Deus Ex: Human Revolution Preview

Machinima has cranked out another one of their rarer text-based previews, with Eidos Montreal’s Deus Ex: Human Revolution being the subject of the article.

From what we’ve seen so far, Human Revolution’s world is amazingly fleshed out and artistically coherent. The echoes of our own historical Renaissance resonate in the game’s very color-palette (the grim Black of despair and dark times vs. the promising Gold of humanism and hope.and also possible wealth and/or greed) and the in-game fashions (an abundance of high collars, Elizabethan frills, and other anachronistic culture-cues). The looks of the urban environs themselves take every science-fiction, film noir, and horror/fantasy stylistic base a geek could want from protagonist Jensen’s sleek Matrix-inspired jacket and temple-less shades to his cluttered, Deco, very Blade Runner/Deckard-esque apartment to the pulsing-neon avenues and alleyways evoking William Gibson’s Night City, to the overall mood of nocturnal, foggy urban gloom that would do a cybernetically-augmented Sam Spade proud. Special consideration has been given to ‘˜not breaking the spell’ of what the future even sounds like remember, it’s only 17 or so years from now! and the game eschews actual ‘songs’ in favor of a foreboding audioscape which hints that somebody has been listening to a respectable amount of Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts I-IV.

All that noise about the possibility of getting through the game without killing anything was all very interesting, but I really wanted to see what new vistas the next stage of human evolution could open up in terms of actually wailing on people and Human Revolution has some pretty neat ones. Some of the augmentations we saw included strength and agility mods (to move large pieces of the scenery about, or to make jumps beyond the abilities of normal humans), as well as immensely useful tech and stealth mods (like the ability to utilize a temporary mimetic-armor camouflage cloak, or even full-on X-ray vision to see deployment of enemies through solid walls).