The game's complex systems and non-linear level design are there to support your behavior, however eccentric that may be. With so little overt guidance and so many abilities deriving from your gradual body augmentation, you gain a satisfying sense of confidence, agency and ownership over Deus Ex's sandbox. Whether you hack your way through a back door to get it, crawl through some air vents, cloak yourself and approach directly, or punch a hole in a brittle wall is up to you and your prosthetic arms. Never mind the mission objectives - how many games trust you to have the rocket launcher within the first few hours? If you explore and overhear the right conversation, you can find one well before a weapons merchant offers it. Every element of the game is contiguous to the next and part of a fantastic, coherent whole. Beyond some isolated, plot-specific locations, there are no demarcated levels and no sections that go "Shush!" when it's time for stealth. If you see gun-toting guards marching about, you should know to approach with a lower profile. Human Revolution has too much integrity and subtlety to put a giant DANGER arrow over a hostile area. And the game won't break if you hop over a line, because there are no lines. They exist long before you get there, and can offer side-quests, bonus experience points and - yes - objectives that may be crucial at a later stage. These are not constructed to support individual missions exclusively. How many games would allow you to complete mission objectives out of order, or even before they've been placed into the conspiracy plot's to-do list? As you explore an embittered, defeated Detroit City (and later, a Chinese interpretation of Final Fantasy VII's double-stack metropolis, Midgar), you'll discover a restrained sprawl of accessible apartments, sewers, slums and guarded targets of interest. It's no great shame, because shooting is easily one of the least interesting approaches to the game's objectives, and the only negative side-effect of Human Revolution's demonstrable confidence in its player. The ability to grow out of it as you upgrade your armor and modify weapons with wonderful things like laser sights and armor-piercing capabilities is definitely one of the game's strengths, but you'll find Jensen to be slow and made of glass if you start shooting with no moderation. There is perhaps no greater proof that this is a role-playing game, however, than the ability to conclude just about every conversation by punching your quest giver into an unconscious rag doll.%Gallery-131342%If there's one caveat to Deus Ex's strategy-through-augmentation approach, it's the inherent bias towards stealth and hacking. And Adam Jensen, a stoic security manager who returns from dramatic near-death as a grumpy cyborg, can warp himself biologically to accommodate those routes. Environments don't exist to funnel you through perfectly scripted events - they're complicated, multi-tiered stacks of obvious and hidden pathways. While the Mass Effect series sheds its stats and inventories in favor of forging an intelligent, emotionally driven shooter, Deus Ex: Human Revolution examines and embraces the structure of Ion Storm's 11-year-old classic, Deus Ex: Didn't Have a Subtitle. This game thinks you're an adult and expects you to handle your shit. Deus Ex: Human Revolution isn't exempt from the clumsy tutorial crowd, but once it gets through the jarring video pop-ups, it quickly stops treating you like an imbecilic waypoint-marker addict. Most games won't convey that opinion so indelicately, instead hiding it between the lines of text that ceaselessly tell you where to go, what to do and exactly how to do it.
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