E3 2010: Deus Ex: Human Revolution Preview

Square Enix had plenty of secret closed door showings all throughout E3. Parasite Eve 3, Final Fantasy XIV, and other games were there for only so many people to check out. I was lucky to get some time to check out Deus Ex: Human Revolution. What I saw was a pre-Alpha build of the game that focused on the social and combat in the game.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution takes place in 2027. You control Adam Jensen who is a private security specialist. His company has been attacked and he has to find out who did it and why. Pretty simple premise, but with Deus Ex games, it goes much deeper than that.

Up first we saw the social aspect of the gameplay. As Adam makes his way through parts of the game, he’ll have to speak with certain people. Depending on what dialogue options you pick will vary the response from the NPC as expected with a game like this. The difference lies with the multiple options you have to go along with the dialogue trees. In the example given, the choices were not correct thus the NPC did not give Adam the info he needed. So instead he had to walk around and overhear conversations about a lost device that held the key code for a door that lets Adam get the same info via a different route. That tradition of the multiple choices available to you that Deus Ex started is still here in this newest game.

One thing I took note of during the speeches is how animated the characters are. Normally games have NPC acting in a very stiff fashion when responding to a choice, but it’s much more fluent and natural.

What followed was a bit of combat with the big revelation being that you can play through the game without killing anyone. Adam has multiple ways of taking down enemies including non-lethal takedowns. Takedowns can also change depending on the situation regarding the placement of the enemies letting you drop two enemies if they’re in close proximity to each other. There are plenty of weapons to choose from, Adam is a weapon himself with the various augmentations. With his augmentations, Adam can be stealthier, more powerful, and far deadlier as his own body can turn into blades to stab enemies. Weapons can be upgraded in plenty of ways with the example shown to us is heat sensing added to a rocket launcher.

By far, Deus Ex: Human Revolution was the game of the show for me. Simply watching someone else play had me thinking of all the possible options available to complete the task which made me excited for the game. It seems that Eidos Montreal really understood what went wrong with Deus Ex: Invisible War and want to go back to the original formula with a few modern changes added to it.

- O.G.

article id: 1449 | poster: OG