Home Gaming Deus Ex: Human Revolution Preview – Augmented Reality

Deus Ex: Human Revolution Preview – Augmented Reality

5 min read
0

Dialogue scenes, like a particularly gripping one involving a hostage negotiation, allow you to apply logical, sympathetic or aggressive stances that will directly affect the outcomes of spoken encounters. Certain upgrades allow you to analyse and even influence the conversation.

hostage

Hacking is an intrinsic part of the game (though you can often bypass hacking in favour of more brute force approaches), and it plays out wonderfully; like a combination between Uplink and parts of Megaman Network and almost like a rudimentary RTS. Unlike the hacking minigames you’ll often find, this requires genuine strategy and becomes trickier and more heart-poundingly frenetic as you race against detection.

Though the original game’s skill tree is still gone, the new augmentations upgrade paths and its myriad of options more than make up for it. Upgrades are done through spending the very limited and difficult to acquire Praxis points. They’re not cheap either, so you’ll often find yourself having internal monologues as to just which upgrade to purchase.

“Do I get the cool aug that lets me fall from any height without taking damage, or should I rather get this one that makes me strong enough to hurl fridges at people’s faces?” You can’t have ‘em all. The game’s many weapons can be similarly upgraded through the application of weapon mods.

Detroit

The world, at least the future Detroit that I got to see for the purposes of the preview, is incredibly realised and full of rich detail, with a dirty Blade Runner aesthetic. Exploring it proves rewarding; not only will you find all manner of side-quest, information and weaponry you might otherwise never discover, you’ll also be given XP for each hidden area you find.

Importantly, for fans of Deus Ex and of RPG games in general is that after 10 hours of playing, I feel as if I’ve barely scratched the surface. If the rest of the game continues the same momentum as this first section, and maintains its alluringly immersive  feeling, Eidos could just have a Game of the Year contender on its hands.

[Played using pre-release code on an Xbox 360]

Last Updated: May 21, 2011

Pages 1 2

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Check Also

Outriders Review…I’m Out…

When Outriders was announced at E3 2019, it was received with mixed feelings. A later game…