In Demon's Souls I've pretty much kept the 75% health ring the whole game. Even in human form, just for convenience.
Demon's is pretty much straight up worse than Dark in every way IMO, but there are a few very nice touches. Old Monk, the valley of defilement, the prison, Lautrec's spoilerish predecessor, etc. Invasion and co-op are a lot simpler too.
So, Deus Ex Human Revolutions.
Third boss fight was a pain. I'm an idiot so I went to the clinic earlier (Why not? free stuff!!!!) and got punished for it. I must say, this is one of the best plot choice with actual gameplay consequences in an RPG. Bioware would not have the balls to do something like this.
So anyway I'm on hard mode, with a stun gun, a submachine gun, a laser rifle, a heavy gun. They all suck, and I can't use my overpowered typhoon with its absurd amount of charges I've gathered.
After about 30 tries I just stunlock him with the stun gun.
Shoot, run behind him while reloading, shoot again. He dies. Awesome.
I had no idea of what I was doing against the final boss, but I won.
So there's a button, ok I press it, there are two others buttons, I press them too. They seem to do nothing. Hack that level 3 thing, I get attacked by turrets, so I hack the level 5 thing that's unprotected instead. Random enemies start appearing? I start shooting but then out of nowhere the floor gets electrified and they all die. Ok I have no idea what happened there. Repeat twice. Uuuh what to do... Shoot the girl? Battle won.
This seems to be the game built for replays, but it fails badly at that.
In Fallout, you need 70 Repair to fix your TV. You need to invest in Repair as the game goes on. In Human Revolution, only hacking level 1 through 5 works like that. If you get the Punch through wall skills, and you'll be able to punch through any wall in the game. Most of the augments only marginally help with stealth, combat, or hacking, and aren't necessary to do anything.
In practice, you'll probably get all the skills that are needed to go to certain places (jump higher, punch through walls, hacking level 5, electricity immunity...) really, really early, and you'll still be able to do either stealth or combat rather well.
In short, you have options, but very soon you can do everything and choices suddendly don't matter. It's not like Bloodlines, Alpha Protocol or Fallout where you need to stick to a build for the whole game. It sometimes felt kind of sad to see developers put so much effort into giving the players passwords all the time when hacking is always so cheap and so easy, or into creating a ton of alternative routes when I could do them all...
Nevertheless, this was a long enough game, and this should please completionists I guess.
I'm not good at talking about plot. But the plot stuff is great. The world building and character design were near perfect, but the game unfortunately railroads the player with its cutscene sometimes. The worst example being Jensen getting seduced and trapped by one of the Big Bads.
The LA Noirish sequences were worthwhile most of the time, and sidequests were all very focused and great.
I also had way too much fun removing every fridge from every apartment. 8/10.
Tales of Innocence Luca Solo Hard Mode: I think I am immortal now.
