Deus Ex: Human Revolution Review

Eleven years after the original, a studio nobody expected produced a sequel that took the right lesson. Detroit and Hengsha are hubs you learn rather than maps you clear, with vents, hackable turrets, conversations and social augmentations all standing as real alternatives to a rifle, and the game genuinely does not care which you use. The augmentation tree lets a stealth build and a combat build produce different games out of the same missions, and the side quests are among the best written in the genre, particularly a police station favour that rewards being remembered.

The gold and black art direction has aged into something iconic. The famous flaw is that the four boss fights were built by an outside team and accept only one solution, so a player who spent twenty hours investing in hacking and persuasion is suddenly handed a room with a man and a minigun. Stealth is also over rewarded to the point that shooting feels like the losing option. Everything around those rooms is superb.