Deus Ex Human Revolution

[Adam]

Is the alert system as whack as I think it is? I would throw a box to the other side of a room, and the guards start their search by coming over to where I am instead of where the box first made a noise. Pretty sure it's not supposed to work that way lol. Really enjoying it though, love the augmentations. Always feels like there's something I want but have to neglect something else that's useful if I get it. Doing a sneaky sneaky playthrough first, then I will use the newgame+ feature to blow everyone up

[briareos_kerensky]

Yeah, AI tends to ignore noises made by objects while they immediately jump at you.

[briareos_kerensky]

Proceeding steadily through the game...and the AI baffles me every time. Got to

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the military compound were you fight Barret: I've tried to be sneaky, but after realizing that enemy soldiers are next to brain-dead, I went for a 10mm pistol and grenades. Now, I know that getting detected in a military compound will surely trigger all sorts of troubles that cannot be represented in a videogame if you want the player to choose between different paths, but at least enemies shouldn't charge in groups toward the only entry point where you're camping and sit in just one spot while endlessy spraying bullet.

Combat boils down to find cover, wait until enemies find cover and reload, pop out for a headshot. It's kinda boring, especially when speaking about professional soldiers, not street thugs.
Patrol patterns are just damn stupid, it's possible to hide behind doors without taking action and enemies will just start to say "hey, he's gone!". No, I'm right here, I haven't moved from the spot where I killed two of your companions, come and check the door. Please. I'm here. I'm not even cloacked.
The battle with

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Barret was also devastatingly easy thanks to a sniper rifle and the cloack augmentation: clocked right away, found an air duct, sniped him from an air vent while invisible. He would just throw grenades (that wouldn't reach on high ground, no matter what he tried) and six bullets through the head were enough to silence him.

The game is at its best when interacting with other characters, dialogues are intriguing and animations are excellent...for the combat you must have extremely high willingness to suspend your disbelief.

[Golgo]

After a disappointing first attempt a while back I re-bought the Director's Cut version and this time I'm finding it totally engrossing. The AI seems better than first version, although I'd be hard pressed to say why. I'm taking a fairly strict stealth/hacker/chat-em-up route, though, so maybe the AI limitations are less exposed that way.

[Golgo]

The lead's deadpanning in this gets comical after a while. Wouldn't you think that, over the course of hundreds of lines, an actor would try to vary his delivery from time to time?

[briareos_kerensky]

I've dropped the game, not because it's bad (it has its faults, sure), but because the game doesn't throw anything new into the mix, after the fourth of fifth complex you need to sneak around, everything becomes very stale. The optical camouflage is kinda overpowered, and if coupled with sound suppressors and longer/better energy, you can go around undetected, anywhere; I always try to be sneaky and use the optical camouflage only in certain situations, then I screw up something, and I'm hit by how bad the AI is: having trained soldiers walking through a doorway already littered with bodies right into my crosshairs is comical. Not to mention that with a silencer and the armour piercing upgrade on a 10mm pistol you can headshot pretty much everyone and the AI just enters into alert mode; miss the shot and it goes full berserker...uh.

But I was committed in finishing the game, though I kinda lost interest in completing all sidequests; then the game throws in a twist...or better, THE twist.
After

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sneaking on the ship from Hengsha to wherever, the game strips all your items and augmentations. It makes sense story-wise and creates an interesting scenario, and you get your items back...no wait, you only get your weapons back, with no ammo loaded, and you only get back part of your Praxis points.

This bullsh*t killed the game for me; I don't know if you get everything back when this scenario is done (I think it's Director's Cut only), but essentially it's like destroying 50% of what you've done before.