Deus Ex: Human Revolution Preview

There certainly hasn’t been any lack of hands-on previews for Deus Ex: Human Revolution lately, but if you’re in the mood to read through another one, this two-pager on Games Radar should do the trick.

Human Revolution’s hacking minigame is not just some side skill you can dabble in if you feel like it: critical mission objectives require hacking, and there are tons of other hackable objects in the world (hell, one early office room literally has a computer at every desk, all hackable we’re talking like twelve computers in just one room). It’s hard to tell how complex or interesting the hacking will get, since it stays very simple for the first few hours of the game. It’s also difficult to describe the tutorial is confusing and we didn’t really understand how to hack until we started doing it. We’ll keep it simple to give the best idea: you go into a virtual grid of nodes connected by pathways, and you simply choose which nodes to (take over,) which opens up the next nodes. It’s partially a game of chance: taking over a node has the possibility of alerting the security AI (you know the percent chance before taking a node), but once the AI is active, it’s a race to get to the end before the AI gets to your (home base.) The early hacking requires no strategy, allowing you to just take the shortest path, but later on the grids get more complex and you’ll earn consumable items that allow you to perform one-time special actions. It seems well-designed and gets extremely intense when you’re trying to race the AI.

The combat, from what we played, ranges from shockingly easy to (boom, you’re dead) sometimes within a single fight. What often makes the shootouts easy is that your reticle displays on screen even when you’re in cover, which means you can line up headshots while totally safe and pop out to down enemies with a single pull of the trigger. However, this only remains true if the enemies are cowards and try to hold back. Sometimes they’ll sneak around and flank you or just bum-rush you, and these scenarios are extremely dangerous because you’ll die in about one second if someone catches you in the open at close range. Adding to the strange feel of the combat is the limited ammo if you try to play this like it’s a standard shooter, you’ll run out of bullets real quick. Still, (strange) is not a bad word in our eyes, and we rather enjoyed the combat throughout our hands-on since it felt different from just about everything else around these days, even if it was in subtle ways.