Deus Ex: Human Revolution Previews

The excitement builds for Eidos Montreal’s Deus Ex: Human Revolution, as a few more websites have cranked out new previews for the cyberpunk RPG prequel.

IGN AU thinks “Everything Old is New Again”:

Eavesdropping for hints now plays a larger part in determining the path you take through an area. Solutions are less overt than your typical shooter from what we’ve seen; you actually need to exercise some investigatory skills if you want to gain the most insight into a given situation. Sometimes simply listening to a conversation between two characters can net you passwords or drop hints about secret areas that you’d otherwise not have known about.

The conversation tree is just as flexible; it’s akin to Mass Effect’s radial dialogue system, where certain options are more aggressive than others and depending on your tone, the path of the discourse will change dramatically. Again, if you’re flippant and don’t read into the other character’s subtle body language, you’ll end up offending them or missing out on key information completely. Of course, if you push a little harder and press for information, you may just intimidate some key facts out of them, rather than simply getting shut down. It’s a risk versus reward system applied to conversations and we love it.

GamesRadar kicks out a three-pager:

Mind reading will give you subtle (or perhaps glaringly obvious) clues as to which direction to proceed during conversations, while mind control gives you the chance to (hack) people’s brains, bending them to your will. However, they’ll remember you having done this and get unreasonably chippy about it later on.

Each ability costs a shot of energy, which isn’t of any real interest until you learn each shot can only be used once per mission, unless you can find somewhere to recharge them. If you have five shots, you can use five of your abilities while in the field. The final slot does recharge, but very slowly. This all means you have to make sure you don’t recklessly waste your abilities, or you’ll end up having a difficult time.

And Punchafish calls it the most anticipated game of the decade:

The player will visit five metropoles during the course of the game, including Detroit, Shanghai and Montreal. In addition, the protagonist will have his own apartment where he may store his secrets and collected information. The events in the game will lead to the formation of UNATCO from the original game.

In the Deus Ex games, augmentations are body modifications that allow the user superhuman abilities. While augmentations in the first two games were nanotech, Human Revolution is set prior to both and instead features mechanical augmentations. These will be divided into four types: Combat, Stealth, Technology and Social. Consequently unlike in Deus Ex: Invisible War, weapons will fire distinct ammunition types instead of depleting a unified pool. They can also be upgraded to better suit the player. Every enemy squad will have an identifiable squad leader who will direct the team’s actions. If the leader is killed, the squad will fall into disarray. The enemy AI will also react to subtle player decisions, such as a change in behaviour or weapons, etc.