[PS3 version reviewed]

It is telling, our state of post-post-meta-modernism, when a game like Deus Ex: Human Revolution seems slightly old-fashioned. Cyberpunk. I mean, how long ago was it that you read Neuromancer and Snow Crash? Or played Syndicate? What was once a cutting-edge science fiction trope now seems almost old hat. We’ve since moved on to looking for whatever comes after nanotechnology.

That’s what makes the setting of DXHR, in 2011, so interesting. When we were first introduced in the late 80s and 90s to the idea of cybernetic implants, and well, Deus Ex* and cyborgs in general, the technology seemed feasible but not exactly on the close horizon. It was easy to imagine humans with interface implants and extra-strong limbs and organs in the future – surely, someday, obviously, right? But, today… today much of what is portrayed in the game, a mere 16 years hence, suddenly seems that much closer. We’ve seen nimble robots. We’ve seen the rise of the global internet, fabrication technology, huge leaps in computer power, artificial materials with new properties already.

This new perspective on cyberpunk makes DXHR that much more interesting, and disturbing. Now it’s near-sci fi.

In terms of tone, the game is aiming a bullseye at Blade Runner, and mixing in a sensible dose of modernisation and healthy skepticism. Adam Jensen, our leading man with the young Clint Eastwood impersonation and the permanently implanted mirrorshades, is straight up street samurai ripped from all of those earlier novels, right down to the longish trenchcoat (so irritatingly appropriated in the Matrix) and crocodilian attack pattern. Dude doesn’t move fast until he has to, you know?

That’s not really an exaggeration – your only melee attack is an instant takedown, ala Tenchu. He gets a few of these, and they need time to recharge. When they run out, you can’t fight.

See, some rough edges. But we’ll come back to that.

This game looks sumptuous. The atmosphere is dripping with detail. The music is paired like a fine wine with a gourmet meal. The industrial design, architecture, and prop work is some of the best I’ve seen. It hits all the right notes, and then takes that arrangement and dips it all in gold. Everything is golden-coloured, sometimes (but rarely) to a fault. You can feel a certain pride in this work, and it is well-deserved; once you make it to the initial late credit sequence, you just have that feeling – I am in good hands here.

Functionally, DXHR makes some interesting choices. The structure is that of an action- RPG in the manner of a System Shock game, but incorporating both first and third- person views in a contextual manner. For the most part, this works fairly well. When in cover, or climbing up ladders and doing certain other mini-cutscene type things you’ll see the character. The rest of the exploration is done in the first-person. You can shoot in either of these modes, although it must be said that freeform run-and-gun is absolutely not what you want to do. This results in a clunky mess of a shooter that is unremarkable in most respects. When firing from cover, there is a little more finesse, as the cover-switching mechanics are fairly sound, allowing Jensen to easily round corners while hiding, and do appropriately-badass Magnum P.i.-style cover-rolls around the shooting gallery.

In this sense it starts to look a little more like Metal Gear Solid in shooting sequences, but with Fallout’s gunplay. Yeah. You quickly realise that it’s better to not get shot at all.

The AI for the most part is relatively inane, but will ventilate Jensen in surprisingly short order. Even for an augmented guy, he takes a surprisingly small number of bullets to kill, which you can view as either refreshing or irritating, depending on your patience. While he will recover health if he survives being damaged, there are a great many situations where you need to think very quickly about how to neutralise the alarm and/or sentries, and oft times you’ve fucked up so bad that you really can’t. (On a related note, this game keeps the last two autosaves.)

Sneaking around means a lot of crouch-walking, vent-crawling, and general spy behaviour. Now we’re thinking more like Hitman, and this is the ideal frame in which to play. Things get a lot more interesting this way, because the player quickly learns that there is always another way. You may feel like you’re trapped behind a door with a security rating too high to hack, but either you haven’t noticed another route, or you don’t strictly need whatever’s in that room. You may think that it’s impossible to get across an open office with a half-dozen guards and no cover, but you haven’t found the terminal that lets you hack the turret to shoot them for you yet. In this sense DXHR is a fantastic experience, incorporating many open-world style complications, when you rely on a stealthy approach rather than trying to brute-force it.

The laughably paltry amounts of ammunition you find throughout the game are another hint that you shouldn’t be kicking off huge firefights. At least, not in your vicinity.

When you’re not Batmanning your way past security goons, you spend your time walking the streets of futuristic cities, picking up side-quests and generally taking in the depressing, beautiful environments. DXHR is particularly adept at triggering lantern- lighting conversations in your vicinity, served up like tidy audio plot morsels. Of course your skull is wired with a nice comms package, and visual HUD indicators that conveniently highlight interesting items (rimmed in…. gold). These extend to some slightly hacky game-isms, such as highlighting the sections of wall with “structural weakness” that allow Jensen to use his wall-punching aug made specifically for this purpose. Other times, such as in the dialog sections with game characters, it is put to great effect; one mod called the CASSIE allows Jensen to monitor the subject of his interrogation like a walking lie detector, and release pheromones (yes) to sway the subject’s will, based on personality type. That in particular was a really clever wrinkle that set apart the dialog scenes in DXHR from Mass Effect (which it so clearly is inspired by, in all the right ways).

Hacking also plays a large part in the game, as it is greatly rewarded in both information and treasure, and there are hundreds of gates and safes and computers to hack in this game. It’s a mini game with a few wrinkles, presenting a 2D view of a random lattice of nodes which you must “capture” before the security system’s trace winds it’s way back to your starting point. A little obscure at first but once you get the hang of it, presents few difficulties, and is helped along the way by picking up single-use apps that can halt the timer or capture nodes without detection. Advanced hacking augments allow you to disable or command turrets and robots, which is extremely satisfying. At one point while playing, I foiled an ambush by ripping a hacked turret out of the floor with Jensen’s augmented arms and planting it in front of the elevator I was waiting for.

Seeing how the various augments, earned through experience and purchasing “praxis kits” along the way, broaden Jensen’s powers are a big part of the enjoyment in this game. While the loading tips advise me that you can’t upgrade everything by the end of the game, if you found all the side-quests, I imagine you’d get pretty close.

DXHR really asks a lot of the player in terms of familiarity with the level layouts. While the mapping systems and general UI for managing goals, augs and equipment is excellent, it seems purposefully sparse in terms of indicators for some typical RPG aspects. Like, where you can buy and sell weapons. You simply have to know where, by asking around or noticing signage. Likewise, the non-city-hub areas also heavily encourage the player to really study the blueprints (goldprints) and discern potential shortcuts around the obvious paths. The game can unfold very differently, depending on the route you take, and many of these decisions actually affect the story.

Speaking of story. While it seems to me that there are some obvious scars in the game where larger sections have been pulled, for the sake of brevity or production limits, I think it did what they set out to do, which was spin a Ludlum-style globetrotting conspiracy theory thriller that didn’t overburden itself with an insistence on absurd scope (I’m looking at you, Assassin’s Creed). Apart from some slightly janky animation in the character system’s lip-sync feature, and a couple of odd casting choices, it works. You have to appreciate that it’s not inconceivable to put 20-30 hours into this game, if you really want to learn to be a sneaky bastard. Adam Jensen is basically a caricature, but he still manages some funny delivery from time to time. The choices you make for him in the game will sway Jensen’s behaviour somewhere between Dirty Harry and, well, this.

And of course, there’s the weird frailties. The lack of any real melee combat is what seems most lacking. Some of the control choices, made to suit the switching of first- and third-person viewpoints, result in odd button mappings. The L1 trigger for instance is the cover button, while the iron sight is on R3. Since you are often firing from cover (third-person) it essentially becomes your “aim” button, like many FPS games. But when away from cover it does nothing. I played half the game before I realised that there even was an iron sight view. It’s also a bit hard to understand why this dude can’t sprint more than 10 paces, or fall more than 10 feet, without an upgrade.

DXHR is an extremely ambitious, cleverly crafted game that succeeds, despite the fact that it’s reach slightly exceeds it’s augmented grasp. There’s enormous potential for follow-up titles. That is, if you have the patience. This is a game for patient men, there is no mistaking that, but the reward is some glorious gold-drenched cyberpunk mind candy mixed with some nice stealth action. It’s extremely rewarding to shop for superpowers, decide if you should take the invisibility cloak or Icarus free fall landing system, equip your gun with quantum-tunnelling bullets, and create mayhem with hacked robot tanks. Definitely one of the best new games of 2011.

* I never played the original games.