Sickypoo - Deus Ex

[essentialsaltes]

Both Dr. Pookie and I have been sick as dogs (are dogs particularly sick?) and the weekend was mostly a loss, though I very determinedly ventured outside and completed the monthly grilling on Saturday afternoon -- that was literally the first I'd been out of the house all day, and the first thing I ate all day. Not that I could taste it.

Unable to run outside and play like normal kids, my thumbs have gotten extra workouts and I made my way to the end of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. This is the first of the series I've played, but since it's a prequel, I guess that's just fine, right?
Good clean cyberpunk fun. It's very neat that you have a lot of options for every mission: you can go Rambo on all the enemies, you can sneak through air vents to avoid them, or hack security robots to go smoosh your enemies. You 'level up' by buying more cyber augmentations to add to your poor body, and you can definitely tweak that to help your particular play style. I tended to choose a little from column A and a little from column B, but you could really do some weird things... max out your skin so you can turn invisible for a good long time.... max out your legs so you can sprint for a good long time, and also make no noise while sprinting. Enter level with 100 bad guys and sprint invisibly and silently under their noses.
A lot of people have criticized the boss fights, and with reason. Hey let's lock em in a room with a bad guy. And to make it hard... let's give the bad guy like a million hit points and unlimited hand grenades! They just stick out from the rest of the game, and, most damning, they are not. clever. in. the. least.
There are a few places where you use dialogue to convince an NPC. Though you're just selecting from your three canned responses, it's designed and written quite nicely, and provides at least an illusion of role-playing as you try to psych out the NPC's motivation. Better yet, on a cinematic note, they ratchet up the tension in a cool way. If you give the correct response in the dialogue (I think - maybe it's automatic) your character takes a few steps closer to the NPC, and the camera focuses in tighter as the dialogue continues. It may be a cheap trick, but it looks pretty boss.

Pretty idiotic/ formulaic plot, but well written, if that makes any sense. There are some nice funny details here and there, like the cops talking about the movie Robocop. Or the bathroom with the three seashells. Or as you hack various computers on a network, you find email evidence of the pranks that some of the people are playing on one coworker they dislike. 'I'm waiting for you to give me back my stapler. I KNOW YOU HAVE IT, BOB!'

All in all, plenty of fun, but I don't see it having replay value for me. Sorry, Malik. RIP.

Comments

[boymaenad.livejournal.com]

they drool, whine, sniffle, and bark when they speak. so yes. :)