In Deus Ex: Human Revolution, you play in the year 2027, traveling to locations such as Detroit, Shanghai, and Montreal, with the art direction definitely bringing the game to life, allowing you to vicariously live out Adam Jensen's life in the future. As Adam, you start the game resurrected with augmentations, searching for clues surrounding the mysterious attack and deaths of scientists at the Sarif Industries research facility. In this latest rendition of the Deus Ex franchise, players are offered the opportunity to play the game in numerous ways with each decision carrying their own consequences and outcomes. This is not your typical shoooter that requires you blast your way through the game, instead allowing other options such as stealth or non-lethal methods of taking out an opponent.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a First Person Role-Playing game based off the previous titles, set as a prequel to the first of the series where people have mechanical augmentations rather then nano-augments like in the previous games. The decisions you make in this game matter at any time and effects how you play, whether you speak to someone with an angry tone resulting in them disliking you, or charm your way into having things done for you. If you want to compare this to any game, consider the older Splinter Cells and Fallout had a baby and out came as Deus Ex: HR, a semi-open world game that requires tactical decisions and quick thinking along with adrenaline rushed combat and role playing elements.

The game play features four different ways to play the game: combat, social, hacking, or stealth. These "pillars", as the developers have named them, intertwine and can highly affect your game, whether the hacking can give you a more stealth approach or the social pillar leads you to realizing a combat weakness that the enemies have. The role-playing elements have you gaining experience for different ways of completing missions and performing actions like killing someone with a headshot or knocking someone out in a takedown rather then killing them. Once you gain enough experience, you will receive "praxis" points, which you can use to unlock perk-like augments that gives you an advantage over your opponents in a number of ways.

The AI has a big role in the feel for the game, with the non-player characters seeming to be almost living their own lives and have their own conversations that you can interrupt although, of course, they may react rudely. Though the AI is intelligent, some characters seem to have obviously scripted reactions or lack of reaction to certain events that causes the game to be a little less realistic. This is no more apparent when you walk through a crowd carrying a large weapon around without anyone reacting in fear.

The environmental graphics look amazing and you can tell that there was enormous attention dedicated to detail. Even when it comes to traveling around insignificant locations, the area is left quite open giving you plenty of secrets to unlock and objects to interact with. Though most of the time you will have to shoot down doors, unless you have your hacking ability maxed out. The edges of usable items are highlighted and this may feel like cheating but is quite necessary with the unusually abundant amount of objects depicted in the surroundings. The scope of interactive objects provides for a very detailed and rich world to discover and you’ll find the different types of boxes scattered around handy to distract NPCs, allowing you to sneak past them.

The sound quality in the game does excel most action games. You can actually get a good indication of the direction that an enemy is coming from and the audio of simple actions like walking and landing on the ground from a jump sound realistic and appropriate to the situation. Individually, the voice acting is definitely up to par, though the animations when you are speaking to someone can tend to be repetitive and weak, most of the time not actually expressing the actual emotion in the voice. The weapons each sound realistic with each weapon invoking the resonance and reverberation that you would expect from the particular armament. To round out the audio qualities, hearing the cry of an enemy when you slice through them with your blades is eerily satisfying.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is outstanding in its attempt to feel realistic, is enormously entertaining and will appeal to a variety of players. Perfection is large production game is difficult to achieve and there were a few glitches that were encountered where NPC's were placed in an odd position that they obviously shouldn't be, like staring at a wall like they were in a ‘timeout’. You will come across moments such as standing behind an unsuspecting enemy and put a shot through their head and, where they should've just collapsed, they instead they grab their neck and made a gasping sound as if I had shot them in the throat. The exceptional story line definitely provided a realistic experience, even though there were some minimal issues that never really affected the game but slightly diminished the feeling of realism, reminding you that you were just playing a game and not fully immersed in an intense gaming experience. Deus Ex: Human Revolution has some of the best production and art design of any game so far this year with some of the most badass game play seen for ages. All these elements come together, making it difficult to put down the controller and imparting the desire to actually complete the missions with patience rather than just rush through levels head first like in some other role playing or shooter games.

Our take: One of the most addicting and badass games ever experienced.