This means that it’s going to take you a fairly lengthy amount of time to pick up all the combat augments, presuming those are your focus. Bear in mind, that basically the only time you’ll be getting a large amount of experience as a character that kills everything is through the ‘getting things done’ bonus at the end of a quest that gives you somewhere between 250 and 750 experience depending on the quest. This isn’t much, but that’s exclusively the augments that will come in handy during combat, and doesn’t include the augments that are just generally useful. Even if all you pick up are the combat beneficial augments, that’s still around 10 praxis, which totals 50000 experience. I was talking about this to a friend, and he said “Do you even need experience if you’re focusing on combat?” I wondered if this was a similar question the developers asked each other when building the leveling up system in the game. It said, “Oh, you want to use a silenced pistol and play the game as an assassin in the shadows? Well I hope you enjoy getting significantly less experience.” In doing so, the game effectively said that way of playing the game is not the correct way of playing the game.

In a game that revolves around your choices so much that the ending is literally just choosing one of four endings, the last thing you want to be doing is telling a person the way they’re playing is wrong. Simply put, it’s an issue because it makes a play style far less viable than another. It’s the illusion of choice that the game presents you with. As I mentioned in the review, the game very obviously rewarded exploration and non-combat over straight up running and gunning. So recently I put up my Deus Ex Human Revolution review, and now that it’s out of the way, I wanted to talk about one of the fundamental flaws I think that game had.

Deus ex human revolution tranquilizer rifle headshot