The main area of the game for me is War Games, and I feel it is a massive success. The maps are great, and I quite enjoy the new ways to play the old favourite gametypes. I don’t think personal ordnance messes up balance – you just have to be more wary of that enemy coming around the corner. He could have a Battle Rifle, he could have an Incineration Cannon. Play it safe. Do some recon. Quick spawning is good, I like spawning next to my team-mates rather than in a distant, empty, battle-free corner of the map.
Overall, I got the impression that the Campaign was merely a warm-up for 343 Industries. The existing enemies included were safe choices, and it harks back to the original Halo: Combat Evolved. The new Prometheans were great to look at, and both a joy and challenge to fight on Heroic. The Halo 5 Campaign, most probably on the next generation of Xbox, will take the beauty of Halo 4, and add to it in terms of scale and intensity thanks to larger storage and more advanced hardware. I can see the Flood re-entering the picture in the next game – I’m personally hoping that 343 Industries keep them as shambolic hordes for the most part, with the specialised units like the Tank and Ranged pure forms rarely encountered. Was I the only one who enjoyed the sheer endurathon of The Library and Cortana levels? I’m excited (and a little scared) to see how deadly these Flood-infected Spartans are…
War Games – the new name for multiplayer Red vs Blue. This was always going to be the main area of the game for me, shooting guys is so much better than shooting AIs. It has a lot to live up to – the Halo series is the only First Person multiplayer experience that I felt was flawless – and then in subsequent games they always improve on it somehow. Halo was great – never has lugging an Xbox and TV round a mates house been so rewarding. Halo 2 improved it, made it smoother, added cool new weapons and had an amazing selection of maps. Halo 3 added equipment and refined the whole thing. Halo: Reach added armour abilities – these things really spiced things up. And now Halo 4…
I have played through the Campaign three times – once with Jane on Normal, once with Lewis on Heroic, and once by myself on Legendary. This is what I thought of it.
Also, as well as the spoiler warning, I should let you know that this may be all over the place. I’m not going to basically write out the whole story, I will jump from start to end and back again with little warning.
But I will start at the beginning.
If I could sum this game up in one sentence, it would be:
Quite simply amazing.
First, some history. Knowing where you’ve been helps you understand where you are. I did try to play the original Deus Ex on the PS2 – I didn’t get on with it. Edge sold this new game to me quite early on with their features on the then-named “Deus Ex 3”. The exquisite juxtaposition of mechanical arms and Renaissance inspired fashion. The luxurious black and gold palette running through every screenshot. Then the lovely melatonin made a Deus Ex: Human Revolution thread on the Random Fury! forum. The videos he posted whet my appetite. Looking back now, a lot of content from those old YouTube videos never actually made it into the game. Anyway, the game came out, and for whatever reason, I never got around to purchasing it.
I was staying round David’s house one weekend, and he had recently been bought it. He put it on, showed me where he could get up to, then he asked if I wanted to try. To be honest, if anyone put it on the hardest setting and played it like a regular first person shooter, they’d struggle to get further than my brother did. This is not Halo. Cover is your friend in DE:HR. There is a subtle art to lining up shots from behind cover, then popping out and plugging an enemies skull in the split second between their clip emptying and them retreating back behind their box. With it being a stealth-based game, I thought David would get on with it – he loves Metal Gear Solid. I have explained to him that it is a semi-sneak-em-up, and that he needs to use cover. Hopefully he gets on better with it when I give it back to him.
Where to start with my experiences with this game? From the start, I guess. Which is odd, because I pretty much started with the downloadable episode, The Missing Link. I did originally start from the start, only to be totally overwhelmed with the Detroit mission hub. Most of the new content added to games nowadays tend to be shorter, standalone experiences, which I figured would be more beneficial in the long run. It didn’t spoil the story at all, and the whole episode warmed me up to what was to come.
There is a curious bug in Deus Ex: Human Revolution that I am amazed hasn’t been patched yet. When hacking any of the (very numerous) devices in the game, instead of hitting X to accept your rewards, if you load up a previous save game, the game still remembers that it owes you those rewards, so the next time you hack anything, you get the rewards for both hacks. Taken to extremes, you could hack the same device (preferably one with a big juicy EXP reward) numerous times and receive a hell of a lot of bonuses. There is one PC, quite near the start of the game, that gives you 500 EXP once hacked. Hack it ten times and you have a Praxis Point to spend on upgrading your augments. Hack it twenty times, and you have two Praxis Points. Do as I did on my first “proper” playthrough and hack it sixty times, and you get yourself a nice little headstart in terms of upgrades. Eager to upgrade everything, I quite often saved before I hacked anything, then hacked them four more times to get a bit more juice. Be warned though – hacking the same thing over and over is a seriously boring exercise.
