Deus Ex: Human Revolution Previews

Should you be in the market for some more GamesCom coverage of Deus Ex: Human Revolution (and who isn’t?), we have a handful of new previews to share with you.

CVG:

Key conversations are handled by a sort of social combat system. For example, Jensen’s after a hacker named Tong but a lackey won’t set him up with a meeting. Instead of choosing from specific lines of dialogue, he has a choice of three approaches: Insist, Pinpoint or Advise.

You get to choose from these three times and have to judge from the other person’s response whether to change tack. Plough on with the wrong strategy and you’ll annoy them so much that they’ll refuse to talk to you. At that point, the options shut down and you have to find another way of achieving your objective.

GameSpot:

With the caveat of using unlimited ammo and health, the development team from Eidos Montreal burst into the police station guns blazing. After being warned by a security guard not to go any further, Jensen carried on and took out two officers using a pistol. He then turned a corner, and getting behind a photocopier to form portable cover, he pushed down the corridor. When he arrived in the office part of the building, he engaged Smart Vision, which produced a visual outline of the threats so he could see where they were, even through cover.

He then proceeded to upgrade his revolver so that it could fire explosive rounds, tearing up the entire office as he went. The development team also showed off a non-lethal weapon called the PEPS, or Pulse Energy Projection System, which would fire a wall of energy, incapacitating enemies but not killing them. Having blown away an entire precinct, Jensen then attached explosives to the coroner’s room door and forced his way inside to recover the device.

IGN:

Security cameras must be avoided or disabled, guards can be incapacitated rather than killed but their unconscious bodies must be dragged from view. Security doors also present an interesting quandary. These can be hacked and in initiating a hack, it also introduces players to a new and rather strategic looking minigame. In essence, you must race the AI spyware detection as you move through the server’s nodes, gradually unlocking them and working your way to the end of the network. In practice, it’s a little bit like a real-time strategy game blended with Bioshock’s pipe-connection game.

The stealth method also gives you the chance to use Deus Ex: Human Revolution’s new third-person viewpoint when crouching behind crates and peering around corners. Using a combination of environmental awareness and augmentation, you can get through the whole game (with the exception of boss encounters) without firing a single shot.

And Dealspwn:

Using the Smart Vision augmentation, Adam was able to see through walls and pinpoint enemy positions. Walking up the wall directly behind a guard on the other side delivered a context sensitive button thanks to another augmentation and so, with a simple button press, Adam plunged through the wall and broke the neck of the guard on the other side. It was around this time that my doubts started fading away.

But Deus Ex was never just about the combat, it was a game of choice. Like all of the best RPGs, you were given a situation and had the choice to use, nurture and perfect a wide array of tools and skillsets from which to operate and is was the subsequent runthroughs of the same mission that fully delivered exactly what we’d been looking for.