Deus Ex: Human Revolution 
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The outstanding Deus Ex: Human Revolution, a 94%-rated game with over 22K 'Very Positive' reviews, is now cheaper than a cup of coffeeMar 4, 2024 - PC GamerNow, 13 years after Eidos-Montréal dropped its 2011 Deus Ex reboot, Human Revolution, my appreciation for just how good this cyberpunk immersive sim is has remained undiminished with each passing year, as I'm sure it has done with countless other PC gamers around the world... Read more.Deus Ex protagonist Adam Jensen's signature voice actor also wanted to do his motion capture, but was rejected for being too short: 'apparently, it was a lot of work to stretch me a couple inches'Nov 10, 2023 - PC GamerDon't let insecure boys on the internet or mean people on dating apps tell you different: it's not that big of a gap between 5'11" and 6'1". However, actor Elias Toufexis recently revealed that it may as well have been a yawning chasm during the making 2011's Deus Ex: Human Revolution... Read more.Deus Ex: Human Revolution's flawless gameplay has aged better than its goofy vision of a future obsessed with robot armsNov 6, 2023 - PC Gamers a strongly self-selecting PC gamer, there have been times in my life I've tried to convince myself I didn't like something because it wasn't 'hardcore' or PC enough. For almost a year in high school, I pretended to not like BioWare games—to no one else in particular, just in my own mind palace—because I watched a loud man on YouTube say they were quite bad indeed... Read more.The best immersive sims are up to 90% off in a great Steam saleSep 9, 2023 - PCGamesNThe Deus Ex and Thief games are some of the best immersive sims ever made. Between the two series, you've got a slew of great stealth games that despite their age are still absolutely worth picking up today. Well, the good news is that these two series are in a great Steam sale right now, so you can nab any and all games from both for next to nothing. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Deus Ex's Adam Jensen says "no one called" about a new game Adam Jensen wants a new Deus Ex game Elon Musk sleeps next to a gun from Deus Ex: Human Revolution Deus Ex's Adam Jensen says "no one called" about a new gameJul 9, 2023 - PCGamesNDeus Ex has been away for a while, as the last major game in the immersive sim series was released way back in 2016 with no word on what's next. While the RPG games still remain absolute classics, the actor behind Deus Ex's Adam Jensen has revealed that he's had no call to come back to the series. Combine this with the current state of Embracer Group, and Deus Ex may be in trouble. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Adam Jensen wants a new Deus Ex game We're probably getting new Tomb Raider and Deus Ex games GOG's Square Enix sale includes Deus Ex GOTY Edition for less than a $1 Adam Jensen wants a new Deus Ex gameMay 22, 2023 - PCGamesNDeus Ex Adam Jensen voice performer Elias Toufexis is, like us, wondering when we might get a sequel to Mankind Divided and Human Revolution. It's been seven years since the last mainline entry in Eidos' futuristic RPG game, and - to paraphrase the mechanical man himself - when it comes to a new Deus Ex, we're all asking for this. Lending his talents to Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed, and Fallout in the meantime, Deus Ex Human Revolution's gravel-throated star is now seemingly eager to know when Jensen will re-emerge. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: We're probably getting new Tomb Raider and Deus Ex games GOG's Square Enix sale includes Deus Ex GOTY Edition for less than a $1 Eidos Montreal are making three games, but Deus Ex isn't one of them Elon Musk sleeps next to a gun from Deus Ex: Human RevolutionNov 28, 2022 - PCGamesNTwitter's new owner Elon Musk posted a photo in the early hours of November 28 of what he said was his bedside table, and it features a weapon that Deus Ex fans should recognise straight away. In addition to a replica flintlock pistol in a Washington Crossing the Delaware display case (and four open Diet Coke cans), the billionaire apparently sleeps next to a replica of Adam Jensen's Diamond Back .357 handgun, which appeared in the 2011 RPG game Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Happy 18th birthday Deus Ex - let's get drunk together What was in the box? Square Enix delivered on their holiday promise of five games for $9.99 Deus Ex: Human Revolution is still a great immersive simAug 23, 2021 - PC GamerDeus Ex: Human Revolution is celebrating its 10th anniversary today, so we're republishing this retrospective from 2018. .. Read more.How much Deus Ex is in Guardians of the Galaxy?Jun 18, 2021 - PC GamerEven with my tinfoil ‘every conspiracy theory is true’ hat on, I can’t imagine a near-future where we get another Deus Ex. The series was a victim of an almighty reshuffle among Square Enix’s Western studios, as the publisher prioritised licensed Marvel games over everything else. With Crystal Dynamics tackling Avengers, Tomb Raider was handed off to Deus Ex studio Eidos Montreal—leaving Adam Jensen kicking about his apartment in Prague, reading other peoples’ emails to pass the time... Read more.Seven years on, Deus Ex: Human Revolution is still a great immersive simSep 25, 2018 - PC GamerWhen I think of Human Revolution, I think of black and gold. Few big-budget games have such a distinctive look, but that’s part of what makes Eidos Montreal’s prequel so immediately striking. As a Deus Ex fan, I was sceptical when I heard a new game was in development. But then I saw those first screenshots, of a futuristic Detroit bathed in shades of black and gold, and knew the series was in good hands. “That’s the first thing I said when I started on the project,” said art director Jonathan Jacques-Belletête when I interviewed him back in 2011. “I wanted the game to be very distinct. You see one screenshot and you know it’s Human Revolution. Art in games isn’t just about shaders, ambient occlusion, parallax mapping, or anything like that. It’s about ideas. And in that sense, the aesthetic is a crucial part of our game.” Set in 2027, 25 years before the first game, the prequel begins with Adam Jensen, head of security for Sarif Industries, being critically wounded in a terrorist attack. On the brink of death, Jensen is saved by his boss, David Sarif, who reconstructs his body with experimental cybernetic augmentations. An upgrade he, famously, never asked for, but that gives him the power to hunt the people responsible down. Part of Jensen’s appeal is his gravelly voice and deadpan delivery, which come courtesy of actor Elias Toufexis. “They had a specific voice in mind,” he tells me. “If I remember correctly, they wanted a tribute to JC Denton from the original game and Clint Eastwood. In the sequel I had more say and was allowed to bring additional nuance and texture to the performance, but Jensen’s voice is essentially my normal voice.” Unlikely hero While JC Denton was trained from an early age as a counter-terrorism agent and fitted with advanced, discrete nanoaugs, Jensen is thrust into the events of Human Revolution against his will, and his body is constantly fighting against his new implants. He, and other augmented humans in this dystopian world, need a steady supply of an expensive drug called Neuropozyne to prevent their bodies from rejecting the augmentations and killing them. Add to that a general distrust of augmented people from so-called ‘naturals’, which boils over in the sequel, and life with cybernetic implants is often more trouble than it’s worth – even if you can punch through a concrete wall and run faster than a gazelle. Of course, for the player, Jensen’s augmentations are an incredible amount of fun to experiment with, and make for a wonderfully diverse immersive sim. For the stealth-conscious cyberpunk there’s the Glass-Shield Cloaking System, which lets you turn invisible for up to seven seconds when fully upgraded. You can also upgrade the Hermes Cybernetic Leg Prosthesis to jump to superhuman heights, opening up new ways to snea...Gaming's tastiest dystopiasJul 19, 2018 - PC GamerThis month, I played and enjoyed Prey's Mooncrash DLC, where one of the game's objectives is to stash enough food and drink to escape in a supply crate headed for Earth. As I collected the items I needed, I was reminded that the developers put real effort into the types of food and drink found in the Prey universe. The packaging is beautiful. There's fun flavour text for each item. And damn, the food sounds fancy. What would happen if you had to live on the supplies in places-gone-wrong like Talos I? Below, I rank five of gaming's most notable dystopias, using no criteria other than which consumables I personally find tasty, versus what's likely to make me projectile vomit. I also touch upon the drinks options in some of these worlds, because first-person games love to get you virtual drunk so they can make the screen blurry. 1. Talos I (Prey) Art by Fred Augis. Image source Consumable food available: Big Bang Candy, Captain Spree's Fish Sticks, crispy frites, Dr. Howard's Superfruit, jellied eels, Methuselah apple, Ossetra caviar, RanDom Dim Sum, Russian blinis, Shaker lemon pie, Siskak Unagi Rollz, Skyking pomegranate, Spiralite cookies, sun-dried tomato jerky, Sunburst banana pudding, veggie blend I feel like the food on Talos I says a lot about TranStar, the space station's owners: they have some serious cash, and if you're going to work in space for a private company that's this flush, then hot damn you should eat well. There's even a few decent veggie-friendly options in there, too, and the concept art above shows at some point they planned some crispy tofu bites too. Impressive amounts of detail on even simple objects has become something of an Arkane hallmark—the packaging on these products (designed by artist Fred Augus) is beautiful, and effort was even put into bringing the food to life with flavour text. Here's how RanDom Dim Sum is described: "A bowl of randomly selected dim sum by TranStar Kitchens. Every bowl is different." I wish more of my food had the element of surprise. The drinks options are strong, too, with beer, gin, wine and bourbon. Maybe I'd accidentally unleash a typhon infestation too if I was drunk off my ass. At least they have green tea and coffee for the inevitable hangover. 2. Columbia (BioShock Infinite) Consumable food available: Apples, bananas, bread, beans, candy bars, cake, cereal, cheese, corn, cotton candy, hot dogs, jar of pickles, oranges, peanuts, pears, pineapples, popcorn, potatoes, potato chips, sandwiches, sardines, spinach, tomato soup, watermelon, white oats I wouldn't live in Columbia for a few reasons—mostly the beliefs of the citizens and leaders, but also the fear of wandering out of my house in a sleepy daze and accidentally falling to my death. The range of food you can pick up around the flying city is reasonably close to my existing (terrible) diet, however. I mean, I'd bet...The best and worst in-game books and codexesApr 2, 2018 - PC GamerLiterature’s had a pretty good run, much of it without any fancy graphics and animations and particle effects to bolster the words. Games love text too. Text is cheap. You can paint a picture of galactic chaos or epic history in about the same time it takes to type ‘and then something cool happened’, without having to spend the next week designing armour and creating 3D characters to act it out. Yet despite centuries of practice, most games still haven’t worked out how to present all this (which let’s face it, is often there more for the writers’ satisfaction than our actual enjoyment) in a punchy, satisfying way. What works? What doesn’t? Let’s take a quick look at some of the ways games have handled books, letters, codexes and more. Deus Ex: Human Revolution Even when you don’t affect a world that much, it’s nice when it pretends. News stories are one of the best and cheapest ways to both highlight your achievements, and reframe them in interesting ways, from acts of heroism to outright terrorism. Human Revolution wrapped them in one of the sleekest packages for this—the Picus Daily Standard. At once a chance to see what was taking place out of your sphere, and see the effect of your adventures on the world. While even a few years later, the futuristic look feels distinctly retro compared to iPad news apps, to say nothing of whatever direct-brain interfaces we’ll likely have by the time of Deus Ex’s dark not-too-distant-future, Picus keeps it pretty, keeps it punchy, and above all, keeps it brief. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Ah, but when it comes to eBooks, things aren’t so smooth. Look at this. Even the original Kindle would wince at these datapad layouts, complete with non-slidable panels, slow refresh rate, poor quality fonts and typography, and non-consistent use of glows. Sure, it’s readable, but it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to, even before factoring in that in the wasteful future of Deus Ex you apparently need a new device for every Wikipedia entry. The crappy quality of this design only stands out more amongst Mankind Divided’s otherwise superbly rendered future, where everything you encounter seems to have emerged fully formed from the brain of a maverick product genius. This, meanwhile, feels like a first attempt at customising Twine. Fallout 4 In the not-too-distant future, who needs books? We’ll have computers! Specifically, ghastly green teletype machines that would be tolerable for simple acts like opening doors, but could be much more of a nightmare if the cast of Five Nights At Freddy’s occasionally popped up for a jump-scare. The horrible font. The clackering of the text. The endless pages that try their best to tell stories of post-apocalyptic horror, despite being locked in an interface that would make even a hardened wasteland explorer decide that whatever happened pr...Watch a Montreal orchestra play Deus Ex music while Adam Jensen kills people in the backgroundJan 31, 2018 - PC GamerOne of the most distinctive things about the Deus Ex series is its music: Hearing the opening notes of the original Deus Ex theme in the midst of the very first Deus Ex 3 teaser took my breath away, and it still leaves me all a-tingle when it plays. So when Elias Toufexis, the voice of Adam Jensen, retweeted something about "Icarus," "Embrace What You Have Become," and @LeMetropolitain, I was naturally intrigued. The video is a performance of the two tracks, one from Human Revolution and the other from Mankind Divided, by the Montreal-based Orchestre Métropolitain. It's all very serious and somber, as befits a proper orchestral concert, but lest there be any doubt about the videogame connection, footage from various Deus Ex teasers plays on a large screen suspended above the musicians, complete with Nano-Ceramic Blade murders and—perhaps a little awkwardly—a message inviting people to preorder the game ahead of its launch in early 2011. (There's no indication as to when the video was recorded, but Eidos Montreal just posted it today.) It's a very cool translation of some great game music, even if nobody in the chorus takes the initiative to sing, "I never asked for this." The full video is below, and you can listen to Michael McCann's originals on YouTube: Icarus here, and Embrace What You Have Become here. The uncertain future of games like Deus Ex and DishonoredAug 15, 2017 - PC GamerWarren Spector is stuck in Prey. The director of Deus Ex, who has worked on many games since labeled "immersive sims"—in fact, he coined the term in a post-mortem of Deus Ex —has been playing the modern games inspired by classics like Thief and System Shock. But he hasn't finished Prey yet. Or, as he puts it: "The crew quarters are kicking my butt." He's enjoying it though, just as he enjoyed the other recent immersive sim from Arkane Studios, Dishonored 2. "I thought they were both excellent examples of what I think of when I say 'immersive sim,'" Spector says. "They removed barriers to belief that I was in another world and they let me approach problems as problems, rather than as puzzles. I'm really glad Arkane exists and that they're so committed to the genre. Without them I'd have fewer games to play!" Spector's not the only one who'd mourn their loss. Arkane is still around, but there's this uneasy feeling in the air that there's now some reason to worry. Not about Arkane, necessarily, but the immersive sim in general, this genre held up as the shining example of PC gaming at its most smartest and most complex. None of the last three big-budget immersive sims—Prey, Dishonored 2, and Eidos Montreal’s Deus Ex: Mankind Divided—have broken a million sales on Steam. It's always been a niche genre, defined by player freedom, environmental storytelling, and a lot of reading diary entries. How long can they be propped up by the fact that some designers really like making them? Arkane's Prey is the latest in the System Shock lineage. Don't call it a comeback In the 1990s and early 2000s immersive sims seemed like the future, an obvious extension of what 3D spaces and believable physics and improving AI could do when working together. But they rarely sold well. When Ion Storm’s third Thief and second Deus Ex game flopped, the studio closed. Looking Glass Studios, responsible for System Shock, Ultima Underworld, and the first two Thief games, was already gone. The immersive sim went into hibernation for years. Despite the love and praise for games like Deus Ex, they're not easy to sell to players. Jean-François Dugas, executive director of the Deus Ex franchise at its current owners Eidos Montreal, says it can be tough even convincing people to make games that let players deviate from the critical path. "You need to realize and accept that you will build a ton of material that a good part of your audience will miss," he says. "Since you are building possibilities through game mechanics and narrative scenarios, you know that you might not be able to bring all the pieces to the quality level you would like. You have to rely on the effect of the sum of the parts to transcend it all. The GTA series is a great example of that. When you look at all the pieces individually, they’r...It's time for cyberpunk games to remember how to be punkFeb 15, 2017 - PC Gamer At the start of the 1988 adventure game based on William Gibson's genre-defining cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, you wake up face down in a plate of spaghetti. Well, it's synth-spaghetti because this is the future, but that doesn't make it any more comfortable. Like the book's protagonist Case you're a down-and-out former console cowboy who has lost the ability to hack, though in your case it's not due to traumatic surgery but simple poverty. You can't afford a new computer. Hell, you can't even afford to pay for the spaghetti. Author Bruce Sterling summed up the cyberpunk genre as a combination of “low-life and high-tech,” and that's a perfect description of both versions of Neuromancer. Later in the game you have the option to sell your internal organs for cash, and hack a computer at Cheap Hotel—its actual name—to pay the rent. Your life is about as low as they get. In 1993 Syndicate went in the opposite direction, casting you as the CEO in charge of a corporation bent on global domination. In Syndicate you're the villain at the top of the dystopian food chain. While most of the games in the genre that followed explored spaces somewhere in between those two extremes, there's been a tendency for them to focus on the high-tech and not the low-life. They get the cyber, but not the punk. Cyberpunk games are rarely about cool losers. They're usually about cool cops. Hero complex Take the heroes of the Deus Ex series. JC Denton is an augmented agent who works for a UN anti-terrorist organization. Alex D is an augmented agent-in-training at the Tarsus Academy with a bright future in the WTO, and Adam Jensen is the augmented chief of security for a biotech corporation. All of these characters go through learning experiences that show their employers are untrustworthy and their world is more complex than they thought it was, but they all start on the privileged side of the fence. When low-life characters do show up, they're pushed to the periphery. Adam Jensen walks past some punks gathered around a bin-fire in the streets of Detroit so he can overhear a conversation about getting a dog cybernetically enhanced to take part in a pitfight. In the Lower Seattle of Deus Ex: Invisible War, Alex D also meets two people huddled around a burning bin, one of whom is Lo-town Lucy—a pierced punk who provides some basic info on the area while reprimanding you for being an Upper Seattle tourist. She points out how out of your element you are in the poor part of town, but in doing so makes it clear you're out of place in the genre as well. That's not to say that there are no cyborg badasses who learn the law isn't always right in cyberpunk outside of games. Robocop and Ghost in the Shell are both classic examples of this kind of story, but in video games characters like Murphy and Kusanagi aren't rarities. They're the norm. The her...Thief's brilliant subtlety is still unmatched 18 years laterOct 13, 2016 - PC Gamer At the end of Thief: The Dark Project, one of its characters muses on the future. Beware the dawn of the Metal Age, he says, looking out over the steampunk city. That line was contributed by Terri Brosius, one of the game's writers and designers as well as the voice of Viktoria (she also provided the memorable voice of System Shock 2's villain Shodan). The dialogue was a spur-of-the-moment addition , but it helped shape the series. Thief II would eventually be given The Metal Age as its subtitle, and the story of an industrial revolution overtaking the city would become its plot. That's how committed the original trilogy of Thief games are to their foreshadowing, and it's part of what makes them unique among immersive sims. In Warren Spector's post-mortem of Deus Ex all the way back in the year 2000, he coined the term 'immersive sim' to describe the type of game he and Ion Storm had created. Deus Ex needed its own subgenre because it is, as he put it, part role-playing game, part first-person shooter, part adventure game. Immersive sims are games that combine elements of other genres so you can play them your own way, with multiple paths to discover, each of which lets you jump genres as you please. These are the games where you can get past obstacles by talking or sneaking or killing, or sometimes even hacking them or casting spells at them or flying right over the top. All that variability, all those systems intersecting to encourage player choice and freedom, are what it takes to count as an immersive sim. They don't require a conflict between philosophically distinct factions going on behind the scenes, but it's a common element nonetheless. Deus Ex has its Illuminati, System Shock 2 has the Many versus Shodan, Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines has competing undead clans, Dishonored has the Hound Pit Pub loyalists acting against the spymaster's conspiracy, and so on. In the Thief trilogy, progenitors of the immersive sim, it's the religious cults of Hammerites in conflict with Pagans, with the Keepers looking on as kind of referee-assassins. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided continues the tradition of player choice, but without some of Thief's subtlety. You can't just dump secret history on a player straight away. Immersive sims are about freedom to choose your own way of playing, and not engaging with a bunch of boring exposition is a valid choice. (These are usually the games where you can jump on a table while someone is talking to you.) Instead designers hint at the backstory, letting players uncover it so we feel like we're learning things we're not supposed to, experiencing the the same rush we get from finding an unlikely method of infiltrating security. Subtle as a thief In Thief: The Dark Project, the first of the series, the Pagans are a cult you don't know much about until you realise one of your employers, Viktoria, is a member. By this point you're at least four missions deep and have been facing off against the rival Hammerite...Deus Ex: Mankind Divided s Transhuman Future Feels Too Cautious For ComfortJun 8, 2016 - Rock, Paper, ShotgunShower scenes seldom Make You Think, unless it’s about what exactly you’re getting for that Premium Netflix subscription, but if anything sticks out for me about the impressive yet oddly unexciting Deus Ex: Mankind Divided , it’s the sight of Adam Jensen washing his hair. Eidos Montreal’s latest presentation begins in Jensen’s new Prague apartment – a casually affluent man-den where you can phone other characters, watch newscasts that track your decisions through the story, answer emails, tinker with crafting resources, and generally get acquainted with the sleek, cadaverous sort-of-human in your charge. … Have You Played Deus Ex: Human Revolution?May 9, 2016 - Rock, Paper, ShotgunHave You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time. Human Revolution has myriad faults, but they hardly matter to me. Square Enix Montreal’s first crack at replicating Deus Ex is a perfect example of how the right creative decisions can make up for any number of constraints. … Deus Ex Mankind Divided Delayed Until AugustNov 18, 2015 - Rock, Paper, ShotgunEverything looked rosy when I traveled to Montreal to take a look at Deus Ex: Mankind Divided earlier this year. The areas I played improved on Human Revolution in every way that matters and Adam Jensen controlled better than ever. All was well and I was looking forward to playing the game in February, right around my birthday. Moments ago, word arrived of a six month delay – the game will now be coming out on August 23rd. … Deus Ex Mankind Divided s Ending Is Not A Button PressNov 2, 2015 - Rock, Paper, ShotgunDisappointing endings are a staple of Deus Ex games, aren’t they? That’s fine, though, because almost everything leading up to those final two minutes when you choose which button to press is pretty great. Unsurprisingly, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided will be continuing the series’s sequel tradition of openings which kinda ignore which button you picked, but the ending this time will be more than a mere button-press. So its lead writer say, anyway. …
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