While the game is quite impressive, its boss battles disappoint severely

Sep 8, 2011 15:31 GMT  ·  By

Deus Ex: Human Revolution was released last week by publisher Square Enix and developer Eidos Montreal as a prequel to the massively successful and influential Deus Ex, and its sequel, Deus Ex: Invisible War, launched at the beginning of the 2000s.

We've talked about quite a lot of the game's attributes in this diary series, including the four main gameplay aspects: stealth, social, hacking and combat, praising it for the great mix of all these elements, but it's now time to talk about probably one of the biggest failures of Human Revolution: its boss battles.

The new Deus Ex has quite a well paced narrative, taking protagonist Adam Jensen all over the world while he's uncovering layers upon layers of a massive conspiracy centered around human augmentation and whether or not it's ethical for corporations to 'play God' with other humans.

Through his adventures, however, Jensen needs to fight against special augmented mercenaries that, in the end, don't even have that much of a motivation to stand in his way, largely because they're mercenaries to begin with.

Nonetheless, Jensen is forced to fight it our with massive guys that have guns for hands or teleporting acrobats through the story, almost all of which are handled clumsily. It doesn't matter what type of gameplay you wanted to specialize in, like a stealth hacker, because in boss battles you just need to shoot them with what you have available. If you only carried a stun gun or a tranquilizer rifle, then too bad, as you're going to die repeatedly.

While the first boss was relatively easy defeat, once you started running around the warehouse where you're fighting him, the second, the aforementioned teleporting acrobat, was quite peculiar, at least in my case.

She manifests at certain moments throughout the battle, and you mainly need to stun her and start firing all your bullets into her body. The game does want you to use her electric attacks against her, by luring her into areas with open water, but during the first few tries that was pretty much impossible to figure out.

After a while, as I was running around the arena, scrounging for heavy rifle ammo, she teleported right besides me but immediately started shaking. I then realized she was standing in a pool of water but I had no idea that's what the game wanted me to do until then.

I love the regular gameplay in Deus Ex: Human Revolution but during boss fights, things start falling apart. What do you think of its boss encounters? Share your thoughts in a comment below.