Deus Ex: a game so good it gave us actual neuroses about its sequels. Invisible War, a shonky but interesting and sometimes hilarious shooter, became reviled as a crime against gaming for declaring itself to be Deus Ex 2. And when Human Revolution started looking seriously, seriously good, none of us could quite believe it.

But it happened. This third game has the wealth of alternate routes and versatile tools that made Deus Ex great, and expands it with huge city hubs, packed with more sidequests and background story than the original ever had. It reworks the system for augmenting yourself to give you trickier choices between more powerful abilities. And all of those abilities are more slickly designed and satisfying to use. It’s not better in every way, by any means, but nothing else comes this close.



It’s an action game, which our neuroses tell us is automatically bad, but most of the concessions to blockbuster accessibility are genuinely, and surprisingly positive. Melee was almost comically unconvincing in Deus Ex 1: now it’s jaw-droppingly brutal and consistently satisfying. A cover system seemed like a frightening departure, but it ended up making for a much more developed and complex stealth option.

Mainly, though, it’s just so good to have it back. It’s Deus Ex! But shinier! And we haven’t played it through 26 times yet! And DLC is coming out for it! And everyone’s sharing stories about the incredible things that happened to them, and all the ways the quests can play out, and all the people they punched in the face, and what aug builds they want next. Deus Ex 4 is bound to be shit, though.

Read our Deus Ex: Human Revolution review for more.

Highly recommended: Battlefield 3, Orcs Must Die!

The headline says it all. The Missing Link fills in the gap you probably didn't know existed in Deus Ex: Human Revolution's main storyline. A quiet sleep in a transport pod in the story turns out not to have been a quiet sleep at all, but a terrible nightmare in which Jensen loses his shirt aboard a stormy ship, and must get it back by any means necessary.

In seriousness, The Missing Link is surprisingly good. "It’s rare for DLC to live up to a great game, rarer still for it to fix that game’s biggest flaw," says Tom in our Missing Link review. You guessed it. They actually fixed the boss fights. It's almost as though everything turns out better when the core developers design every aspect of their game.

The Missing Link is available now on Steam for £8.99 / $14.99 / €10.99. Deus Ex: Human Revolution is also on sale at 25% off. Coincidence? I think not. There is surely a conspiracy at work here...

With the Deus Ex: Human Revolution Missing Link DLC out next week the nice chaps of Square-Enix have given us some of Human Revolution to give away. Not just any copies though. No, we've got three Collectors Editions. Each one comes with tons of bonus material, in game items and even an Adam Jensen action figure. He definitely asked for this.

Check inside to see exactly what you can win, and how to enter.

The Deus Ex: Human Revolution Collector's Edition contains:

A poseable Adam Jensen action figure
DVD featuring a 44-minute “making of” special, 30-minute game soundtrack, motion-comic (adapted from DC Comics’ official series), E3 trailer and animated storyboard.
40-page art book.
The Explosive Mission Pack, featuring the 'Tong's Rescue' mission
In game weapons: Automatic Unlocking Device, M-28 Utility Remote-Detonated Explosive Device (UR-DED), Linebacker G-87 multiple shot grenade launcher, Huntsman Silverback Double-Barrel Shotgun, SERSR Longsword Whisperhead silenced sniper rifle.
10,000 extra credits to buy or upgrade weapons.

 
Plus some gorgeous box art:



To enter, answer me this question in the comments below.

If you had the chance, what cybernetic enhancements would you have, and what would you use them for?

The cleverest, funniest, smartest or most moving entries... basically whichever ones I like most, will win the prizes. Once again this competition is for European readers only (sorry rest of the world), if you win you'll be notified in This Week's Winners.

Good luck everyone!

Human Revolution was brilliant at letting you play the way you wanted. Its boss fights were terrible for not doing that. When it emerged that they’d been outsourced to another developer, you had to wonder: what would they have been like if Eidos Montreal had made them?

Here’s one they did. I won’t spoil anything about the plot of the new Missing Link DLC, but I’ll tell you how I took out its boss.

After ten minutes of methodically stalking and knocking out the guards patrolling the area, I hacked a turret. Bulletproof glass separated the room the boss was in from the larger open area I was clearing out, so I couldn’t make the turret shoot him directly. But I could get beneath that room, and when I did, I found an open doorway at the back. Too high to jump to, even with my augmented legs, and no crates nearby to stack. But there was that turret.



Avoiding the gaze of a well-armed heavy on a high balcony, I snuck out to grab the gun emplacement with my strength aug, carried it beneath the boss room, and climbed on top of it. Using X-ray vision to see the boss through the floor, I waited until he turned away from the opening, leapt up through it, and grabbed him from behind in a sleeper hold.

It was tense, tough and brilliant, and this whole enormous mission is tense, tough and brilliant. It inserts itself into the timeline of the original game, between leaving Heng Sha on a mysterious boat and arriving in Singapore. Rather than sleeping soundly in a stasis pod, as the main game implied, you’re discovered and wake up in captivity.

You’ve lost your items and all but the basic augmentations – punching and level one hacking – but you’re soon given a generous windfall of praxis points to buy new ones. Starting from scratch, using what you find, and trying new options in a hostile environment – it’s all an intentional nod to the excellent prison break in the original Deus Ex.



I assumed that was the whole thing – an exciting escape section on a prison ship – but that’s just the intro. The bulk of it takes place after you dock. It’s a huge mission with masses to discover, and Eidos Montreal have given it an almost hub-like structure. A lot of the later encounters take place in areas you’ve already cleared out, repopulated with guards and hastily set up defences – like that turret I used for a boost to take out the boss.

It’s not like the main game’s cities, Detroit and Heng Sha. This isn’t a friendly area, and despite a few sidequests, it doesn’t have that same sense of open exploration. But there is a surprisingly in-depth story, and some tricky decisions to make.

While the backtracking is necessary for the story to make sense, the way it’s handled isn’t ideal. There are no loading screens, but you have to sit through a suspiciously long ‘bioscan’ between each area, during which the game is obviously loading the chunk of level you’re about to enter. When objectives lead you back through two or three areas you’ve already visited, it means a boring walk through covered ground with several painfully long waits along the way.



It’s not a big deal. The levels themselves are magnificently rich with alternate routes, plot detail, and subvertible security systems – including a new turret that fires Typhoon mines. The structure makes it possible to complete later objectives before you’ve been given them, and it’s handled elegantly – you can even steal the boss’s personalised weapon before you fight him. And the whole thing is just massive. It took me five hours to play through, with a quick and brutal stealth combat style, exploring the levels but not scouring them.

The excellent boss fight and a satisfying story conclusion end it on a high note, with a strong hint at more to come. It’s rare for DLC to live up to a great game, rarer still for it to fix that game’s biggest flaw.

The Missing Link is priced at £8.99 / $14.99 / €10.99, and it's out on Steam next Tuesday - October 18th.

Sometimes, even the best games end up with the absolute worst DLC. Fortunately, Jensen's not being saddled with the latest in cybernetically enhanced horse armor. Missing Link's looking like quite the thing, and the boss fight sounds like it'll make all my wildest dreams come true - including the part where I'm always wearing a trench coat for some reason.

Best of all, the wait's nowhere near as excruciating as, say, getting your arms replaced with transforming robot swords. According to Human Revolution's Facebook page, the DLC's launching on October 18 - aka, next week. The price is a bit steep at $14.99/€10.99, but you're getting what essentially amounts to a whole new chapter in the game. Regardless, I'm pretty thrilled. Are you?

Update: Square Enix have sent over word that Missing Link will cost £8.99 in the UK.

The Explosive Mission Pack and Tactical Enhancement Pack DLC bundles for Deus Ex: Human Revolution have arrived on Steam, giving us the opportunity to pay for the pre-order bonuses that pre-orderers got for free.

The Explosive Mission pack adds a grenade launcher and a remote detonated explosive device for maximum explosions. The pack also contains the bonus Tong's Rescue mission. That costs £1.99 / $2.99.

The Tactical Enhancement pack tactically enhances Jensen with a great big double barrelled shotgun for maximum tactics. It also includes a silenced sniper rifle and, annoyingly for purists keen to earn their in-game cash, 10,000 extra credits. That's on Steam now for £1.19 / $1.99.

Both sets of DLC are available as a single pack which costs £2.49 / $3.99.

This feels a bit odd. There was a network of confusing pre-order DLC deals in the run up to Human Revolution's release, and weapons like the remote detonated explosive that provides creative new options in combat should really have been in the game in the first place. And that's before we consider the extra mission. It's as though those who paid full price on launch day are being punished for not gambling on a pre-order. Will you be picking up these DLC packs?

 
Square Enix have sent over a new trailer and some screenshots for Deus Ex: Human Revolution - The Missing Link. Tom's played it, and it's rather exciting. You can read his thoughts in our Deus Ex: Human Revolution Missing Link preview. The walkthrough trailer above shows us the tense opening minutes. Shirtless, and therefore powerless, Jensen's forced to use extra caution to get around the cargo ship. It may feel a little familiar to those who have played the ship level in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory.

In case you missed them on Friday, Square Enix sent over three new screenshots showing the ship's interior, which is slightly surprising, because the improved lighting and storm effects on the deck shown in the trailer look much more spectacular. Even at sea, everything has that smokey, golden sheen.

We've heard GRIP's side of the confused, rather depressing saga that is Human Revolution's not-so-revolutionary inclusion of boss fights, but what about Eidos Montreal? Well, the developer hasn't augmented its ears to tune out all criticism.

Speaking with Rock Paper Shotgun, project lead Jean-François Dugas was refreshingly open about the whole mess. Don't take that to mean he's done with boss fights altogether, though. Rather, Dugas feels that his game's boss fights weren't quite comfortable in their own skin.



“When we started the goal was to have those boss fights with the same design and rules as the rest of the game. We had our pillars of stealth, of non-lethal actions, and everything else, and we wanted to make sure that was reflected in the bosses, but in the end it was not... I think the biggest weakness there wasn’t the concept of having boss fights, it’s just that our boss fights are not Deus Ex boss fights and that’s why people are complaining about them. I guess we live and learn,” he admitted.

“Should we have cut them? It’s a decision we made, we said 'well at least they will be entertaining in some fashion'. The biggest surprise, actually, was having released the game and finding that people thought they were frustrating. Not just that they weren’t that interesting, but that they were frustrating.”

And yet, the encounters – ultimately responsible for many a crushed keyboard and irate, all-caps tweet – stuck around for the long haul. But why? Surely someone noticed that dying 17 times in a row against the first boss wasn't fun, right? Apparently not.

“The playtesters internally gave us a lot of good feedback for the game, and on the bosses they felt that the fights were entertaining and making you use what you had learned,” said Dugas. “They didn’t say they were frustrating. We knew it was not in step with the rest of the game, but the surprise for us was that the playtesting was correct everywhere but the bossfights. So lesson learned.”

Fingers crossed that Eidos Montreal irons out all the kinks next time around. Or at least throws in a boss who loves nothing more than to lean obliviously next to air vents.

Often, the bit where a game takes away all your weapons and abilities sucks. The main exception is Deus Ex: you wake up in a cell, a hacker lets you out, and you're forced to use anything you can find to break out of a high-security Majestic 12 facility. It worked because the game itself was so good: there were clever uses for something as simple as a fire extinguisher.

The Missing Link is a very obvious reference to that section. It takes place during an event that's skipped over in the main game: you sneak aboard a cargo ship bound for Singapore, and we cut to when you arrive. The Missing Link sees you waking up a captive on that ship, all your items gone and your augmentations disabled. You've got to escape, or you'll be transferred to a Belltower prison on arrival.

The good news is, it feels a lot more like Deus Ex's improvised escape section than the clumsy equivalents in lesser games. There isn't really any bad news.

The opening section of Missing Link is tough: you have nothing except your augmented arms and level 1 hacking, and the place is crawling with guards. It's hard to get any of them alone, and if you're going non-lethal, it's harder still to knock one out with time to nab his weapon before his friends show up and revive him. You do have to improvise: I liked to find alternate routes, make a lot of noise going through one, then double back and take the other while the guards rushed away to investigate.



Once you get out on deck, the level opens up significantly: you've got free roam of a large section of the ship while the waters churn nauseatingly around you. I had an achingly tense moment on a high balcony, crouching behind a patrolling guard and praying he wouldn't turn around before the security camera above looked away.

Because you're stuck without high-level hacking abilities, there's more focus on finding the right keycodes for locked doors. It's never the only way forward, but often knocking out a guard and reading his improbably convenient pocket secretary is the short route to a new area.

Eventually you find your equipment, the most important benefit of which is putting on a goddamn shirt. You also get 7 praxis points to upgrade yourself with - the idea being to let you experiment with augs you haven't tried before. I experimented with the Tag-and-Track aug, which usefully confirmed my suspicion that it's not as useful or cool as seeing through walls.



Below decks, the mission gets very quiet, thoughtful and puzzly. You're clambering among huge cargo containers, uncovering the weird secrets of the ship, and figuring out how to get deeper into it. It's an impressively big place, and it's actually lovely to have an extended break from combat in a new and interesting place.

This version ends shortly afterwards: pull a certain switch, and the credits roll rather unceremoniously. I haven't heard back from Square Enix yet, but I'm guessing that isn't the intended climax of the mission. The loading screen plot summary suggests I'm on stage 2 of 5 at that point - and that's after two hours of play. It already feels fresh, substantial, challenging and fun.

Dotted throughout, there are a curious number of references to a floating 'pirate towns' off the coast of New Guinea. If that's a hint at a future DLC, one with an explorable city hub like Heng Sha: yes please.

The Missing Link is out in October.

Update: Square have sent over a few extra official screenshots of The Missing Link, which you can see below.

"We did the boss battles" announces the president of G.R.I.P. proudly in the Deus Ex: Human Revolution behind the scenes video above. The footage, highlighted by Gameranx, reveals that Human Revolution's awful boss encounters weren't made by Eidos Montreal, but instead outsourced to a different company headed by a chap who admits "I'm a shooter guy, coming into this not knowing a lot about the Deus Ex world." The video gives a pretty good indication as to why Human Revolution's boss battles were such a horrible flop.

Thankfully, almost everything else was fantastic. Discover what we thought of Deus Ex: Human Revolution in our Deus Ex: Human Revolution review.