A new wave of previews dealing with Eidos Montreal’s upcoming prequel to the highly-acclaimed Deus Ex has surfaced these last few days.
First is Eurogamer that decided to intersect their preview with questions from their readers:
“How open do the levels get? Not just in the cities, but also in the places you’re not supposed to be.” – TheTingler
It takes a while for Human Revolution to open out into the Detroit hub. There’s a long conveyor belt Half-Life-style opening to get through first, then various missions that attach the tutorial stabilisers to DX’s varied hacking, social, combat and stealth gameplay.
Once you’re out and about, you’ll have two or three missions on the boil within a hub that’s comparatively large compared to those in other contemporary games. It’s a little bigger, say, than a Mass Effect 2 planet. The open and lonely acreage you might have felt in the very first Deus Ex, however, is lacking or at least it is in this map.
Then we switch to a more classic approach with GameSpot:
Our mission was to go in ahead of SWAT and secure a prototype weapon system, as well as rescue the hostages. After shooting our way through the facility, we reached a hostage-negotiation sequence with the terrorist’s leader. Dialogue sequences such as this are all about breaking down your opponent with a verbal barrage. Oftentimes, what we were going to say was already determined, but how we were going to say it was up to us. Aggression, sympathy, and cold logic were out typical choices, and striking a balance among the three was key in getting our target to yield. The conversation spanned numerous breaks for us to choose our next line, and we could see it in the terrorist’s body language that we were making an impact. At times he would drop his shoulders with regret or furrow his brow in disgust. Finally, he agreed to release the hostage–but we won’t spoil what happened next.
PC Gamer:
The first Deus Ex looked like a shooter, but was inordinately tough to play as one. It expected you to look for other ways to approach your enemies: sneak past them, create a diversion, use something in your inventory to stun them, turn a nearby turret to your side, or find another route to avoid them entirely.
Human Revolution has every part of that. On the maximum difficulty (referred to as ‘˜Deus Ex’), being shot at for more than a second is death. You can sneak past your enemies, distract them, stun them, subvert the environment and find new routes through the level.
The difference is that each option is slicker. The cover system lets you see enemies without them seeing you, by pulling back to third person. It’s an unfair advantage, but it means stealth is a viable option without having to make the enemies laughably short sighted.
IGN:
I was happy to see how much thought has gone into creating a virtual space that doesn’t feel generic. A ubiquitous flood of golden lighting clashes with Detroit’s somber, graffiti-tagged four-storey apartment complexes adorned with veins of ductwork and rusted fire escapes crisscrossed by networks of thick electrical wires. Alleys between buildings are littered with trash bags, dead leaves and crushed cardboard. Posters are plastered on telephone poles and across brick walls and liquor storefront windows are covered in dingy advertisements. It’s supposed to be 2027 in this world, and touches like these help establish a sense of realism to counterbalance the fact that you’re walking around with moddable, mechanical arms.
Those arms and your other non-organic parts can be upgraded in multiple ways. Earning experience in Deus Ex and leveling up nets you Praxis points that can be dumped into a skill or augmentation (aug) tree. Based on my time exploring the nighttime city, it seems there are uses for pretty much everything. Some areas are blocked off by high walls that could only be cleared with the aid of the Jump Enhancement aug. Certain vents are clouded with poison gas that require a Chemical Resistance aug to pass through unharmed. Often, crawlspaces are blocked by sturdy obstacles that can be moved only with the aid of the Heavy Objects aug, and in abandoned elevator shafts it’s tough to survive a fall without the aid of the Icarus Landing System aug. On my upgrade path I bypassed these and other options for stealth and armor enhancements so I could focus on hacking. In fantasy games I can never bypass a locked chest, and in Deus Ex I have a hard time passing up the opportunity to break through the security on a computer terminal to check private email accounts, open doors, deactivate laser gates and switch off security cameras.
Strategy Informer:
Levelling up doesn’t happen as often as you might think it should, and whilst you can also purchase or find points to put into increasing your augmentations, expect the ‘Praxis Points’ to be a scarce resource. How you choose to spend the points will heavily influence your course in the game. For example, we specialised in hacking early on, so when presented with the usual choices of how to approach an obstacle, we were mainly left with the hacking choices because the others were more difficult. There’s usually always a route that suits the kind of skills you’ve decided to field, but not always – so far though, it doesn’t look like choosing one or the other, or none, prevents you from progressing further. We’d need the full game to verify that though.
Speaking of Augmentations, they really can add new dimensions to the game – side-skills like hacking, or social manipulation, make mundane tasks like talking to someone or cracking a code that much more interesting. And of course there’s the usual augmentations you would expect, like more power, better aiming or health… even something that allows you to jump from any height and not die, or something to make you jump higher. All of these have clear and obvious uses as well… you may trying to figure out how to get somewhere, and realise “damn, if only I’d put points on this, or that”, but there should be an alternative that you can handle as we mentioned above, so don’t fret.
And Rock, Paper, Shotgun wrote down their article as a list of ten things you’ll think while playing the game:
Hmm. Human Revolution seems to be offering what Deus Ex did, but that’s it.
Deus Ex went down in history not just because it was a great game, but because it was a staggeringly inventive game that has, in a sense, come to define the immersive sim as a genre.
Deus Ex was a game about freedom of choice. Arguably, a true sequel would try and expand on that freedom of choice, in much the same way that Half-Life 2 proved itself as a true sequel to Half-Life by being as inventive as the first game once again.
Instead, Human Revolution hones the more raw mechanics of the original game, improving the action, the implementation of augmentations, the visuals and so forth, without offering a great deal more choice. Buildings still have two or three entry points, you can still talk, hack, sneak or fight your way through obstacles, your decisions as to how to treat a character will still occasionally have repercussions, and you’ll be on the receiving end of different lines of dialogue depending on whether you follow a character’s orders to the letter or not. Talking purely in terms of your freedom of choice, Human Revolution could be an expansion pack for Deus Ex.
Then again, the problem with my only having played the first ten hours of the game is obviously that I don’t know precisely how many of my choices will twist things up further down the line.
