God is Dead

The end of Deus Ex Human Revolution took me by surprise; not because of what happened but because it happened a bit sooner than I expected.

Since I started to play games with the specific intention of finishing them I have almost always been taken aback to discover that they end at all.  It's hard to say whether this game was short or not both because I have so few completed games to compare it to and because I played it over a very extended period with long gaps between sessions.  It does feel slightly as though some aspects of the game were underdeveloped and there were not many city locations to explore: Detroit and Heng Sha both being visited more than once.

The plot seems barely concluded as well.  As I wrote recently, loads of different organisations are mentioned in the game but how they all relate to each other and what becomes of them in the end is far from clear.  It felt slightly like the world of Human Revolution was developed and then the game ended and I can't help feeling that this was an ambitious project which had to be finished in a hurry, like a story I wrote at school but ended very suddenly because I reached the 2000 words I needed to write so the characters had outlived their usefulness to me and could be killed in a crash before their spaceship reached it's destination.

The game's playability and the depth of its world kept me interested to the end.  I will miss the mechanics of the game and nostalgically wish to hack a security terminal and turn a bot against its masters then watch on the camera as it mows them down.  I will long to take down a group of security guards one by one and hide so many unconscious guys in a vent that no more can be squeezed in.

Every time a write about a game I seem to pedantically draw attention to it's negatives but the positives in this game far out weigh them.  I hope I will find time to play through it again some time.

Changing the subject, I have bought Mafia II recently.  It was a bit of an impulse buy and I don't know if it is the right game to be getting so soon after playing a lot of GTA 4.  I have played the very start but I am going to put it to one side and play NFS ProStreet for now.