I've been playing
Deus Ex: Human Revolution for the past couple of days, and it's been an interesting experience.
Just as when I played the original
Deus Ex and its slightly awkward sequel
Invisible War, I'm afraid my
perfectionist tendencies (though not, I'd like to think, a lack of skill) are to blame for the amount of time it's taking me to finish the game. It's hard to resist loading my last autosave every time I trip an alarm or waste an item, but part of me still knows it's more fun to improvise when facing the consequences of a stupid mistake, so I'm trying to keep the save scumming to a minimum.
In terms of item hoarding, though, I'm still hopeless, just as I am in every game with an inventory. When I bought
Human Revolution, it was on sale, but so was all of the downloadable content, and like a fool I bought the whole package. The end result was an inventory full of extra stuff — a few bombs, a silenced sniper rifle, and a double-barreled shotgun — and I've been carrying it around thinking "hey, I might still use this." More generally, my inventory is full of crazy things that I've been waiting for the right time to use, and some of these things are loud and explosive.
But they're going mostly unused, because I've decided to take the non-lethal stealth approach. It seemed like the easiest option in the beginning of the game, and it continues to be the easiest option now that I've had plenty of practice at sneaking and very little practice at shooting. Like its predecessors,
Human Revolution doesn't seem to encourage players to charge in with guns blazing. Perhaps this would have been a viable option if, earlier in the game, I had picked up a nice assault rifle and every combat-oriented augmentation I could afford. But I didn't, and despite my extensive experience with more generic first-person shooters, I found myself dying very quickly whenever I made the mistake of being seen.
So I stuck to sneaking around, as the developers intended, and at this point it only seemed right to avoid killing people whenever possible. My weapons of choice are a tranquilizer gun and my own metal fists. I've probably left about 150 unconscious dudes in my wake, and I hope their imaginary families appreciate it. There have been times when lethal force would have made things easier, but I've already come this far. If it takes me twice as long to complete a mission because I've committed to carefully sneaking past the guards instead of blowing them up with fragmentation grenades, so be it.
But even a non-lethal run through the game will involve some necessary bloodshed. The bosses in
Human Revolution are notorious for taking that element of choice away from the player; with one exception (or so I've heard), they all must be killed. So far, I've fought two of them, and both fights were an unwelcome departure from the playstyle I had already established. Unable to sneak away or knock my enemy unconscious with a punch to the face, I was forced into a brutal fight to the death. I realized it was a good thing that I kept all those lethal weapons in my inventory instead of dropping them on the ground when I made that commitment to imaginary nonviolence.
Of course, there are always weapons lying around in the room when a boss fight occurs — the developers make sure these fights are winnable — but running around the room collecting loot (and accumulating damage) before even starting to fight back is an easy way to die.
In any case, as with most boss fights in most games, I died more than a few times in each fight before getting the hang of the enemy's attack pattern and thereby developing a viable strategy. And in each case, the strategy I ended up using wasn't exactly as fun as I hoped it would be. It wasn't the jarring transition from methodical stealth to ultra violent carnage that spoiled the experience. It was the transition from a semi-realistic world into one in which a
dude can take multiple shots to the head from a high-powered sniper rifle and not die, and in which a
chick can happily absorb a hundred rounds from a heavy machine gun after stepping on a couple of landmines and
then blow
me to pieces. Yeah, I get it, they're mechanically augmented, but so is the protagonist, and the superhuman feats do need to be kept within reason. Even metal parts can be blown up.
When I nail a guy in the head with a sniper rifle (or any other weapon) I expect him to go down, or at least be severely wounded. Even with a pure adamantium skull, he should have a concussion. If the developers want a boss fight to be challenging, they should be able to think of ways to make it so without giving the enemy so many health points that the suspension of disbelief is utterly destroyed before the fight is half-way over. If they don't want the player to blow the guy's head off in one shot, they should find a clever way to keep the player from doing so, rather than making the guy's head (along with his other parts) nearly indestructible.
I suppose a force field would have been too much of a cliché, while taking away the player's sniper rifle would have been too restrictive. Maybe there isn't a good solution. That is, maybe — just maybe — games that strive for any amount of realism shouldn't be designed with long boss fights in the first place. A fight involving firearms should be over in less than ten seconds if both parties are mortal human beings, with or without super cool prosthetics.
Human Revolution isn't the first game in the series to have boss fights. The original
Deus Ex had them too, and some of these bosses also absorbed an unreasonable amount of damage. However, I distinctly remember winning one of these fights in less than a second by blowing the guy up with a few cleverly placed bombs. I walked out of the fight unscathed. It wasn't the manliest way to win, but it was what I chose to do, and it worked. Furthermore, some of the boss fights in the original
Deus Ex could be avoided entirely — for example, by using ones investigative skills to uncover a killphrase which causes the enemy to self-destruct.
So why does
Human Revolution force players into long, grueling battles, even when the player has chosen stealth over brute force and non-lethality over wanton destruction? I almost think the developers were under the impression that video games just
need bosses, which clearly isn't the case here. I'm reminded of the
Mass Effect 3 director who took a lot of heat from fans for
saying that boss fights were excluded from his game because they were "just so video-gamey." He went on to explain how he didn't want to include boss fights just for the sake of having boss fights. This whole portion of the interview is ridiculous for a lot of reasons (e.g., why the heck shouldn't video games be video-gamey?), but I think having boss fights for the sake of having boss fights — happily fulfilling this particular video game trope without regard for whether it really improves a particular game or the player experience — is exactly what the
Human Revolution developers have done. The game might have been better without them, or at least without the necessity of participating in them.
All in all, I think
Human Revolution could have learned a lot from its predecessor. The original
Deus Ex is outdated, but it still has some good ideas that could have been put to use in the prequel.
Update (November 18, 2012):
For the record, I did finish
Deus Ex: Human Revolution last night. My opinion on the boss fights hasn't changed much. The game's
third boss wasn't nearly as frustrating as the first two, since I'd dropped the unused double-barreled shotgun and amassed a small collection of fragmentation mines, but it still wasn't particularly fun. Based on my single brief engagement with this particular enemy, I have to surmise that he wasn't very bright. After taking a couple of hits from his plasma rifle, I simply ducked behind some nearby cover, and he just kept shooting (and missing) without attempting to move to a better position.
Since he didn't seem to be going anywhere, I started chucking those explosives at his feet, and from this point onward he was stun-locked by one explosion after another until he finally died. I would have expected him to be reduced to a fine paste after all that punishment, but instead he bled to death rather peacefully as if I'd shot him with a single well-placed bullet. In fact, that's how most of the bosses seem to die, even though killing them usually requires a whole arsenal of heavy weaponry.
Again, suspension of disbelief destroyed. But it didn't really come as a shock this time.
Only the final boss was really interesting, since the fight had multiple stages and multiple targets. This doesn't make it the most original boss fight I've ever seen — a lot of it was still "shoot this, shoot that, press this button, repeat" — but at least it didn't feel like attacking Superman with a BB gun.
