Recently thanks to GAMEAus on Facebook, I won a competition that earned me the privilege of going to an exclusive Deus Ex: Human Revolution night at The Goldfish Bar in Kings Cross, Sydney. The night involved a collective bar tab up to $2000, loud music of the enjoyable nature, and most importantly the opportunity to see the game before it’s release.
This is the trailer that was featured on repeat throughout the night:
Deus Ex: Human Revolution revolves around the character Adam Jensen, and is solely a single player game. Nothing more, nothing less. There are three difficulties to choose from, all of which offer the same story line, but upping the skills of the CPU makes the game a much bigger challenge. After picking up the PS3 controller and playing on a file set to the hardest difficulty (sinister gamer who did that) it became very apparent that brute force in this game is not the way to go until experience is earned. You have the option to use cover in the middle of a fight, and whilst using said cover the dynamic camera changes from first to third person, allowing you to get a better perspective as to where your enemies are and how you are going to take them down. Cover can also be moved around, and from what I saw it looks that later you can move heavier objects through better augmentation. Health is scarce and regeneration is not by any means quick in the beginning.
In the start of the game you have the choice of being augmented and equipped for lethal or non-lethal combat. Lethal will be the most popular choice by far and finishing melee attacks are available which requires the player to hold down a button for one hit kill. This requires energy however but they are absolutely epic. However for the trophy hoarders there is a gold trophy requiring a player to finish the game “without anyone dying by your hand (boss fights don’t count)”. There are 50 trophies in the entire game. Lethal combat gives you the more violent augmentations (I won’t go giving away too much) and equips you with guns designed to you guessed it, kill your enemies. Non-lethal hooks you up with a more stealthy augmentation, and the main gun you appear to start off with is a dart gun. Some cruel gamer decided to set up the one and only PC in the venue with a non-lethal setup. Eventually someone took the time to clear the saved game and start fresh with something better.
Here’s a video showing some finishers, the cover system and how to be stealthy:
The game looks absolutely amazing on 3 monitors on a reasonably high spec AMD PC. It still looks pretty damn nice on the Xbox 360 and PS3, but nothing compares to a well set up PC. The game on PC is not a console port, and does allow for full graphic customization for playing on lower powered PC’s or laptops.
On the topic of customization, as you defeat enemies you earn experience. Extra EXP is given for skilful kills and playing on non-lethal seems to reward you more experience for defeating your foes without any long term harm. This experience can later be used to upgrade your augmentation. An example is the obvious upgrade of being stronger, which allows you to move heavier objects, and do stronger melee damage. Other upgrades include greater stealth, speed etc.
The game is set to release by Square Enix in North America 23/08/2011 and Europe: 26/08/2011. After that night I am pretty sure I’m going to pick that game up as quickly as possible.
