Have now acquired and played the game.
As a side note, my housemate has a fairly high-end desktop PC gaming rig set up right next to the household television (hence PS3) screen. I'm sure this hasn't been a universal experience, but I've watched him playing this game at the same time as I did. He's been crashing, on average, every hour and a half while I played the whole shebang for up to seven hours at a stretch without so much as a glitch.
Seems there's some advantage to kinda-sorta uniform hardware.
Kaleigh, I largely agree with your critique, though I think a good deal of that is defensible. Most of my quibbles boil down to minor preferences and so on.
[spoiler]Gameplay
Melee kills, as opposed to knockouts, should not be so damn loud. It's freaking hard to scream with a slit throat, and the "slitching" sound of blades passing through flesh should not be substantially noisier than the brief fist-fights you get into doing knockouts. There should be a reason, other than ammo economy and nifty visuals, for cutting people down with blades instead of capping them in the head with a silenced, laser-sighted 10mm.
There should be People Worth Killing after you get the plasma rifle. "I Am One With The Machine" end boss chica, mechs, turrets, and innocent "zombies" don't count.
Even playing on "Give Me Deus Ex" mode right off the bat, endgame was too damned easy. Died more times against the first boss than against the entire complex.
Enemy AI = good. Enemy communications and security protocols = moronic. Consequences for tripping alarms are trivial, assuming you don't mind killing every luckless bastard in earshot. Would be better if every alarm tripped made further progress substantially more difficult (later enemies are alerted, have time to set up kill zones, etc.).
All forms of play may be viable, but not all are equally rewarding. Game still rewards actions taken not because they advance the cause, but because they give points. E.g., hacking every single alarm panel on every wall everywhere.[/spoiler]
Edit: a couple more ...
[spoiler]Complementary function of certain augs was non-obvious to the point of stupidity. For instance: large numbers of batteries are potentially useful for high-intensity stealth functions such as cloaked attack (silence, cloak, sprint over, KO two dudes, repeat until out of batteries). They serve no combat function that isn't handled equally well by a fistful of nutrient bars; only reason for combat-heavy character to get more batteries is to get greater efficiency out of high-end nutrient sources.
Silent movement faster than walking speed consumes energy. Punching people consumes energy. X-ray vision consumes energy. Hacking people with blades consumes energy....
... Whereas falling great distances without harm (and with very flashy effects), regenerating from near-fatal injury, doing the augmented-Olympic high-jump, and monitoring in real time the position, facing, disposition, and type of all uncloaked hostiles within a hundred or so feet? All of those don't.
"Analysis" hacking augs are essentially useless, at least for people who get good at hacking. Odds of remaining undetected can be estimated accurately with a little experience, and neither I nor any other in-game hacker I know of has ever met a datastore he didn't like, whatever its contents.
If you can one-shot most enemy personnel with a silenced pistol and one-shot a war mech with an EMP grenade, what exactly is the point of an inaccurate, noisy, difficult-to-find-ammo-for, yet surprisingly-ineffective-even-on-a-direct-hit rocket launcher?
The sniper rifle accepts a laser sight. The apparent sole advantage to this is that it lets you aim when shooting from the hip, a task at which it does not excel with or without the sight. If I'm going to modify the hell out of my sniper rifle, I want a laser dot I can see through my scope, please.
While enemy AI is generally good (aside from a medieval "earshot only" communication scheme in an age of universal connectivity, as noted above), you'd think they'd react a little as more and more members of their teams go silent and/or disappear. See "Batman: Arkham Asylum" stealth sequences for good enemy reaction to vanishing team members (intensified search patterns, patrolling in pairs, eventual break down of discipline in face of increasing terror).
Nobody ever looks in, much less follows you down, the vents, not even when you just ducked into one in plain view of God and man. This should be an immediate invitation to a grenade hucked into the crawlspace. Instead, you can sit there and bounce gas grenades around the corner into the crowd of gathered hostiles with impunity. Alternatively, you can wait for the lone mark who glimpsed you to walk right up to the vent (so that he can't possibly look down it), then pop back around the corner and take your time lining up a shot on his kneecap with the scoped traq gun. Yes, I do mean from six feet away.[/spoiler]
And I should make clear, I LOVE the game. Having finished my first stealth-shooter style playthrough, I'm now working on a pacifist run.
Author
Topic: Deus Ex: Human Revolution (Read 16441 times)