Deus Ex: Human Revolution Previews

Eidos Montreal’s PR train for Deus Ex: Human Revolution is starting to pick up a bit, as another pair of hands-on previews made an appearance on the web today.

Game Revolution:

Your protagonist this time around is an unaugmented security specialist named Adam Jensen, working for a leading augmentation manufacturer called Sarif Industries. Adam is given the job of protecting researchers on the eve of some historical hearings regarding the use of augmentations. But all hell breaks loose when they’re attacked by mystery assailants, the researchers are killed, and Adam is left mortally wounded. His only option for survival is to be augmented himself and once that’s out of the way it’s time to track down the attackers and unravel the conspiracies surrounding the entire incident, conspiracies that (true to Deus Ex form) put the whole world at stake.

The hallmark of the series has been innovative, multi-path gameplay, and Human Revolution has more ways to play than a kid who walks into a toy store for the first time. As a general rule, you can split up the play-styles into three categories: combat, stealth, and social. In most situations you could charge in guns blazing and fight your way to the objective, or find some storm drain or vent shaft to crawl past the opposition, or use that silver tongue to talk your way through and maybe even make some friends along the way.

And Destructoid:

There’s always another way, and this time it was avoidance. We skipped the station’s front door and went around back. There’s armed guards, but we waited for them to pass. Using acquired strength and jump Augmentations, we pushed over a trash bin and scaled a fence. I was told that had we not had those augmentations, there were other ways through to the back of the station. Around back we found a ladder that went up to another floor in the building. It was locked, so we had to hack it.

Hacking is like a puzzle game where you’re trying to capture nodes without being detected by a subroutine. Our hacking Augmentation wasn’t high enough to take this challenge on, so we put experience points into it to raise it. Once inside, we used stealth to proceed. The X-ray Augmentation let us peek at what’s ahead, and the cloaking Augmentation let us go by undetected. It seems that the cloaking only hides Jensen visually — he can still be heard. We moved past two guards and snuck around a busy police office, listening in to conversations, stealing healing items and pain killers. Near the morgue we snuck behind a guard and took him out from behind, using non-lethal means. We used his body to defeat the security on the door and walked inside. Leaving, we used a sewer exit. No one ever saw or heard us.