Review: Deus Ex – The Missing Link

Deus Ex Human Revolution was a game that was made possible by a brilliant design ethos that made every environment layered, and packed with opportunities to problem solve however you saw fit. The game features a sort of density in level design that hasn’t been seen since the supposed heydey of PC gaming way back in the mid to late 90′s. That was a time when games like Deus Ex were revolutionary, but made sense given the projected path of game design, and First Person Shooter Design. Sadly, that wasn’t the case. Instead of FPS games evolving toward a landscape that looked more and more like Deus Ex type games, they shifted toward an overabundance of cutscenes, and quicktime events. Two words that my word processor refuses to acknowledge even exist.

So when I was given the opportunity to revisit the world of Deus Ex in a kind of sort of way via The Missing Link, I was fairly excited. I love the design and the gameplay of the Deus Ex games, and even went so far as to name Human Revolution Game Gavel’s Game Of The Year for 2011. So how did this revisit into familiar territory go? It was a bit uneven and restricted honestly.

The first thing that you will notice as either an asset or a detriment to The Missing Link, is it’s choice of setting, and narrative placement within the game’s own timeline. First, it’s a boat, second it’s in the middle of the story of Human Revolution. The second detail is honestly a bigger concern than the first even though game journalists and the like would have you convinced that it’s the other way around. The narrative placement of the content means that you have one of two choices. You can roll a new save game and play through until the point in the game where you can play The Missing Link, or bizarrely enough… you can play The Missing Link as a stand alone expansion. For me this is simply an issue of time. It means that I am faced with the choice of either playing a whole new save game so I can the full narrative experience, but sacrifice a huge chunk of time in doing so, or I can play the stand alone version, and write my review from that perspective even though it may end up being disjointed. This is a problem in presentation, and design from the outset. It’s bold, and daring, and adds a sense of replay value and creates a revenue opportunity that maybe other companies haven’t explored in the context of narrative, and it should be applauded as a bold design choice, however… it’s also an odd choice for an RPG to make insofar as content is concerned.

Most DLC for RPG’s is set after the main game, or incorporated in a way that is open. There are plenty of good examples of this, but Borderlands and Fallout specifically spring to mind. Borderlands is one of the best examples of extending a game well beyond it’s projected lifespan by smart use of DLC. Every single downloadable can be played before or after the main quest is completed, and can be played again on the new game plus setting. Fallout 3 uses it’s Broken Steel DLC to open the game back up to play, and lets players continue to build their characters well after the main quest is done. Fallout New Vegas is more firm and resolute, and still comes to a concrete ending, but it incorporated all of it’s content in a way that still left it open to explore any time the player wanted provided they hadn’t completed the main quest. These methods of inclusion all have a commonality to them, their open nature. This open approach to content delivery let these games pull the players back into the game worlds in a way that felt natural and rewarding. Maybe that’s why The Missing Link feels so jarring.

Most will just go straight into the content without grinding a new game to get there, and certainly that’s the choice I made in order to write a review in what I assumed would be a timely fashion. But it means that the player is going to be stripped of any upgrades, or progress, and will essentially have to start from scratch, as the content doesn’t recognize any of your accomplishments, or level progress from the main game. This already forms a disconnect to the world of Human Revolution, making it seem like this is just a sideshow diversion that really has no effect on the main game. And rightly so, though you will find some Praxis kits that let you upgrade your stats to almost satisfactory levels of ass kicking, you will still feel cheated, or like you are being punished for just jumping right in. But on to that second thing I mentioned, the content’s choice of setting. The boat. It’s really not the behemoth problem a lot of reviewers made it out to be, and that’s because the design standard itself is still fantastic. The compartmentalized feel of the boat actually provides some pretty tense, and very well thought out tactical opportunities and you can see the team trying to work a level of real world logic into this maze of steam choked hallways, jumbled shipping containers, and of course air vents. And most of the time it works. It’s enough to remind you that you’re playing a Deus Ex game, and not just the greatest homage to the best part of Metal Gear Solid 2.

The Missing Link stands out on it’s own in such a way that it threatens to make the base game, or the content (depending on how you look at it) irrelevant. Adam’s boat excursion is a distraction as far as Human Revolution is concerned. It’s not recognizably mentioned in the main game when he crawls out of his human contraband shipping container, and it has literally zero impact on the end game in Human Revolution. You should buy the content if you want an excuse to start a new game in Human Revolution just to see if the method of inclusion is a bit more subtle, or makes better sense. But if you get The Missing Link as something to play on it’s own, I’m not so sure of the value. It’s still a hallmark of excellence for game design, because the gameplay for the content itself is still up to Deus Ex standards. That alone sets it a cut above the rest, but it gets knocked down a full grade for it’s perplexing placement in the story, and for basically having no effect or connection with anything you’ve done in Human Revolution, or will do after.

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