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.

It really sucks when vital items drop through a solid table and disappear from reality, which is why the first major patch for Deus Ex: Human Revolution is good news for Adam Jensen. "The TYM medical card should no longer fall through the table if an NPC's body comes into contact with the card," reads an entry in the new patch notes spotted on DSO gaming. The patch will be applied automatically when you restart Steam.

Also, if your Adam Jensen has been jumping around the map like a staccato assassin then you'll be pleased to hear that the new patch that aims to fix the stuttering associated with certain video card shader problems. A windowed mode has been added and "intro logos can now be skipped on all but the first run of the game." Yes! Read the full notes below.

Fixes:

We have addressed various issues that can occur for players that would result in 'stuttering'.

Stutters that are the result of graphics driver shader processing are now removed or significantly reduced.
Stutters that are the result of data streaming have been removed or significantly reduced.
Performance has been improved and made more stable on dual-core systems. This could previously also result in stuttering.

Fixed issue where some players couldn't complete the Motherly Ties side quest.
Fixed an issue where doors in Omega Ranch sometimes wouldn't open.
The TYM medical card should no longer fall through the table if an NPC's body comes into contact with the card. Players already stuck in this area will need to revert to a previous save before the card fell through.
Occasional hangs for some players during video-playback have been fixed.
A crash on startup when running DX11 on a single-core CPU has been fixed.
An issue causing Eyefinity setups to not be correctly detected for some players has been fixed.
Fixed an issue where the HUD would get permanently disabled for some players.
Fixed certain issues that caused the mouse cursor to be able to leave the game-screen on multi-monitor setups.
Fixed an issue that caused the mouse cursor to not be visible in-game when the user has mouse trails enabled in Windows. We still recommend disabling mouse trails for a smoother in-game mouse cursor.
Fixed issue where ammo count for collected guns is incorrect when Adams weapon is augmented.
In DX9 mode:

Fixed error message for some users when trying to use FXAA Medium or FXAA Low anti aliasing modes.
Fixed shadow-mapping 'lines' on some graphics hardware when using anisotropic filtering.

 
Feature Additions:

The Enter and Numpad-Enter keys can now be bound to game actions in the keyboard control menu.
Intro logos can now be skipped on all but the first run of the game.
Added windowed mode.
Selectable in the menu, and can be toggled between windowed, fullscreen, and fullscreen windowed using ALT-ENTER.
Added an option to change the text language of the game. This setting only changes the text language, the audio is controlled by the language option in Steam.