Deus Ex: Human Revolution Previews

Eidos Montreal’s promising Deus Ex prequel continues to be the subject of hands-on previews, with yet another pair making their way to the ‘net over the past couple of days.

IndianVideoGamer starts us off:

One of the newer abilities that caught my fancy was a social aug that allows you to gauge a character’s personality type during a conversation. The NPC could be alpha, beta or omega. You’re not explicitly told what personality you’re dealing with. Rather, you have to watch a few bars on the top left corner of your screen light up during a chat to figure out what you’re dealing with. After that, you have the option of releasing pheromones correlating to a particular personality to gain the edge in conversation. You might end up with a variety of outcomes that may or may not work in your favour. My playthrough had me pissing off a cop so much that he promised revenge. Such conversations do end up changing certain facets of the plot. It’s a sweet way of dealing with things, because it’s an extremely dynamic, almost natural, approach to plot progression.

Hacking has been reworked too, similar to the mini-game on the Sarif Industries website. You have power-ups that allow you to roam networks undetected and slow down detection; it’s very well done and very involving. Some might cringe at the additions to the combat, namely a cover system and one-hit kills, but they actually work quite well. While you can’t always run away from a fight, you will find yourself up against some very tough foes or being swamped by an entire gang of them, ensuring that being in cover is handy. Weapons handle well. Earlier games in the series had you as a fresh recruit; here you’re ex-SWAT, so you can handle a pistol without any shaking and there are an ample number of upgrades, from laser sights to silencers, to make your killing a lot more convenient. You get experience points for every kill, and you get a little more if you silence enemies non-lethally, so think twice before you decide to put a shotgun to the face of a drug dealer.

And then Plughead goes for a two-part article here and here:

Want to play as a stealthy hacker? A gun-toting inventory hog with a silver tongue? An augmented superhero killing machine? Even more so than the original game, Human Revolution gives you an astonishing array of playstyles and simply lets you pick and choose how you want to play. It absolutely never punishes you for picking shooting over stealth (it’s your choice after all), but doing it one way will cut off rewards or conversation options if you did it differently. There is literally no right way to play Deus Ex: Human Revolution, it’s entirely up to you.

In fact, there’s almost too much choice available, especially when it comes to Upgrading. The first two games had Biomod Canisters that you could choose one or two augmentations from and upgrade afterwards. Human Revolution has instead every option available from the beginning, you just pick and choose which upgrades you want to focus on. Inevitably you will find plenty of moments where you wish you’d picked a higher Hacking level, or the ability to pick up heavy objects, or the Icarus Landing aug which allows you to safely fall from heights, or some other upgrade. Every one comes in useful somewhere, but you can’t have them all.