Having spent six years on-and-off and across four different rigs trying to get this game to run stutter-free, I was finally able to sit down and play through it from start to finish.
After 25 hours, undertaking a pacifist run (something I hardly ever do in games), I have come away with a somewhat mixed opinion. There is a lot to like here, but unfortunately, the experience is held back by poor boss fights, an underwhelming conclusion, and some of the worst performance I've experienced in a PC game.
THE GOOD
The art style and aesthetic are incredibly unique and captivating. I frequently found myself stopping to stare at the skyboxes and environments across the various locations the game takes you.
The story has an interesting start, and I found myself genuinely interested in diving deeper into the corporate conspiracy and uncovering something that could potentially shape the future direction of mankind. There are also some intriguing parallels with how society is integrating AI into everyday life, akin to how augmentation is being used in the world of Human Revolution.
The game has possibly the best interpretation of a hacking mechanic I've experienced. It's simple to grasp and scales well depending on the difficulty rating of the security.
I also found a lot of satisfaction in discovering the various avenues and alternative paths available for navigating different areas. There is a decent amount of flexibility in how you approach situations, and the game does a good job of accommodating different playstyles.
The takedown animations are also incredibly satisfying, particularly once you unlock the ability to take down multiple enemies at once. There's something oddly rewarding about carefully positioning yourself, triggering a takedown, and then chaining it into another enemy.
Whilst I undertook a pacifist run, there were still a number of combat encounters that I found surprisingly challenging, particularly on the higher difficulty. Having to avoid killing enemies while simultaneously managing limited resources and hostile encounters made certain sections considerably more tense than I expected.
One of my favourite aspects of the game was how some of your choices actually come back to you later. Preventing a character from taking their own life and choosing to let a terrorist live early in the game are both examples of decisions that can have consequences later on. These moments made the world feel more reactive and gave my choices a greater sense of importance.
I also enjoyed the branching dialogue system as a mechanic. The choices aren't always particularly clear-cut, but I actually think that uncertainty is part of what makes it interesting. The Social Enhancer augmentation becomes particularly useful here, allowing you to better understand the people you're talking to and giving you another reason to invest in it.
THE BAD
The boss fights were horrific bullet sponges that didn't mesh well at all with my pacifist playthrough. Apparently, the Director's Cut fixes these somewhat, but I would hate to see what they were like in the original release. The final boss is so bad that I hesitate to even call it a boss at all.
The reason it took me six years after purchasing the game to finally sit down and play it from start to finish was the horrific performance. This game suffers from stuttering the likes of which I have rarely experienced in a PC game. The frametime graph looks like a heart monitor having a nervous breakdown: perfectly flat one second, then suddenly shooting through the roof for no apparent reason.
This really shouldn't be the case for a game of this age. From what I understand, the Director's Cut is based on the Wii U version after Square Enix lost the source code for the original release, which apparently doesn't suffer from the same issues. The original version was subsequently delisted, leaving this as the only legal version available for purchase. Another feather in the cap for the "Stop Killing Games" movement.
If you do find yourself wanting to play this game, I would recommend downloading the HRDCFix and locking your framerate to 60 FPS. Both helped considerably, but I still experienced loading stutters lasting anywhere from one to two minutes whenever entering a new area.
The biggest disappointment was the ending. It's not necessarily the fact that the game gives you multiple endings that bothered me, but how they are presented.
After everything the game spends hours building towards, you are essentially presented with a handful of philosophical choices before the credits roll. The endings themselves are little more than glorified PowerPoint presentations, accompanied by unrelated stock footage, with Adam Jensen narrating the consequences of whichever option you chose.
In a world where Mass Effect 3 is rightly panned for the way in which its ending choices were presented, I am genuinely shocked that Human Revolution doesn't enter the conversation more often. After investing so much time in the game's conspiracy and themes, I found the way the story ultimately concluded incredibly unsatisfying.
VERDICT
Human Revolution is a game I have a lot of respect for, even if I ultimately found it disappointing.
There are some genuinely excellent ideas here. The exploration, hacking, stealth, takedowns, branching dialogue and consequential choices can make for some fantastic moments, and I particularly enjoyed discovering how certain decisions would come back to affect the world later in the game.
Ultimately, I'd give Human Revolution a 7/10. Despite my criticisms of the story's conclusion, I enjoyed the story overall and found enough of the gameplay, exploration and choice-driven elements compelling to consider it a good game.
However, I cannot recommend the Director's Cut version of this game. The performance problems are simply too severe and too persistent for me to overlook, especially when they can continue years after release and across multiple pieces of hardware. A game this old should not require community fixes and framerate caps just to achieve a reasonably consistent experience. If you find yourself wanting to experience this game, try and track down a copy of the original 2011 release.
Beautiful to look at, occasionally fascinating to play, and packed with some genuinely satisfying systems and choices. Unfortunately, it's let down by poor boss fights, an infuriating PC port and one of the most underwhelming conclusions I've experienced in a game.
7/10
