Deus Ex: Human Revolution/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Anticlimax Boss:
    • As expected of the franchise, there are ways to eliminate powerful enemies besides shooting them hundreds of times. The Typhoon aug is potent enough to kill any boss in a few shots. Thanks to Wiki Magic, gamers have figured out easy kills for all of the bosses:
    • Barret, the first boss, isn't immune to gas, be it grenades or the toxic stuff in the cylinders scattered around the area. These can be thrown halfway across the room even without the strength boosting mod. It only takes two of these, three tops.
      • If you have explosives on you, throwing four grenades or explosive packs at him in quick succession allows you to kill him without even taking a step from your initial position. The stun gun also works well, allowing you to walk up to him and head shot him with a rapid fire weapon.
      • If you've been collecting frag mines in particular, you could have around four by the time of the boss fight. Just book it to the small alcove on the other side, then toss a mine out into the room proper. Wait for Barret to walk onto it. As soon as you hear the explosion, toss out the rest of them. The "fight" will last under a minute.
    • For Fedorova, stock up on Typhoon ammo and spam repeatedly.
      • Alternatively, PEPS and EMP grenades do wonders, provided you have the EMP shielding aug or enough healing items.
      • Wait for her to get visible and chase after you. Hit with stun gun. Break out heavy rifle or shotgun and fire at head at point-blank range. After a few seconds and before she clears her head, stun again. Rinse and repeat until dead.
      • Doing this may also stun-lock her, glitching her so that she doesn't move. Happy shooting.
    • Namir, the third boss, is a close-combat specialist armed with loads of grenades and a powerful energy weapon, but has a glass jaw. Spam the takedown button as the boss mantles a wall and it's a One Hit KO. Strong hackers can hack a turret from earlier and carry it down to his boss arena, which is almost as fast.
      • Alternate option: Combat rifle with laser sight and both aim reduction augments active allows you to pretty much rack up dozens of headshots the moment he stops to shoot. One magazine is all it takes. Option for rich Europeans: The Preorder Bonus Grenade Launcher.
      • Another option: mines.
    • Hyron, the final boss, has a terminal to shut down life-support directly in front of Zhao Yun Ru. Hack it or sucker the codes out of Darrow for an easy win.
    • Invoked in the Missing Link DLC. The boss, Burke, fights you in a wide open room with a large number of flunkies. However, it's possible, if you move quickly, to get into cover and avoid being spotted by the Mooks. If you're good at hacking or have certain augs, it's possible to get directly behind the boss and use a takedown without him knowing. There's even an achievement for doing this.
      • Hell, if you duck into cover immediately and stay there for a few minutes, they'll go back to their patrols, even with Burke continuing to taunt you about how it's only a matter of time before they find you. It's entirely possible -- though difficult -- to get the Apex Predator achievement along with Factory Zero.
  • Author's Saving Throw: The Director's Cut, which was originally planned to be exclusive to the Wii U, was made available for the PS3, Xbox 360 and PC.
  • Breather Level: The return trip to Detroit. The previous several levels had you go up against heavily armed Belltower mercs and their complex security systems. The Purity First thugs in Detroit are nowhere near as powerful since they're not augmented.
  • Broken Base: While there was one for console and PC gamers when they didn't know if the Director's Cut would be released for their systems, Xbox and PS3 players are annoyed at how they have to buy the game all over again, and even more so if they paid for the DLC that'll be included in the Director's Cut.
  • Complacent Gaming Syndrome: The developers went out of their way to avert this. Firstly, ammo is always very scarce and doesn't stack well, so you can never go hog-wild with rapid fire weapons. Secondly, important dialogue scenes don't always have the same triggers or flow; you can't always get the same reactions out of people by sticking to the same verbal stance throughout it. And don't get used to always being able to fight enemies the same way; the endgame involves a total shift in combat strategy.
  • Complete Monster: It's hard to have a Complete Monster when all the corporations as well as Taggart have good, if conflicting, intentions. However, Pieter Burke from The Missing Link DLC fits right in, taking We Have Reserves and Lack of Empathy to the max. A proponent of The Hydra Project, he's responsible for kidnapping women from streets for the horrible experiments. When Adam tries to uncover Belltower's role in the project, Burke forces him into a Sadistic Choice between gassing the prisoners or Dr. Kavanagh, showing no signs of remorse in the process.
  • Creator Worship: The original Deus Ex was a personal project of Warren Spector's. News that Human Revolution was being made without much input by Warren Spector was poorly-recieved. Initially even Warren Spector was displeased by this news, although he changed his tune after getting to see Eidos Montreal's work.
  • Crowning Music of Awesome: Has its own page.
  • Damn You, Muscle Memory!: The B/Circle button is the cancel action button in nearly every context, but it is also the one hit takedown button. More than one player has accidentally started a conversation they didn't intend to, hit B just after the game registered the conversation as over, and wound up punching out a random person.
  • Disappointing Last Level:
    • Not as bad as the other games, but it starts to replace the mission hubs with singular levels after the final visit to Shanghai. It's actually justifiable, because Adam closes in on the conspiracy so why would he want to waste time doing random side missions for people? In real life, the main reason for the lack of a 3rd mission hub is the game needing to be released on time but the 3rd hub not being close enough to completion to justify any additional delay.
    • The Final Dungeon replaces enemy soldiers with pseudo-zombified humans. It is possible that this gameplay change was quite deliberate; Deus Ex has always been a series that rewards a player who is adaptable, resourceful, and prepared, and completely changing up the gameplay like this is one way to reward players who are quick-witted or balanced enough to adapt to such a sudden shift. Word of God is that Eidos Montreal wishes they had done a better job handling the final mission, though the design intention was always to have the gameplay change suddenly.
      • Unusually for this trope, the catalyst of the disappointment (i.e. the sudden zombieness of augmented characters changing the gameplay) goes on to have a major impact in the sequel.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: Malik became the most popular woman of the game quite fast. It makes her death a way too powerful Player Punch for a lot of players who dropped their Pacifist Run at this point or when her body is discovered at the Harvesters' hideout for a Roaring Rampage of Revenge killing spree instead. For the people who managed to save her, her thanks are depicted as a Crowning Moment of Heartwarming.

Adam Jensen: Anytime, Fly girl.

  • Fan Dumb:
    • Vehement fan opposition to some of the design details of the game, despite the fact that some of those same design details appeared in the original game.
    • One point of contention is against making it mandatory to kill some bosses, although in the original, this occurred with Anna. While you had a choice on how to dispatch her, you had to take her out, or you could not proceed in the game. There was a glitch that allowed you to bypass her, but this obviously wasn't the designers' intention.
      • Not to mention in order to achieve two of the endings in the original game, you had to kill Bob Page, either through blowing him up with a switch, or indirectly killing him by leaving him to die in the explosion when you destroy Area 51.
    • Cutscenes and third-person camera. The game went into third person and a cutscene in the original whenever you had a conversation with someone.
    • Some fans take issue with the cover system for the same reason, believing that it's third-person camera breaks immersion, despite its usefulness, and that it's completely optional. If you don't like it, unbind the key so you can't use it!
    • Regenerating Health. Many old-time fans worried that the game was taking cues from modern shooters, although the original game did have a regenerating health system of sorts. Even though it was limited through bioenergy, once you upgraded it, you would gain back health at a quick rate with little energy loss (reduced even further with the Power Recirculator aug). Still, this concern has caused many interviews to go out of their way to point out the regenerating health takes much longer than five seconds to kick in.
    • The designers also pointed out that this was to avoid "health pack hunting" that plagued the earlier the games. If you were about to advance to the next area but were low on health, your only hope was to scour the entire area for a health pack you might have missed. Obviously, this can destroy the pacing of a game.
    • Also, despite how it seems at the first glance, health regeneration only refills your health to half of its maximum potential. Not so bad when you look at it that way.
    • A lot of fans also forgot just how overly abundant health kits and biocells were, as well, in the original games. The health regeneration system, if anything, is less forgiving since you are no longer able to instantly refill both your meters at will.
    • The object highlighting system, which the original also included, has been accused of being visually distracting and breaking immersion, despite being almost a necessity to finding many of the hidden pickups throughout the game (unless the player has a very sharp eye and a lot of patience). These complaints, however, have pretty much disappeared after the developers confirmed they made the highlighting an optional feature.
  • Fandom Rivalry: One is already developing between Human Revolution fans and Mass Effect fans. The music and general genre of the two make them natural rivals. Although there is a very large overlap between the fanbases of the games. A lot of people actually liked both titles. Ironically enough, the creators of Mass Effect designed the ending choices of the trilogy to mirror that of Deus Ex, leading to the infamous ending.
  • Game Breaker:
    • The Linebacker grenade launcher, which is a Preorder Bonus, can kill the third boss in seconds.
    • Punch-Packing Pistol: Per any Deus Ex title, the standard pistol is a reliable and accurate medium-range weapon with plentiful ammo. What makes it a Game Breaker is the armour-piercing upgrade, which allows you to take out almost every mook you come across with one or two headshots. Heavily-armoured enemies can otherwise take several clips to bring down.
  • Genius Bonus/Meaningful Name:
  • Good Bad Bugs: There's a glitch you can exploit that allows you to get infinite XP, allowing you to get all 68 Praxis points and max out every single Aug you have. Simply save your game in front of a computer, then hack it (Nukes make it much easier). Once you've finished hacking and your reward is displayed on screen, exit the computer before collecting your reward, then reload your last save and complete the hack again. Each time you repeat this process, your XP reward for completing the hack will double.
  • Harsher in Hindsight:
    • While working on story details for Human Revolution back in 2007, the devs came up with the idea of having Detroit become a major bio-tech center after an auto industry collapse. Little did they know that a real crash would happen the following year.
    • Not to mention protests over class disparity turned out to be very on the mark shortly after the game's release.
    • Detention policies for American citizens hit closer to home with recent developments in the government.
    • Blink and you'll miss it, but one of the scrolling texts underneath news broadcasts mentions that there has been a tsunami alert in Japan, but it is expected to be harmless. Not so much in real life.
    • The whole theme of technology that could potentially benefit all of humankind having secret backdoors for the benefit of a small powerful group. Edward Snowden revealed the truth about the NSA a few years after the game's release.
  • Ho Yay: Pritchard becomes more... concerned about Jensen late in the game.
    • And after Jensen goes MIA for a few days, Pritchard expresses a desire to keep Jensen on a leash.
  • Iron Woobie: Adam, for the most part. He does allow his angst to show at occasional intervals, but for the most part he just swallows his despair and tries to get on with his life, dangerous though it may be.
  • Memetic Mutation:
  • Moral Event Horizon:
    • Narhari Kahn and Belltower as a whole cross this when they open fire and kill everyone in the Alice Garden Pod apartment complex, despite the fact that everybody, including the one hacker they were after, were unarmed civilians.
    • If Megan Reed didn't cross it at some point in the game, then she inevitably does sometime after once she joins Bob Page and begins work on what will eventually become the Gray Death.
  • Most Wonderful Sound:
    • The chime that plays when you hit the start button after starting up the game.
    • The original UNATCO leitmotif that plays when entering Sarif Industries for the first time in the intro.
  • No Such Thing as Bad Publicity: The leaked beta convinced a lot of the Hate Dumb to switch teams.
  • Only the Creator Does It Right: The game was starting to receive this... until the beta was leaked. Even then, angry nostalgic gamers were still upset, to the point a mod mocking it was made for the original Deus Ex.
  • Paranoia Fuel:
    • Visiting the basement of Picus and snooping in their files shows how easily and to how great an extent mass media can manipulate people. But it's just a plot point of a Conspiracy Theory game, right? Right? Wrong. Picus is a thinly veiled Expy of NewsCorp.
    • Adam himself, especially during a stealth run. So there's this guy in the building, right? And we keep finding our buddies dead/unconscious on the floor, right? But we've still got (dwindling) numbers and familiar ground and security systems on our side, so we should be able to at least find him, right? Right? ...Guys? Hey, where did everybody--
  • Player Punch:
    • Malik's death, if you let it happen.
    • Made all the worse when you reach Tong's HQ in the parking garage, and her corpse is on one of the tables having been stripped of augmentations.
    • Players have reportedly been enraged enough by these atrocities that they abandoned their Pacifist Runs on the spot.
  • Polished Port: The Wii U Director's Cut, besides combining the game with all of its DLC, uses the GamePad in very helpful and sensible ways that greatly enhance the experience.
  • Sequel Displacement: Because of the large gap between HR and Deus Ex Invisible War, this was many players first Deus Ex game. Since HR wasn't a Numbered Sequel like it was originally going to be, and any references to the original games would only be picked up by players of them, it isn't uncommon to find players unaware of the first two games.
  • Sidetracked By the Golden Saucer: There are so many computers to hack. Almost none of them are strictly necessary to hack, but the minigame lets you hack literally hundreds of computers over the course of the game. When you enter a large office area, espect to drop at least ten or twenty minutes just running around hacking every computer in sight for experience and money.
  • Signature Scene: Everybody seems to remember Adam Jensen's apartment.
  • Special Effects Failure: The takedown animations:
    • They are keyed for the standard character model size. Fair enough. But there are a few enemies (i.e. Ogres) that are a bit larger than everyone else, and the animation for their takedowns remains the same. So if Jensen performs, let's say, his "Hey You!" Haymaker on an Ogre, he taps the small of their back (rather than the shoulder) and punches them in the heavily armored chest.
    • The spacings for the animations expects a certain amount of room. If you're in a particular cramped area or are on top of something, some of your enemies would end up clipping through the geometry or even through the camera itself (resulting in part of them being completely see-through). One of the Lethal Double Takedowns involve Adam throwing one guy on another and then stabbing both; if you happen to do this in a narrow hallway Adam will slam them against the wall, then headbutt half his torso through the wall while the two guys ragdolls.
    • Since Takedowns are scripted, when you're facing multiple enemies you'll see that they're frozen in place. Normally the animations are chosen in such a way that you don't see this, but during the fight on Panchaea, due to the larger amount of enemies going for your face, you'll see a bunch of them either in mid-stride or mid-jump. Not to mention that the takedowns stay the same regardless of who Jensen is taking down. Which for example, means a pair of street prostitutes will engage in a quick series of kung-fu blocks and counter-punches before Jensen puts them down. Then again, if someone would have to learn martial arts to survive on the streets, it would be prostitutes.
  • Spiritual Licensee: This is probably the greatest RoboCop game you will ever play.
  • Surprisingly Improved Sequel: Invisible War was basically the epitome of Contested Sequel. Fans took much more kindly to this one. While the first will probably never be topped, this is seen by most as a worthy successor.
  • That One Achievement: Playing basketball, of all things, since Adam tosses the ball really hard and the ball is inexplicably well inflated for a back alleyway in Detroit.
  • Uncanny Valley: The running animations that the cyberzombies use at Panchaea seem a bit... off.
  • Unfortunate Implications:
    • Meet Letitia.Outdated racial stereotype.
    • To a lesser extent, there's Sandoval (and Zeke Sanders), and the various Asians you run into. The clerk at the Chinese LIMB clinic also has unfortunately broken English.
  • Vindicated by History: The game was overlooked by many when it came out, as 2011 was chock full of great titles, but when Game of the Year discussions came up later on, Human Revolution was on the short list in just about everyone's book, prompting some to give it a closer look.
    • The game won five awards at the 2012 Canadian Videogame Awards, including the high profile Console Game of the Year award.
  • Waggle: In the Wii U port, clicking the zoom button with a scoped weapon causes the scope view to show up on the Gamepad screen instead of the TV. This can be rather bothersome for those used to the vanilla game.
  • What an Idiot!: If you choose to confront him, Zeke Sanders is this. Instead of turning his weapon on the very dangerous cyborg just a few feet away from him, he takes the time to push Josie Thorpe to her knees and tries to shoot her, giving you ample time to shoot or knock him out first.
  • What Do You Mean It's Not Political?: The entire augmentation debate is just like the abortion debate. Clinics built for augmentations being protested and bombed by detractors, supporters declaring that it is their body and they will do with it what they like, and people against it using religious statements to oppose it. In one protest, you can see signs that say, "I regret my augmentation," just like "I regret my abortion" signs in real life. The Humanity Front and Purity First has many real-world analogies, with a legitimate political group sharing goals and views with a terrorist organisation, such as Sinn Féin and the IRA or Animal Rights groups and the ALF. Conspiracy-wise, Serif Industries is under fire for trying to end Neuropozyne dependency, and in Real Life, there are proposals to develop embryo transfer to the point that abortion would not be lethal to the fetus - these cannot get off the ground due to anti-technologists protesting stem cell research... and stem cell researchers would probably rather not have the supply of aborted fetuses for stem cells cut off. The anti-aug crowd want augs eliminated, and Versalife is making a killing on Neuropozyne.
  • Win Back the Crowd:
    • Successfully won people back to idea of more Deus Ex games after the disappointing Invisible War eight years earlier.
    • The leaked beta turned a number of fans opinions of the game to a much more positive one after the game was leaked, and the leaked players finding out it was pretty good.
  • The Woobie:
    • Haas, just Haas. He is ordered to shoot a 15-year-old kid, then is blamed for it even though he was not in charge, then gets demoted to a desk job, then his family gets upset with him because of his demotion, then he gets fired because he let Adam into the police station, then he gets a job at Sarif Industries under Adam, and depending on the ending, Sarif Industries itself might collapse or at least end up without David Sarif or Adam Jensen to keep the company afloat.
  1. ↑ The obligatory comment on a video of Adam engaging in some Video Game Cruelty. Originates from the aforementioned Adam needs a new mirror video.
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