Deus Ex: Human Revolution

The year is 2027 and I'm a cyborg crime-fighter, like Robocop, but I sound like Christian Bale's gravel-coughing Batman, which hurts my suspension of disbelief a lot more than when I shot that guy twenty times in the face and he didn't seem to notice.

I've snuck into a secret compound hidden under Detroit's industrial ruins. The place is extremely overstaffed with gun-toting meathead murder jockeys, and they also have a lot of giant robots and kill-on-sight sentry guns, which is a mistake on their part because I can totally hack their systems and flag all friendlies as bullet sponges.

There's just one problem:

The dude I'm playing as, Adam Jensen, has no idea how to sit down when using a computer. The dumbass always stands up when in front of a desk, which is a real problem when the computer room is surrounded by windows overlooking a warehouse full of black ops mercenaries.

"Hey! Who's that guy over there?"

"I don't know. Let's shoot him!"

Before I can bypass the first directory the alarms start going off and about thirty dudes go full-automatic on me. I probably would've been in serious trouble if I wasn't such a fucking ninja.

But once I get past those assholes, things change.

I find myself trapped in mortal combat with this eight-foot-tall human weapon, and the fight is totally unavoidable, which is a bitch because up until this point the game has been really supportive of me building a passive-avoid-combat kind of guy, and what I mean by that is whenever you gain a level you get a point, and that point can be spent on all kinds of bonuses, from sweet combat moves, to turning invisible, to sweating special pheromones that can influence people. Whatever you want. It doesn't have to be combat-related, and all of them are useful given the proper scenario.

At first, the game was my buddy:

"You want to be a hacker? Sure, spend all of your points in hacking. That's cool. You can use computer terminals to beat the next mission."

"You want to be sneaky? That's wonderful. You can use your stealth to the beat the next mission. We believe in you."

But then the game was like, "An Icarus landing system?!? You spent your hard-earned points on a hi-tech parachute?!? That's it, slacker! We're tired of your bullshit, half-assed level-up bonuses. We're shipping you off to military school!"

And in this case, military school is some asshole who could out-gun a tank. His fucking arm turns into this super-big A-10 Warthog gun that rips through concrete like it was cheese.

Do you know what your arms turn into? Swords.

Swords were big in the Middle Ages, but in 2027,

      against a giant cyborg?

This guy can also spit out, like, half a dozen frag grenades all at the same time in every direction whenever he feels like it. I can only toss one grenade at a time, and I only have one grenade in my possession, and it's a flash-bang.

"You like pineapples, boy?"

That's the kind of shit-talk he spits out when you're scrambling ahead of his firing solution. The dude is laughing the entire time, which felt like some substitute for the game itself to be laughing at me.

Boss fights in a game with stealth elements don't have to be so focused on direct confrontation.

Anybody ever play Thief? In the last level you descend into this fairy tale version of Hell called the Maw where the Woodsy King is performing a dark ceremony.

I remember it looking so much better than this.

You never fight the guy directly. Instead, you have to sneak into his ritual chamber and replace his orb with a fake, which fucks up the ritual and makes a bunch of stuff explode. It's really cool and a lot more satisfying than if the developers had forced you into a sword-fight with the fairy monster.

Bitching aside, Deus Ex: Human Revolution is awesome.