The AI in friendly areas now has a flimsy concept of suspicious behaviour, and you can build a hilariously conspicuous cardboard-box secrecy fort around a security terminal to hide your criminal hack. It makes up for that by interlocking it with other systems in entertaining ways: the slick, surprisingly natural third-person cover system lets you hide behind any vertical surface, including the ones you've placed there yourself. Human Revolution has that exact system вЂ“ though the more cluttered levels mean it takes a while to learn which objects you can move.

If you can pick up a box and stack it to reach an alternate route on the first level, you can stack every similar box in the game and reach anywhere physically possible. The soul of Deus Ex is in its systems: simple sets of rules with no scripting, no exceptions, and no accounting for what the player might do with them. And if your ears are still ringing from the last gunfight, you can slip through the next area quietly.ДЄnd these are just the routes the developers have planned. If you're bored of vents, you can open fire. If stealth gets too hard, you can find an easier route. The pleasure of that freedom is that it leaves major elements like pacing, challenge and variety up to the player. The man-sized air vent is a clichГ©, but honestly, it never stops being satisfying to bypass a locked door or a group of enemies. The main thing Human Revolution gets right is giving you options: every mission gives you a labyrinth of ways to get to your objective. And lastly, what it does better than the first game ever did (amazingly, loads).

Secondly, the few things it misses (not that much). So I'll talk about it in three parts: firstly, everything that Human Revolution recaptures about the original Deus Ex (quite a lot). It is, I guess I should mention, the best game I've played in four years. Human Revolution is a prequel: a global conspiracy thriller set at a time when replacing your body parts with high-tech prosthetics is a violently controversial new trend.

Despite a sequel in 2003, the first is still considered by me, this magazine, and a lot of our readers as the best game ever made. The Deus Ex games are first-person shooter RPGs that let you approach your objectives in a way that suits you: direct violence if you enjoy it, stealth if you don't, and throwing heavy objects around if you like getting caught, beaten and shot.

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