RobotGeek

Warning: Spoilers for Deus Ex: Human Revolution are contained below.

Security in the world of Deus Ex has always been kind of lax. Not that restricted areas aren’t usually chock full of cameras, laser traps, and overpowered trigger-happy goons with nothing better to do, but move aside a few strategically-placed boxes and it’s normally easy to find a very simple way of, you know… circumventing the situation (hur). One of the funnest and funniest parts of Human Revolution was sliding around police headquarters, a building full of people who really ought to have had one or two things to say about my chosen method of transportation, popping out here and there and generally having a whale of a time while the cops simply went about their office work.

It’s not really spoiling much to say that ‘The Missing Link’, the first DLC for Deus Ex: Human Revolution, starts with apparently the dumbest security lapse the series has ever seen. The story takes place after Adam Jensen stows away aboard a Belltower ship and hides in a cryogenic hibernation pod. In the original game, Jensen then wakes up in Singapore with no memory of the last few days, which is never explained. ‘The Missing Link’ fills in the blanks, beginning with Jensen being discovered and held captive by the Belltower operatives on board. What happens next, and how Jensen gets out of his predicament, is… well, the game.

It kicks off to a fairly uninspired start, immediately falling back on the game’s all-too-traditional stealth/hacking/assault formula. For instance, you’re faced with an obvious vent the moment you leave the first room. There’s a distinct lack of subtlety to the options, leaving it feeling more like, say, a panel of multiple-choice buttons, than something to be experimented with and figured out. It does quickly get better, but as a general feature throughout this instalment, the options do tend to feel a bit rote.

One of the big things about this DLC is that you start from scratch augmentations-wise, courtesy of a plot contrivance. This makes sense, because it would be tricky to try and plug into the exact personal configuration you had at that moment in the original game’s plot. You’d be reverting from your last configuration anyway, assuming you completed the game, because the events of ‘The Missing Link’ happen partway through the story. Given that your old augmentations were intimately linked with your sense of development in that particular narrative, it wouldn’t add anything to TML to be starting in the middle.

Instead, TML gets its own flow. Offering limited but much more frequent upgrades, it makes for an interesting change of pace and a new strategic aspect, because augmentation becomes more of a short-term investment. It also allows you to try things a little differently than the way you did before, with the challenge of not having the augs you’re used to having—though it can make you feel pretty nerfed at times.

TML generally takes the shape of a fairly standard, linear mission level, heavily focused on shooting-or-not rather than chatting up the locals. It’s solid enough, but these levels, dealing as they do with wave after wave of goons in warehouses and corridors, were never Deus Ex‘s most interesting. Granted, given the obvious limitations of the little wedge of plot we get, they would have been hard-pushed to offer us a city hub to explore; and while the focus is kind of narrow and the secondary objectives are somewhat piddly, they do a fairly good job of giving you room to manoeuvre.

As you might expect, there are some repercussions for how you choose to go about the mission. Sometimes this feels forced, though—the game tries to make a big deal about how many Belltower people you kill, and you get scolded or existentially probed accordingly. Sorry to say, but my conscience got over that a long time ago in Hengsha, when they were all up in my pilot’s grill, so it’s a little late for that now, sisters. Plus it’s like the same guy ten dozen times anyway. HE KNOWS I’M IN HERE, ASSHOLE.

The story itself is pretty decent, with some engaging characters and a couple of nice twists and turns along the way. In terms of environment and level design, there’s also a handful of creative, novel sections. A few technicalities get in the way, though. While most things are very tight on the technical front, it seems like they didn’t take quite so much time to iron things out or find elegant ways of doing stuff. The biometric scanning chambers that you stand in and wait for the level to load get old very fast, given that there’s a half dozen of them and they are painfully slow (even before they decide whether or not they’re actually going to let you through), and most of them you’ll have to pass through more than once.

Character animation was always a bit iffy in the main game, where characters would undergo complicated jives, twitches and head-lolling as they spoke, but there were a couple of particularly unsightly moments during this one. One time during a conversation, the camera kept feverishly jump-cutting for no apparent reason, like half a dozen different conversations were being patched together. On another occasion, lip-syncing was about half a sentence off. These aren’t huge problems, but they did feel noticeable and surprising given the degree of polish the game normally presents.

To conclude, ‘The Missing Link’ is not revolutionary. It’s not the best of Deus Ex, and doesn’t feel quite special enough to have been set aside as its own unique adventure, except for the fact that the story is relatively self-contained. As a few more hours of the stealth-hack-shooter formula, however, it’s not bad, if somewhat run-of-the-mill.

Eventually, Jensen and the Belltower operatives decide to put aside their differences because they’re all lovers, not fighters, and what follows are several days of inordinate partying and drinking games, and of course what happens on the Belltower ship stays on the Belltower ship, and Jensen later wakes up with no memory and a splitting headache. Once he finds some coffee, normal schedule resumes.