

In the Director’s Cut, there is a director’s commentary. During cutscenes and specific parts of the maps, you can trigger these beacons in which you can hear the devs talk about the development cycle, the choices they made to create Human Revolution, and the development hell that this game went through. Hearing these discussions opens up a whole new perspective on game development and it’s all very fascinating. I wish more games had this as this is a very unique feature in a game. In the commentaries, you can tell that the devs were very passionate about this game and they wanted it to be as perfect as they could make it. They had so many ideas for the game, but due to time constraints, they had to cut a lot of content from the game. The entire Upper Hengsha map, Bangalore (India), Utah, a whole important character was basically cut (head commander of the Belltower Hengsha operations) (you only see him once if you sneak into Tong’s office), extended parts of the maps, and so many more things were cut from the game. This legit pisses me off because if they were given another year tops, I’m sure this game would’ve been in the masterpiece category. 

So this game has a number of issues. The main thing is that the game is unfinished. With all of the cut content, this game isn’t capable of reaching its peak quality. Combat can use some refining and even more enemy variety would be great. Graphics need some improvement too. Hell, I wouldn’t mind more consequential actions too. A lot of the story points don’t hit as hard as they should either. It’s still a good story, but it needs more. All of these issues would’ve been solved if the game was in the oven for a longer period of time and It’s a shame that the final version of the game is incomplete.

Overall, this game is a must-play. If you have access to a PC, PS3, or 360, go get this game. Even with all of the cut content, this is still a good game that was overshadowed by Skyrim, which was released later that year. If any game is in dire need of a complete remaster, it’s this game. Even with all of the game’s issues, I still love it. I’ll be playing this game again in the future and hopefully I’ll get the platinum trophy.

Thanks for reading and I’ll see you next time.

This is Zorgak, signing off.