Deus Ex Human Revolution

[EvilBoris]

If the chat pad works, then I bet a regular USB keyboard works too.

I've just got to Hengsha, which is a pretty big difference in environment, so I bought the Icarus Landing System Augment.

That is COOL! Don't think I'll get bored of using that, AND it's very useful on that level.

[NW2013]

Starting to enjoy it more now that I'm getting hardcore and fully upgraded on some augs. I'm also surprising myself by enjoying the stealth. Also loving the hacking especially

->Open Spoiler<-

turning the robots against their master

.

I'll have to wait to rate until I see how the story ends, think I'm pretty close to finishing now but that's because I'm playing on easy.

[rmoxon]

Just wanted to say I love this so far. Really amazing atmosphere and art direction and I'm finding the game immensely fun to play. I love sneaking around through ducts and finding hidden areas. I know you can choose how to play the game, but it definitely feels like you're supposed to be playing stealth. It's not a problem as I'd probably choose this anyway, but every now and then it would be nice to charge in like a hero and not die in one shot!

Just upgrade your armor, once its fully upgraded you can take quite alot of damage before dying, this is another reason why people saying it is too geared towards stealth are just wrong really.

You need to upgrade your augemtations in consideration with how you are playing it. This game is geared towards being whatever type of game you want to make it really.

[EvilBoris]

You could play the Hitman games by just running through and shooting everyone should that be how to choose to play them, but are you telling me that they weren't geared towards stealth?

The game constantly rewards you for stealth/ non lethal encounters. And more level design and consideration has gone into making the game work well for stealth,

You get bonus XP for hacking
You get bonus XP for getting through an area without being seen
You get Bonus XP for knocking out or tranquilising enenies instead of killing them
There are secondary objectives that you get bonus XP for doing witout being seen/killing anyone.
You get Bonus XP for achieving objectives via talking instead of killing.

The game constantly rewards you for not playing the game like an FPS and is encouraging stealth as a result. I'm pretty sure the whole "play it how you like" spiel that we've heard on numerous occasions from the developers was just a marketing excercise to encourage people to buy who would of given it a miss had they labeled it a stealth title.

I'd almost say it was the oppositie of Crysis, which was a decent FPS with basic stealth element built in.

[NW2013]

Complete-me-do. I just blasted through the main story really because I don't like all these 'my cat is stuck up a tree' sidequests and I'm not a completist in terms of doing every ending, unlocking everything, etc. Took me almost 13 hours to play through. I did die a lot though to start with.

The gameplay choices got a lot better as you improve your augs as you can come up with a few different ways of getting around situations. Some of the takedowns, etc were cool too. Don't know if I'll ever go back and re-do sections and I know I certainly won't try to complete anything without setting off alarms, that's masochism to me

Shame I only have a PC to play it on as I can't sell my copy now.

[abigsmurf]

You could play the Hitman games by just running through and shooting everyone should that be how to choose to play them, but are you telling me that they weren't geared towards stealth?

The game constantly rewards you for stealth/ non lethal encounters. And more level design and consideration has gone into making the game work well for stealth,

You get bonus XP for hacking
You get bonus XP for getting through an area without being seen
You get Bonus XP for knocking out or tranquilising enenies instead of killing them
There are secondary objectives that you get bonus XP for doing witout being seen/killing anyone.
You get Bonus XP for achieving objectives via talking instead of killing.

The game constantly rewards you for not playing the game like an FPS and is encouraging stealth as a result. I'm pretty sure the whole "play it how you like" spiel that we've heard on numerous occasions from the developers was just a marketing excercise to encourage people to buy who would of given it a miss had they labeled it a stealth title.

I'd almost say it was the oppositie of Crysis, which was a decent FPS with basic stealth element built in.

Yep, that's the big annoyance. The game only rewards different methods of stealth. Why, for example, doesn't the game reward you for headshots? For multi-kills? For killing a series of people without getting shot? It's not hard to do. Playing as an FPS is already difficult because of how fragile you are and how little ammo there is, the lack of any XP bonuses makes it even worse.

Other big annoyance: upgrading energy cells is a waste of an augmentation and I've wasted 2 upgrades on them. As you can't recharge anything other than the first cell, it makes it pointless except for bosses (and then you suffer from the classic megalixir paradox).

[rmoxon]

You could play the Hitman games by just running through and shooting everyone should that be how to choose to play them, but are you telling me that they weren't geared towards stealth?

The game constantly rewards you for stealth/ non lethal encounters. And more level design and consideration has gone into making the game work well for stealth,

You get bonus XP for hacking
You get bonus XP for getting through an area without being seen
You get Bonus XP for knocking out or tranquilising enenies instead of killing them
There are secondary objectives that you get bonus XP for doing witout being seen/killing anyone.
You get Bonus XP for achieving objectives via talking instead of killing.

The game constantly rewards you for not playing the game like an FPS and is encouraging stealth as a result. I'm pretty sure the whole "play it how you like" spiel that we've heard on numerous occasions from the developers was just a marketing excercise to encourage people to buy who would of given it a miss had they labeled it a stealth title.

I'd almost say it was the oppositie of Crysis, which was a decent FPS with basic stealth element built in.

You get bonus XP for knocking out enemies, but if you shoot everyone youre more likley to atract more attention and so you will kill alot more people. The way the game is designed, it all balances itself out. there is no right or wrong way to play this game. The best way to play is actualy to mix things up a bit.

A Large proportion of the game is about infiltrating buildings, so stealth is usualy the more obvious tactic, that doesnt mean the game is geared towards stealth though, its all about playing the game however you want too. One of the most exciting things about this game is situations when you have used stealth and it goes wrong and youre forced into a shoot out, its intense and alot of fun and you never feel the need to restart, you just deal with the situation, which in turn proves the game isnt a stealth focused game.

Much like Crysis 2 though if you are playing this game in a gung ho fashion then its far too easy just to tank your way through situations, once you have upgraded your armor you can take alot of damage and have no problems clearing out rooms of people.

Likewise the bosses are also really easy if youre upgraded in the right way, they can be put down in a few seconds when you know what you are doing.

[EvilBoris]

Yep, that's the big annoyance. The game only rewards different methods of stealth. Why, for example, doesn't the game reward you for headshots? For multi-kills? For killing a series of people without getting shot? It's not hard to do. Playing as an FPS is already difficult because of how fragile you are and how little ammo there is, the lack of any XP bonuses makes it even worse.

Other big annoyance: upgrading energy cells is a waste of an augmentation and I've wasted 2 upgrades on them. As you can't recharge anything other than the first cell, it makes it pointless except for bosses (and then you suffer from the classic megalixir paradox).

I'm not entirely convinced it ever was intented to be played as an FPS, the controls alone make that hard.

The energy bars as weird, you can refill the other bars by eating, but why there isn't an upgrade that recharges them all I don't know.

[abigsmurf]

I think they probably realised late on that the takedowns broke the game. With 3 or 4 energy bars it would likely be very possible to go through large segments of the game by simply charging into enemies and spamming takedowns.

[Flabio]

Played a fair bit more of this now, and it's fun enough, but it's just Deus Ex really isn't it? It's basically the same game as before, only with nicer visuals (yet not quite cutting edge ones).

Good, but I can't see it making my game of the year list.

[rmoxon]

I think they probably realised late on that the takedowns broke the game. With 3 or 4 energy bars it would likely be very possible to go through large segments of the game by simply charging into enemies and spamming takedowns.

Yeah, if you have 3 or 4 built up then that is quite possible to do so if they all chaged back up it would be way too easy. Once you get further into it and have loads of upgrades youre actualy pretty unstopable, which is a stark contrast to the whimp you start off as.

I feel that alot of the most enjoyable momments for me have been when all hell breaks lose. For instance there is a sub mission where you can pay this bar tender to stop hasseling a woman, but then I decided that I didnt like him at all so I knocked him out and took my cash back, this kicked off a massive gunfight in the bar, I took out about 20 of his men and then walked stright out of the front door. It was fantastic.

So even though I dont think its a focused FPS any more than I think its a focused stealth game, I do think that some of the shoot outs that can happen are great.

[Jimmyboi]

As for the energy bar thing I think you're probably better off investing in the quick recharge augmentations rather than investing in additional bars. At least that way you can use your first bar quicker rather than ending up with 7 bars that all empty.

[saturn-gamer]

Its a bit retarded that only one bar auto-fills. You basically have to hold a stack of candy in your inventory to remedy that.

[Kieran76]

I only picked this up yesterday after having second thoughts because of all the stealth talk. I can't do stealth. Loving it, padding around the city along with the hacking reminds me a bit of Shadowrun on the SNES. It has been a while since I played a game all night then find that I am thinking about it as soon as I wake up. Funniest moment was accidenty punching a Hobo.

[PeteJ]

Played a fair bit more of this now, and it's fun enough, but it's just Deus Ex really isn't it? It's basically the same game as before, only with nicer visuals (yet not quite cutting edge ones).

Good, but I can't see it making my game of the year list.

If someone told me before hand that this was just Deus Ex with better visuals, then I'd automatically put it up there as a GOTY contender! As it stands I pretty much agree, it's a very worthy sequel to one of the greatest games ever made and up there with Portal 2 as my game of the year.

You can play the game however you want, not sure why people are arguing it is only designed for stealth. It's even designed as such that it isn't even black and white - you can go in guns blazing right down to sneak passed everything, with everything in between allowed too. I play sneaky but use a silenced pistol as my main weapon and have a backup shotgun just incase. Works wonders As mentioned before, you get less points for kills (and you do get a bonus for headshots) because if you play that way there are more enemies to kill.

PS the first boss -

->Open Spoiler<-

What was all the fuss about? I have no augs in combat but all you had to do was throw canasters at him then fire off a few rounds while he was stunned. Repeat that three times and he was down. Even if you went in carrying NO weapons at all - and if that was the case I would ask what are you carrying? - then the area had plenty of weaponary and ammo around.

edit - Deus Ex HR has gone to the top of the charts, good to see!