Honestly, this game is really fun in terms of gameplay - essentially just where it's a stripped down action game with RPG elements in it, and there's so much fun to have in terms of the skills you acquire in this and the stealth and the gunplay. It's something that I find incredibly fun just to mess around with and it's very functional in terms of just being a pure action game.

One of my biggest faults just comes from the story and just how it's so lacking compared to the first one. The first one worked because of how it's such an interwoven web of conspiracy - where the issues captured in that game are accurate, but then it's also about the absurdity of paranoia - where it's not exactly fully correct or wrong, but about how it's such a meshed combination of the two - some of them are casted as almost prophetic or really intricate and studied, and others are just casted as being completely wacko and so on. It's very much a game which is confrontational of the conspiracy theory mindset.

This game mainly just handwaves a few things about FEMA camps, gangs, police brutality, giant corporations and human augmentations (which apparently the whole game decides to revolve around) - and I just felt that it was really lacking in terms of what it's trying to explore. It tries to do something about human advancement but so much of it just feels like aesthetics - like someone ripping out passages of a book or some sort of art piece without really understanding what's behind it.

There's just not really much of a follow-through with it, or really enough to justify this as though it were a Deus-Ex game. Although, this is otherwise fun if it were treated as a standalone entry - definitely an incredibly functional game, and so fun to play at points. But again, the story here is just really lacking.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is the first game in the reboot/prequel series of the Deus Ex series, and it does everything the original game did but better. It has a really cool cyberpunk story about augmentations and transhumanism, and it portrays how those things would interact with capitalism. Through the open world streets of the game you can find people both pro and anti augmentation, with the anti side ranging from "this is an unnatural affront to God" to "this only benefits the rich." And you'll also find harvesters, people who harvest augmented body parts to sell on the black market. The game is a little too mainstream to explicitly say "capitalism is the problem here," but I could feel the class struggle in this game's world. When I was playing and listening to all the game's opinions on augmentations I couldn't help but think, a lot of the problems here aren't inherent to the technology, it's about the system this technology finds itself in. All of this is really cool sci-fi that I could imagine actually happening one day. The game also does away with the original game's weird early 2000's racist voice acting of Chinese characters, and has them either speak English with a slight accent, or often has them actually speaking Mandarin. And the way that Hengsha is envisioned as this city that's had to build itself vertically in order to expand for its population is really cool. The other huge improvement on the original game that makes this one of my favorite games, is that the game will not give you enough skill points to invest in everything by the end. This forces you to have to really think about how you're going to augment your character, because those decisions will influence what ways you're able to approach any given situation. It's that gameplay choice that makes this a story that I don't think would be as effective in any other medium than games.

Edit: Well I just watched the three and a half hour long HBomb video that will surely become the only way anyone talks about this game going forward. So that certainly dates this review based on my teenage memories of playing this! A lot of my enjoyment of this certainly comes down to something HBomb says in his review, which is that at the time this game came out, unless you were playing retro PC games, there was nothing like this so it was kind of a breath of fresh air. It was my first immersive sim and I didn't even know that genre existed. I was also still a Liberal at the time and so even the small hints at the larger class issues this game touches on were like revelations to me. I think something interesting that comes out of sites like backloggd and letterboxd will be that you'll see a lot of reviews calling something groundbreaking when by all account it's not at all, but it will have been that user's first experience with that type of thing, and have completely shifted their perspective. I think I still enjoy this game over the original though. If only due to the fact that when I played the original, the moment I got the blue-lightsaber-destiny-sword I immediately switched to just massacring hoards of people with it because it made the game exponentially easier and quicker to get through, which made me turn off the "making interesting choices" part of my brain. And also the racist voice acting. Like, my god the racist voice acting.

It's ironic how this game takes MGS as an influence while MGS V has gone full sandbox, immersive sim-ish. But that philosophy doesn't work here, the not-so-open but still free-of-action medium size worlds the first Deux Ex allowed you to approach them as a big whole that led to different ways to solve big problems, all of them meaningful. Instead, here we have a more linear experience that has a little open hub world that bifurcates to different locations in which missions will take place, leading to unimaginative and dull situations in which you have to decide between direct action, hacking, and lots of airways spiced up with stealth and a brushstroke of roleplay that lacks the elegance and meaning of MGS games.

You know what, I DID ask for this, because this shit was a blast.

Felt nice to play a cyberpunk game that actually understood that the cyberpunk genre is not simply neon lights and sex dolls. Especially one where you have actual choices and consequences that could affect the outcome of your missions. Seriously, there's some 200 IQ moments to be had here, where the game definitely makes you feel smarter than you are. Or on the other hand, makes you feel as dumb as a brick, depending on how you handled the situation.

Combat wise the game is decent enough but the stealth definitely shines and is borderline amazing, though the occasional horseshit AI does hold it back a bit. Still, it's a damn fine game with an interesting story, great immersive sim elements, and a kickass soundtrack. It's just a shame that some dickface degenerate decided that boss fights should be added to this. Every time those came up my mouse teetered on the .5 star button. Also since I'm complaining, whoever added dickhead mines that have a 3,000 foot detection radius and don't come with a disarming tutorial, fuck you.

4 outta 5

CDPR y'all are some mid smokers for turning CP2077 into "Neon GTA: Scuffed Edition". Eidos already gave you the blueprint in 2011 (Except for the ending, which of course is pretty much the only thing CDPR took after).