LogFAQs > #953812331

After an inexcusably long break, I returned tonight to the life of Adam Jensen, the winner of the Michigan state gravellyest-voiced man contest. Thanks to Linkmariosamus and ctesjbuvf for keeping this bumped while I was away.

For the sake of jogging my own memory, let me summarize the story I played through earlier: Adam Jensen is an ex-cop who works for a tech company that makes weapons for the military and experiments with cybernetic augmentations for humans on the side. His ex-girlfriend Megan is the lead researcher for that latter occupation. The company gets attacked by a mysterious terrorist organization which kills Megan and critically injures Jensen, who can only stay alive if he gets rebuilt like the Six Million Dollar Man. He never asked for this.

A few months later, Adam is back in commission solving security crises of his company and trying to find out who killed his ex-girlfriend, and the way I've been playing him he has very little concern for the sanctity of human life or the collateral damage he causes, including the lives of hostages he's been sent in to save.

Last time, I was rounding up the sidequests that you can do in the Detroit "sandbox" area and about to start on the second major story mission, which I played through today. Jensen finds out that someone's been hacking into his friends' database and traces the signal to a military compound, where it turns out the same guys who killed his ex-girlfriend are on patrol. My usual tactics weren't very effective here, because this crew is a serious step up from the gang mooks of Detroit. I found that any time someone spotted me Jensen would be dead within a few seconds, so I resorted to the usual stealth game approach of saving every five seconds and loading whenever I got caught, which made me wish I was playing on PC given how slow the PS3 is at doing those things. It was pretty tough and took me a lot of restarts and a little bit of swearing at my TV screen to finish the mission, ironically being far more merciful to the mercenaries who killed my ex than to the random hobos on the street. I guess that's corporate for you.

One thing I consider a downgrade from the original Deus Ex is how you move bodies. The old game let you carry people over your shoulder in the usual old-school stealth game style, seen also in the Thief games, while in the new one you have to very slowly drag them, which just isn't as cool. At one point, I thought it would be fun to hide one unconscious guy in a vent, but couldn't get him over the "lip" of it. I'm also unsure how I feel about the new hacking minigame. In Deus Ex 1 hacking was just watching a progress bar move forward, which wasn't very interactive, but maybe it was for the best because the hacking minigame this one brings to the table is kind of lame.

I did that whole second mission without any stealth upgrades, because I've been focusing on the hacking upgrades (which seem quest-mandatory at points) and the damage reduction power, because I knew going in that there are unavoidable boss fights in this game. The first such encounter marked the end of tonight's mission. It's a fight against a big guy named Barret. Either my game messed up or it's one of the most laughable boss fights I've ever seen in a game, because all he did was stand in the center of the room and mindlessly unload his gun at me, even if I was behind cover, until it overheated and I had a free chance to shoot at him. This made him easier to deal with than a single random enemy from the area leading up to him. I think I'll get the cloaking device next.

In the aftermath, Prichard, who is Adam's hacker co-worker and kind of a dick, informs him that the boss is hiding information to them about a private back-door he had through company electronic security, which the enemy used to hack them. I managed to talk him into spilling the beans on it, and it turns out that (possibly among other things) he used it to solicit an Private Investigator to find out that Adam was adopted. With that out of the way, Adam is getting sent to China to follow up on something cryptic Barret told him as he died, so before leaving I went and finished up the sidequest involving Adam's old police friend, who hires him to illegally investigate a shady officer she's trying to take down. Once you gather all the evidence, you can choose whether to confront the guy yourself or not. If you do, he bribes you to let him go, which I accepted because I thought it would be funny. He told me the money would be at Adam's apartment, which is when I realized I can't remember where that is.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 19/129
Currently Playing: Deus Ex: Human Revolution