Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Thoughts @ Twenty Sided

Twenty Sided's Shamus Young thinks about Deus Ex: Human Revolution, struggling to decide how to assess the game:

Months later, I still don’t know how to judge the game. Is it a masterful and cunning improvement on modern shooters, or a short, dumbed-down bastardization of its predecessor? It’s kind of both.

I will give the game credit for this: The story worked. This should not be praise. This should be the most basic, obvious accomplishment that a game can achieve. This should be like saying of a restaurant, “The food was cooked.” But as Fallout 3, Assassin’s Creed 2, and Fable 2, and many other games have shown, game designers can’t seem to keep even the most simple plots from falling apart into contradictory nonsense, and they can’t devise characters with any sort of coherent motivation. Yes, there were parts of Human Revolution I could nitpick. (And the boss characters were unforgivably horrible.) But on balance the writers managed to create a world that was both complicated (by videogame standards) and sensible. There were many sides to the conflict, they each had a unique viewpoint, and none of them were mustache-twirling “EVUL FOR TEH LULZ!” (Again, aside from the Boss Villains. I make no excuse for them. They were just shameful, and felt like they were grafted in from a much dumber game. The point is, the factions made sense and had interesting things to say.)