After getting wounded in a terrorist attack during which several top scientists (including his girlfriend Megan Reed) are killed, Jensen’s life is saved by an emergency surgery which replaces damaged body parts with mechanical augmentations. There’s also a strong theme of bioethics not unlike the real-world debate about genetic modification and cloning.Īll those issues are presented in the story of the game’s protagonist, Adam Jensen – an ex-policeman working as the head of security for the biotechnological company Sarif Industries. The eponymous human revolution isn’t a change in political power – it’s a change in the understanding of science and technology (compare: neolithic revolution, industrial revolution) as the line between man and machine is blurred by the augmented humans, emerging artificial intelligences and even the computers made from humans. Human Revolution could be described as a transhumanist game as it deals with the relation between human and machine on the physical (augmentations surgically implanted in people’s bodies or salavaged from their corpses and repurposed by the subculture of harversters), psychological (addiction to the augmentations) and social (the need to afford anti-rejection medicine, the anti-augmentation movement) level. It’s this technology that is the game’s main focus – that is, the technology itself and not its relation to global politics (that is not to say that the political dilemmas are completely absent from the game – they’re just not given as much focus). Human Revolution is a prequel to the first Deus Ex, set in the early days of augmentation when the implants where not yet based on nanotechnology but on mechanical engineering (see: Anna and Gunther from the first game).
While Human Revolution includes many elements of the modern shooters and action-RPGs and while it isn’t as complex as the original, it does bring back some of the complexity removed in Invisible War and even has some interesting ideas of its own.
Given how disappointing Invisible War was, it was easy to see this game as an another dumbed down sequel – especially given that it used the always controversial regenerating health and cover mechanics – but surprisingly, the final game was actually good. Four years later the game got released under the title Deus Ex: Human Revolution. In 2007, Deus Ex 3 was finally announced. The idea of making the next Deus Ex game was quite popular around Ion Storm and Eidos, but for a long time all plans went nowhere.
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