What I'm Playing, part 7
This game has been a long time coming, and so far has been worth the wait every step of the way. Spoilers ahead; you have been warned.
It starts off with a bit of retcon for the ending for Deus Ex: Human Revolution in that this game says that Adam lived through the destruction of Panchea and was fished out of the waters of the freezing arctic ocean and taken to Alaska. Apparently during that time he suffered a severe memory loss and was implanted with new experimental augments. I'm still following the trail of the augments (shortened in the game world to augs) though that quest is going nowhere fast.
Most of the time I'm just wandering around the main hub of the game, Prague. Prague is this game's central space much like Detroit was for Human Revolution. Quite a bit of the signs are written in whatever language the people of Prague read and write and quite a few of the NPCs in the hub are speaking it too. Kinda makes me wish there was an aug that would translate all that stuff for you so you could hear what was actually being said. There's also quite a bit of the game that takes place in the sewers underneath the city. It's fun to just run around down there and see what you can find, though there are a few quests that require you to go down there which can be fun too.
I think my least favorite area of the game so far has been a place called Golem City. Golem City was a place built with the intention of it being a temporary place to house augs after the event in Human Revolution where Hugh Darrow sabotaged every aug in the world. Now Golem City is where these poor souls live and are persecuted by the police that guard it. Picture a tower, something the size of the WTC in New York. Now picture that tower being made entirely of metal shipping containers. That's basically what Golem City looks like. Throw in some catwalks, loose hanging cables that go all over the place, sick, dead or dying augs laying in the "streets" and you get the idea. This place is the embodiment of depressing. In my first few minutes there, I discovered several of the residents that had died due to either suicide, illness or drug addiction. This was also the first place I ran across enemies that wore power armor and I suspect that it won't be the last. I was happy when my time there was over and I'm definitely not looking forward to going back in futurde playthroughs.
They've improved the in game hacking mini game quite a bit by adding firewalls, multiple entry points in the terminals and clouding over parts of the hack that you can't see (think fog of war from RTS games). They've also taken the idea behind the hacking mini game and turned it into a full fledged side game called Breach. Breach is a brilliant addition to the Deus Ex universe. The idea behind Breach is that you and fellow hackers are trying to dig up whatever information Palisade Bank has hidden in its massive blade server farm that dominates the Prague skyline. In Breach you play as a crude 3D wire frame avatar that seems to have several of the same abilities that Jensen has in the main game. The idea is that you enter a small room and collect data by downloading it from black boxes. Once you reach a certain percentage of that data collected you have to get out (by going all the way back to where you started the level) before you get captured and killed by the computer. I didn't dig too much into it because I wanted to progress the main game story but will definitely go back to it later. At least progress in one game doesn't effect progress in the other. I so hate it when games do that.
I'm very much enjoying the game even with the retconned ending from the first one, it's definitely been worth the wait. Getting the platinum might take a while since there's a trophy for completing the game on the hardest difficulty setting. What makes this difficulty so hard is that you get ONE LIFE. If you die, you start the game completely over. I assume that saving your progress won't help since it says so on the difficulty select screen...but then does that mean that you have to complete the game in one sitting? I guess I'll find out when I unlock this difficulty. The one and only thing about the game that I'm not too happy about is the fact there's an in game shop where you can use real world money to buy Praxis Kits and in game money. Being able to use real world money to level up your character just feels cheap to me. It eliminates any need of skill. I can't really say too much on that subject because I did buy the season pass for the game which gives you (I think) 6 Praxis Kits from the 2 booster packs that you get immediately. You can also unlock Praxis Kits in the mobile game Deus Ex Go...but that only works for PC and Xbox One users. Us PS4 players got the shaft on that one, so I guess I wasted $5 buying that app. I'm also bothered by the fact that anything that is in the storage section can only be taken out of it for use once. Other than these small blemishes, this game has turned out to be a masterpiece.
Is the platinum attainable: yes, but will take a lot of memorization and subsequent playthroughs to achieve.
% of trophies at the time of writing according to PSN: 19%