Thank you Square-Enix for sending us this game to review!

The Missing Link, the first piece of DLC for Deus Ex: Human Revolution, does exactly what its name implies: fills in the gaps left in the endgame of HR's plot. While Deus Ex: Human Revolution left Adam stowed away on a ship in search of a team of kidnapped scientists, The Missing Link starts with Adam being discovered and brutally interrogated by Bell Tower agents.  After these agents leave, Adam is mysteriously released from his room and has to find his way off of this barge.  

You don't know who set you free or why, but apparently you do have a friend on the ship.  Everyone else still wants you dead, so you better rely on stealth to take out your first couple of guards to get their weapons. Basically you start this DLC with a blank slate.  You have no weapons, and all of your augmentations have been reset to factory defaults.  Thankfully, you do have some praxis points to allocate to get you started and I would strongly recommend boosting your hacking skills, especially robot domination.

In order to get more upgrade points, you’ll have to gain experience by hacking, defeating enemies, and completing objectives.  Exploring is key, and you are rewarded for it by experience and some good loot.  The game world is also surprisingly big and I often relied on the convenient signs to find my way around.  However, you discover it’s more than a barge, and you eventually gain access to a secret underwater base.  I don’t want to give away too many spoilers here.  

While the game map is a decent size, everything else is scaled back in this expansion.  I only came across one optional side quest and there are only ten Steam achievements to earn.  You also get roughly five hours of game play compared to the twenty five provided by the main game.   

Everything else has pretty much the same look and feel as the regular game.  The visuals are stunning and the voice acting is top notch.  Adam Jensen’s responses can be suave or snarky, and can be laced with swearing at times.  

I love playing stealthily and as non-lethal as possible.  I was pleasantly surprised to find many air vents and cable ducts to explore and utilize, and while there is a final boss, you don’t have to be a power house to take him down.  

I still love how this is a game of choices.  You can choose how to take down your foes by using bullets, stun guns, or hack their turrets and robots against them. But be warned, some of the story decisions you have to make in this game are just plain brutal.  Without going into details, you have to determine who will live and who will die as a situation arises where you apparently cannot save everyone.  To make the decision even harder, you communicate with people on each side of the fence so it’s a personal blow either way.

Overall, the story is captivating and the character development is awesome.  In true Deus Ex fashion, it leaves you with just as many questions unanswered as answered.  If you've played Human Revolution, you'll know what kind of moral content to expect.  It’s a great ride, but I’m not sure it’s worth $15.00.  That’s almost half of what I paid for a fraction of the game play.  But if you see this DLC on sale, I’d recommend picking it up if you enjoyed Human Revolution.