Previews// Deus Ex: Human Revolution

You can’t take many bullets, and although you have regenerating health it takes a long, long time to recover from the classic ‘blood faze,’ so you need to have your wits about you when tackling any enemy.

The triggers are used to take cover around almost any surface, with the left analogue stick allowing you to pop your head over for a bit of cheeky gunfire. With aiming set to a click of the right thumbstick, it takes a while to get used to, but it’s not so bad once you’ve flown through the opening sections of the level.

Expect the unforgiving however. I was playing on Normal difficulty, and kept dying as I tried to take out an enemy and ended up getting spotted. Once that happens, you’re pretty buggered - you can hide round a corner and wait for the bad guys to get close so you can perform some close-quarter KO moves, but these use up segments of an energy bar displayed on the HUD.

You’ll always have one bar that replenishes, but generally you’ll need to use items to build that meter back up. In a panicked situation against five dudes with machine guns one energy bar and no ammunition isn’t going to go very far.

It seems that at this stage, as a weakling, your only real option is to just make sure you don’t get seen. Which can be frustrating if you want to be a bit pro, but realistic in the sense that you’re not going to be Superman from the very start of the game. As I kept replaying segments, I found many alternative routes through cargo bays and science labs - which mostly involved ducking into vents.

There are many opportunities where your actions will have an impact in the game - throughout the mission there’s a chance to rescue hostages by hacking into a ticking time bomb.

You complete these minigames by connecting one datapoint to another without the security system catching up with you and booting you off. If you save the hostages, you get additional experience, and I’m told that different situations occur as a consequence later in the game as well.

After sneaking around the complex John McClane style and having the chance to circumvent or deactivate several cameras, my time with the game ended with a bit of diplomacy. The leader of the activist group is holding an innocent at gunpoint, and you have to try and convince the guy that he got played and that someone’s trying to take his operation out from the inside.

He initially doesn’t trust you, but calling him a dickhead for being a little bit thick seems to do the trick, and he lets her go. After congratulating myself for a job well done (yay for hurting someone's feelings), I went over to the helipad to get out of dodge before the cops took down the place - getting a fair bit of background information about the characters for doing so.

This element of choice underlines the entire Deus Ex experience, and it's great to see it honoured in terms of character development in Human Revolution. Hopefully later parts of the game will show off a greater level of choice in the mission gameplay too. But for now, Spector fans, yes - you have a good reason to get excited.