Extremely mild spoilers up to the middle of China

This meant there was a lot of time for bored village boys to talk about their favourite topics: Quake II, Duke Nukem 3D, Jedi Knight. Carefree and convinced we were on the cutting edge, we were nonetheless aware of the limits of our tales – the finite number of ways to say I’d grabbed the Gold Key and killed a dude, dude!When I was a kid, I used to ride the bus to school. It was a long trip, prefaced by a mile long walk and ending with an hour on an ornery double-decker that was as likely to roll back down a hill as climb one.

With Human Revolution, I’ve been telling these stories again to friends both new and old and, more than the game itself, that’s what I find myself looking forward to – the chance to look a friend in the eye and raise a challenge. How did you infiltrate Detroit PD’s morgue?

What else could it be? Not the graphics, which are middling, or the design which crumbles any difficulty back to easy as soon as you put a laser pointer on a silenced pistol.The fact that Deus Ex and Human Revolution are so suitable to this sort of discussion is one of the main reasons that both games have rocketed to classic status.  Every negative in Tom Chick’s review of the original Deus Ex can be levelled against Human Revolution too.

Kieron Gillen thinks Human Revolution is about DRM, but I’m so far interpreting it as being about republicanism – and we can argue that fact until the augmented cows come home.Anyway, the conversations. It’s something I look forward to, because far more important than the methods we use to kill imaginary cyborgs are the ways we discuss the events afterwards and the language we use to do so.The fact that Human Revolution can support so many different interpretations on every level from the practical (How you tackled the FEMA base) to the philosophical (Why you tackled it that way) is the defining aspect of the game. 

The early levels especially feel brazen in their move to parallel the objectives of the original; your first job is hostage mission, with captives to free and a leader to either snuff or talk down.After that you’re returned to your base – Sarif’s lobby or UNATCO – and turned loose in urban America to deal with optional gangs and a transmitter which sits in the rough part of town. Then: whoomph, you’re off to China in your helicopter to talk to a hacker and a millionaire businesswoman with a ropey accent.I’ve found it hard to ignore how closely the early game mirrors the first.

This is all that Deus Ex fans, normally so fixated on such intangibilities as emergence and innovation, really care about. They don’t want a new game, they want the old one with prettier pictures and a few twists.This might sound like a criticism of Human Revolution, especially given how quick game critics are to dismiss most sequels – prompting questions about whether writers understand their industry – but it’s not.