Of course I haven’t been able to stop playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution for long enough to write a decent article here, but I do have time to complain about some small things that irritate me!
Camera shake
I’ve said this before, but shaking the camera is never a good idea — unless the character is being actively shaken, knocked around or hit — because the human body is sophisticated enough that it compensates for such movement automatically. When a person jogs, they don’t feel like they’re disoriented and unable to focus, so why should we feel that way in a first-person game? It’s bad enough that I really wish Eidos would patch the game and get rid of it; it only subtracts from the experience and the immersion.
Tiny minimap “upgrade”
The minimap, found in the bottom-left corner of the screen, is a decent size when you first start playing the game, and I was perfectly happy with it. In fact, I was so happy with it that decided to spend upgrade points on it so I could see more! Little did I know that the upgrade would simply condense more information into the same tiny square, making it nearly impossible to discern what’s actually going on! Instead of shrinking all the icons and making the minimap frustrating to use, the upgrade should have expanded the size of the minimap on the screen, which has plenty of room to spare. The HUD in this game is very sleek already, so it wouldn’t be a problem. Again, this is significant enough that I hope people complain and it gets patched.
Scarlett Johansson syndrome
Back in the day, it used to be impossible to make a female character look sexy. There just weren’t enough pixels and polygons to make it work. But now it looks like every female in Deus Ex is a sister of Scarlett Johansson, and that’s kind of lame. I mean, let’s be realistic, sexy people are only sexy because there are so many ugly people in the world; it’s a number’s game, and I believe that ugliness is a part of making a gritty dystopian future feel bad.
Or, if you’re going to pack the entire world full of supermodels anyway, at least try to acknowledge it somehow. Say that all the ugly people were killed as part of a eugenics movement or something. I know fat people are harder to animate and there’s a certain satisfaction to successfully creating an attractive model, but this is a bit over the top.
The game is great though, and I think it deserves praise for many different things, especially it’s story.