Hitman: Codename 47
5534Screen_01
It took the Hitman series a long time to get it right. 2006's Blood Money was an apex: by far the best game about silently mudering a man and then sliding away into the mist. In LA, I'm about to see if the follow-up - Hitman: Absolution - can do better.

The demo begins in a Chicago library. It is clearly a new, high-tech game. Agent 47 - more pumped than I remember him - is hiding behind a bookcase. It’s a gorgeous slice of grotty dilapidation; dusty, old, ruined, but still beautiful. 47's been chased to the abandoned building by the local police. He’s got to escape. Simple mission. Simple objectives. Hard problem.

But stealth has changed in the time since Hitman: Blood Money. Splinter Cell: Conviction showed that you didn’t have to feel fragile if you kept to the shadows, Batman: Arkham Asylum showed that being fragile doesn’t mean feeling vulnerable. And both those games showed the importance of slick, instinctive control systems that fluidly understand what you want to do and help you achieve it, rather than twisting your fingers into spaghetti as you crouch, aim and hide.



Absolution’s first solution is going to be controversial: a cover system. Agent 47 hides behind the bookshelves, ducking between each slice of protection as the cops move around. It’s the same style cover system we’ve seen in Gears of War, in Splinter Cell: Conviction. The second; a system for showing when and how the guards move called 'instinct' – when turned on, you can see a glowing orange path that shows where they’re going. It’s about helping players visualize the space and allowing them to plan ahead.

The next few minutes are spent with Agent 47 ducking and weaving between bookshelves trying to get closer to the roof. He clambers up, and then shuffles along a balustrade, dodges a patrol by hanging from a ledge, and eventually ducks right past two guards as they chat.



Meanwhile, the guards talk. And they really, really talk. One officer is sniping at another, a rookie, teasing him about how he doesn’t really know anything about being a cop. The dialogue is sharp and funny, a real step above gaming's usual idle chatter. A side-plot is already forming – one in which Hitman can clearly intervene.

He does, brutally. First, he shuts down the power to the library by sabotaging a fuse box. Fat sergeant and rookie wander over. “I know nothing about this,” says the Sergeant. You’re on your own, buddy.“

He then wanders off. 47 picks up an abandoned piece of cabling and sneaks up behind the sergeant. Then stabs him with the sharp end, right in the neck. It’s a gruesome take-down, and in performing it, 47 alerts other cops.

There’s a shoot-out, and during it, Hitman takes a hostage, using a cop as a human shield. 47 ducks back out of a door, and dashes up the stairs, under heavy fire. He finally manages to shake his pursuers by shooting at a chandelier, which falls through the stairwell, smashes at the bottom, and scatters the police. Agent 47 dives through the door to his freedom.

This first section of the demo showcases combat and technology. But it could be any stealth shooter. It’s slick, clearly fun, but doesn’t necessarily have that unique blend of silliness and sadism we expect from Hitman. That’s to come.



Before we get to that, though, we’re given a demo of why Hitman’s action and stealth sequences should be at least as well put together as any competitor’s: the tools and tech the team at IO are using to create them are built from scratch to help their designers rapidly iterate.

Martin Amor, IO’s technology director pauses the demo and starts moving the camera around – shifting giant purple waypoints around as he sees fit. He restarts the action, and the patrols of the guards are instantly changed. For the better, hopefully.

The point is that the developers can play and play and play, forever polishing their work until it feels right, until the levels work, and that players can plan ahead, execute and understand a strategy and still have fun when it all goes wrong.

Back to the demo. Hitman is being chased across the rooftops of Chicago by a helicopter. A machine gun is ripping through the attic in which he’s hiding, spraying bullets with no regard for the pigeons that roost in there. At one point, 47 leaps between two roofs, and the action slows down for a brief moment. In that moment, I swear I see two pigeons explode into a mist of feathers and blood.



It’s then that 47’s next move becomes clear. A solitary police officer is wandering the roofs, torch in hand. He’s quietly knocked unconscious, stripped, and 47 walks away in police uniform. Over a bullhorn, the pilot of the helicopter yells “Any sign of him?” 47 doesn’t respond.

Then, it gets weird.

Part of the new emphasis within Absolution is giving in-game, non-hostile characters a range of reactions. 47 walks into a top-floor flat. It’s full of stoners, draped with psychedelic posters saying “Fuck the Police”. This should be fun.

The local hippies are all gathered at a window. They’re looking at the police below, clearly terrified. One panics, grabs his prized cannabis plant and runs to the toilet, flushing it down the sink. Out of sight, 47 simply watches, dodging their movements. On a sofa, one of the hippies is completely off his face, entirely unmoved by the bald, terrifying, fake policeman watching. 47 takes his bong, and walks over to the hippies. And then smashes them both over the head with it.

Drugs are bad, mmkay?

47 leaves, as police rush up the stairs, and start going door-to-door. Some glance over at 47, ask each other “isn’t he going the wrong way?” But most ignore him. When they do get slightly suspicious, time slows for a brief moment, and 47 ducks his head. It’s a very cool, very cinematic touch.

Finally, we’re at the lobby, and it’s a clear homage to the final scenes of Leon. 47 is dressed as a cop, but there’s a wall of police ahead of him, all dressed in full riot gear. He’s not getting through. 47 spies a box of doughnuts. A solution presents itself. 47 grabs a doughnut, and starts munching away.

“Hey, I know you,” shouts one of the bored beat cops. 47 barely gives him the time of day. Instead, he’s watching the riot police, who start running up the stairs. The escape route is clear. He leaves.

He walks down the street, and turns right, onto a train platform. There are hundreds of people waiting in the rain, all milling about – far more people than we’re used to seeing in a game. 47 walks straight into the mass, blending into the crowd, and the demo ends.



Hitman: Absolution won me over. At first, the stealth combat, with its freshly grown cover system, reminded me too much of Splinter Cell. In Hitman games I’m used to wandering around a mansion - or the White House, or a cruise boat, or a bayou wedding chapel - mostly unchallenged, figuring out the clockwork of a level and the vulnerabilities of our target before striking. In this demo, Hitman didn’t assassinate anyone; he simply fled.

However, the second section, with its bizarre bong kills, and phenomenally tense escape through hordes of police, was spectacular. It wasn’t just a cool stealth game; it was a step above what we’d expect from Hitman. After the trailer, and this demo, I can’t wait to play it.
Hitman: Codename 47



Codename 47 will go to any lengths to perv on a lady in the shower, equal to and including: holding a man's head underwater until he dies, punching another guy so hard he dies, garotting a man with a wire until he dies, dangling a man over a banister until he dies, and launching a man's head into a wall. I think he died too. The trailer has the right level of moodiness, but there's zero in-game footage. Lucky then, that Tim will have a full preview for you in a few minutes.
Deus Ex: Game of the Year Edition
5513DXHR_screenshot_takedown2
Behold! More fruit from E3: Deus Ex: Human Revolution screenshots. We've played the first ten hours of DX: HR, and communicated our excitement for the game with an entire week of diaries that showed the variety of ways in which it can be played. The game's close to launch now - August 23rd in North America, 26th in August - and these shots represent a fairly well-finished game. That first one also represents the way Tom likes to play.











Deus Ex: Game of the Year Edition



A while back we we showed you what to expect from the Deus Ex: Human Revolution Collector's Edition boxed set, now there's a video to illustrate it. As well as the Adam Jensen figurine, making of documentary and art book, the box comes with a number of in-game bonus items that will also be available in many of the various retailer pre-order deals.

These controversially include a number of weapons, such as the super-long range sniper rifle, the grenade launcher and remote detonated mines. There's even an additional mission, which is set to feature the appearance of a mystery character from the original Deus Ex. Will you be buying
PC Gamer
Hitman subtitle thumb
Some prototype box arthas been spotted by Kotaku in a marketing survey, showing three possible covers for Hitman: Absolution. Amusingly, the game's listed in the mock-ups as Hitman: Subtitle. It's likely they were created before the Absolution subtitle was decided. You'll find the three pics below. Which would you choose?



Deus Ex: Game of the Year Edition
Deus Ex Rich Thumbnail
This is the last of our Deus Ex: Human Revolution diaries. Yesterday, Graham scythed through computer security. Two days before, Tom killed every single person he met in the name of science. I'm focusing on a more cerebral approach, sneaking past any obstacle I can't talk my way through.

I'm surreptitiously fiddling with the lock on my co-workers office when I get the call. It's my boss, and it's clear from the tone of his voice that he's not happy. I close down the hacking interface I've been using and wheel about, trying to look as nonchalant as a man with matte black robo-arms who's just been trying to worm his way into a locked room to dig out dirt on his co-workers can. But David Sarif's not bothered about that. He's upset because I've taken too long.

My first job as Adam Jensen – after the game's introductory mission blew off my arms, legs, and ability to talk like anyone other than Batman – was to interject in a hostage situation. The victims are Sarif Industries employees, like me, and they've been taken by a group of anti-augmentation terrorists. The mission's sold as time sensitive. But I've heard that schtick before from other games. I can leave the mission hanging, leave my helicopter pilot dawdling, and leave the hostages unrescued for as long as I like while I break into offices and read the juicy gossip secreted on the computers inside. Surely?

Sarif's call says otherwise. The extra time I took made the hostage takers antsy, and they've gassed their charges. That's eight of my co-workers' deaths on my robo-hands, all because I was too busy snooping through their emails and climbing through vents to come and shoot their captors. This wasn't meant to happen. I've already spoken to others about their hostage rescuing escapades. I swear Graham never mentioned they were dead. I'd remember something like that. I offer a moment of silent sadness to the hostages' pretend memory, and get back to hacking the door. What's another twenty minutes of wandering around? It's not like the hostages are getting any more dead.



There's the vestiges of a sidequest in this earliest part of the game. Someone is pilfering Neuropozene, the medical goo that augmented types need to keep on hand to ensure their mechanical parts aren't rejected by their weak human body. I was convinced the mystery would be solvable before I packed myself off on my first mission proper, and my poking and hacking uncovered a stash of items and an incriminating note in one of the office's ventilation shafts. But there the trail ended: my hacking ability was too low to allow access to a critical office cubicle, and I was saving my Praxis points. I packed up and headed out, after rifling through one final desk for gossip fuel.

Sarif gave me the same choice in weaponry as both Tom and Graham, but I plotted a different course. Like Graham, I wanted to play non-lethal, but I was keen to try two distinct methods: talking, and hiding. The sniper-style tranquiliser rifle would be unwieldy in exactly the kind of tight spot I planned to find myself in, so I went for the stun gun instead. It's a beautiful bit of near-future design: black and yellow plastic that fires a glob of taser-like electricity and folds up to look like a particularly naff mobile phone.

Not that I had much cause to use it. I've seen Human Revolution's stealth in action before, but this was my first chance to try it in person. I was half way through the facility before I was even heard, three quarters before I was seen, the game's Rainbow 6: Vegas-esque cover system feeling consistently reliable. I halted at the facility's final open-plan office, watching the terrorists' patrol routes for a few minutes. My back to solid cover, I inched down the stairs. Human Revolution is surprisingly generous with its cover: chances are, if it's got a vertical surface, Adam can duck behind it.

I'd been holding onto my Praxis points, unwilling to spend them without genuine reason. At the foot of the stairs, I found one. I plugged my initial allotment into a stealth 'helper' aug, part of a suite of abilities designed to assist the sneaky player in their invisible travels. Now, when I moved, my minimap glowed with a circumference of sound: the noise my clunky footsteps were putting out as I bounded around the level. Perfect for me. Sneaking games get me so overwhelmingly paranoid that I spend levels in a perma-crouch, waddling in silence even with no terrorists nearby to hear my shuffles. Now I had a quantifiable value to measure my stance against. I could stay out of sight all I liked, but if those waves of sound lapped against an enemy's eardrums, it'd flip them into an alert state.



The area in front of me was rich with terrorists, their vision cones leaving few corners of the room unswept. Spying a door off to the side, I planned an exit, before rolling deftly into cover with the space bar. I opened the door in a crouch, and came face to ass with another terrorist. Panicking, I hammered the left mouse button, bringing up my most recently selected weapon. A good few thousand volts flicked from the muzzle of the stun gun into my opponent's unlucky buttocks, and he crumpled to the floor with a sad little moan. Moving quickly, I slammed the door shut behind me, rifled through the unconscious body's pockets, and grabbed his leg. Considering this excursion wasn't planned, it was going better than expected. Until his friend walked in.

He spotted me crouching over his workmate, who was slumped on his back, arms wide, one leg cradled softly in the augmented arms of a strange man. It looked worse than it was. I immediately dropped the unconscious man's leg, and raised my stun gun, firing another blurt of electricity. My rude interrupter collapsed too, but not before yelping a warning to the men outside. Sprinting over to his body, I grabbed him by the arm and pulled him into the same dark corner I'd been trying to stash his colleague. Hiding bodies has a practical application, as well as letting you put one man's hand on another's crotch: should a conscious foe stumble on a sleeping one, he'll shake him awake and raise the area's suspicion level.

The sleeping terrorist's warning was more useful than expected: the region's bad-men were all drawn to the same point, and while they fussed over their spooning friends, I was able to slip through to level's final confrontation with Zeke and his lady hostage. After my fairly successful infiltration, I was comfortable with my current level of sneaking ability. I resolved to jam my next Praxis points into the speech centre of my brain, and upgrade Adam's social augs. With that in mind, I tried to talk Zeke down from the edge.

No matter how saintly you play, it's tough to ignore a dialogue option labelled 'CRUSH.' Rarely a lunchtime goes past that I don't ache to CRUSH the self-service checkout machines in Boots. Selecting it here made Adam launch into a systematic takedown of all anti-augmentation terrorist Zeke held dear. He didn't react well to me calling his eyepatch stupid, waving his weapon around and hugging his hostage harder. I backed off from that avenue of verbal attack, and chose instead to 'reason' with him. Look, I said, spreading my terrifying robo-arms to look less threatening. I knew he was a noble man, caught up and betrayed by forces bigger than he. A few back and forths, and I'd convinced him of his folly. But still, Zeke was certain he needed to keep his hostage to avoid the firing squad waiting outside. I had one chance to dissuade him of this, and gambled it on another 'reason' dialogue tree.

It worked. Zeke saw sense, and jabbed the hostage forward. I let him disappear off into the night, and gained the jeers of the SWAT team who had been forced to wait for my arrival. In their eyes, I'd turned up late, huffing and puffing, before letting the orchestrator of a terrible massacre go. When they put it like that, I sound fucking useless. But I've got giant robo-arms and sunglasses that flip onto my eyes when I think about sunglasses. What have they got? Big stupid faces, all of them. Let them jeer. Sure, eight people are dead, but I finished the mission without firing a bullet, and I used my words to defuse an execution. Who needs guns when I've got a silver tongue?



As soon as I could, I upgraded that tongue. There's only one dedicated social augmentation in the game, and I'd managed to earn the Praxis to activate it after completing a few sidequests. I'd been pottering around the streets of Detroit since installing it, chatting to prostitutes with the enthusiasm of a schoolchild who doesn’t understand why the nice ladies are standing on a street corner. They professed their cheap rates, but none of them offered any extra dialogue options. In my haste to experience all of the game, I'd already mined out a chunk of the city's meatier conversations before awakening my new ability, and the aug only comes into play during important chats.

Walking sadly away from the hookers, I spied an open door. On the other side was an ex-cop turned security guard, a friendly fellow who I'd leant on earlier. He ended up handing out some useful information – letting me know where to look for vital evidence in working out how my ex-girlfriend died in the assault that blew off my arms. But helpfulness wasn't enough. He'd also mentioned he knew the code for a secure lockbox full of goodies. Problem was, he was the only one who did, outside of the shadowy bad dudes covering up Megan's murder. If anyone were to access the box, those same bad dudes would do bad dude things to my security guard chum. Never, he swore, would he give up that information. It might kill him.

That sounded like a challenge made for my new “convince people to do things they said they'd never do because it might kill them” aug. I wasn't sure what I expected it to do – maybe let Adam talk so fast he shatters the skull of his conversational adversary? Instead, it made smells. Pheromones, to be exact.

Mid-chat, I was prompted to 'press Z to activate pheromones.' I duly pressed the button, and released my gas. A meter appeared in the top left, three pips next to gauges marked 'alpha', 'beta', and 'omega'. The standard dialogue options were gone, replaced by a set of conversational principles more abstract: things like the 'CRUSH' I'd used against Zeke, each annotated with a small description of their effectiveness against certain personality types. As my mark talked, the meter's pips filled up with light: two in alpha flashed on as he talked about his duty, replaced by one in omega as he warned me against pressuring him any further on the topic of the stash.

Our conversation was pockmarked with these little blips, enough that it was difficult to keep up. I'd expected the social aug to allow an auto-win in dialogue, but it goes beyond that, creating a mini-game in itself. After the security guard had finished nattering, I chose an option. Broadly, Alphas are strongmen, confident and bullish. Betas are more reserved, and unsure of themselves. Omegas are insecure, but hide it with bluster and threats. I’d lost track of the pips, but I still had my human ability to read a personality. The security guard had once been a cop, and was still doing the right thing in aiding me: I figured he’d respond well to some alpha ego-stroking.

“Don’t try that shit on me, Jensen, I can see right through it.” I backtracked quickly, trying to extricate the code from him. No dice. Even with the social sectors of Adam’s brain whirring at triple normal speed, conversations were still fluid affairs that could be ‘lost.’ I briefly toyed with an approach more in line with Tom’s, but had neither the strength, nor a fridge in hand to hurl full-force at the security guard’s face. I let him keep his secret, and trudged out into the Detroit night.



I was keen to use my newfound talky powers again, and didn’t have to wait long. After the hostage rescue mission, Jensen’s charged with making his way into a police station. There’s a range of entry points: a vent on the roof, a ladder in the sewers, a side-alley. I chose a simpler route, and waltzed straight in the front door. It was guarded by one man only, but moving past him unauthorised would bring the full force of the Detroit PD down on my augmented ears. I had to talk my way past. Time to get gassy.

I released my pheromones early in the conversation with the cop behind the desk, but I didn’t have to. Turns out he was an old colleague of Jensen - who himself spent his earlier life as a SWAT team member in the motor city - and both had been involved in an operation that went horribly wrong. Players without the social aug can read the scenario using their pathetic, unaugmented human brains and still talk their way in, but my mental additions made the process simpler. As well as the return of the alpha/beta/omega pips, initiating the conversation also brought up a wavering line on a graph. When I selected options the cop chimed with, the line would go up; when I pissed him off, it would drop, giving me constant feedback on how my vocal gambits were paying off.

It started badly. It becomes apparent that Jensen’s SWAT team had killed an augmented kid during a job, and the man behind the desk had pulled the trigger. My opening line was too vicious, excoriating the man for his stupidity, and had I mentioned how ugly his face and wife both were? He didn’t like that, and his meter dropped. Quickly, I changed tack, offering soothing platitudes. That went down better, but he’d heard hollow sympathy before. My third approach worked best. From the dialogue, I’d got an overview on the man: he didn’t want support or abuse, he wanted to be able to justify what he’d done to himself. I reasoned with him, suggesting that the augmented kid he’d shot was a genuine threat, arguing he did the job he was trained for. Absolved of some guilt by an ex-superior officer, his wavering brain-line shot up to the top of the meter, and he let me in. I didn’t necessarily agree with what I’d said, but the social aug had let me genuinely manipulate the poor guy. I’d have told him that his hair was beautiful and we should run away together and have little robo-babies if it got me what I wanted. Feeling equal parts cruel and cool, I sauntered onto the police station’s open-plan floor.

As great as the social aug is - and trust me when I say it’s great - it’s somewhat of a Praxis point dead-end. Once I’d unlocked the pheromones, I didn’t have another step in the tree to take. But by the preview build’s final mission, I still had some Praxis points floating around in my augmento-sack. Which powers to choose? Hacking had been covered by Graham, being an insane multi-murderer by Tom. That left stealth, but it was a broad church. The helper aug I mentioned before had a host of add-ons - things that show vision cones, or dampen footstep sound. But they were too passive. I wanted something I could use in a panic, an ejector switch to get me out of trouble. I wanted something suitably futuristic. I wanted something that let me turn absolutely invisible at will, so I could rise from thin air like some kind of mad land-shark with metal arm-teeth. I wanted the cloak.

I’d finally cobbled together enough Praxis to afford it by the preview build’s final mission. Deus Ex’s full-fledged MISSIONS (capitals for distinction between the hub’s side-missions) take place in bespoke areas. They’re closer to a standard shooter’s levels - there’s a beginning and an end - but there’s still a quadrabajillion ways to approach them.

The job opened out into a small, dusty courtyard. It was late evening, and the guards posted in front of my Jensen were upgrades on the basic grunts I’d met earlier. They had assault rifles, body armour, and mean looks. But that was fine. I could disappear from reality.



Problem was, I’m not much for reading the fine print on things. When I’d selected the cloak, my mind had filled in the blanks I couldn’t be bothered to skim. Probably shouldn’t have done that. My first trip across the courtyard was taken at a gentle jog after engaging my cloak. The sound of invisible feet on floor attracted the ears of every guard in the vicinity, but not quite to the same extent as Adam’s sudden burst back into visibility in the centre of the courtyard.

It turns out the cloak last a scant few seconds at its basic level. Even the Praxis upgrades only provide a slight extension to its lifespan. I found out the hard way. With bullets, in my face.

Reloading and starting the stage again, I started to use the cloak as a last-gasp saviour instead of a constant crutch. Towards the end of the stage, the facility - I won’t spoil what it’s facilitating - opens out into a huge office floor, studded with cubicles. I started moving methodically, stunning guards and dragging them into dark corners. But the room made for long sight lines, and the stun gun’s ball of electricity had a limited travel distance. I broke out my tranquiliser rifle - purchased from a helpful arms dealer in one of Detroit’s apartment tenements - and loosed off a few darts at distant targets.

One guy slumped to his knees, alone off in a corner. Except, he wasn’t alone. A friend, previously hidden by a crate, came jogging up to his unconscious body. In a panic, I fired a second dart. It missed, high and to the right, and the nearby guards flipped into an alert state. In groups, they began sweeping the upper floor I was residing on. To take the sniper shots, I’d holed up in a small control room. I had doors to my left and right, both about to be occupied with the bulky frames of heavily armoured guards. In front, beyond a window, the edge of a balcony that dropped ten feet to the comparatively safe ground below. Earlier in my travels, I’d used some extra Praxis to glue the fancy-sounding Icarus Landing System to Adam’s feet, an aug that slowed falls from any height with a halo of light that looks like a shuttle re-entering the atmosphere. If I could make it to that balcony and leap off, I’d be safe.



Augs are classified into two major categories: passive, and active. Passive ones, like the noise detector I’d installed earlier, were always-on. Active ones drain power reserves. These reserves can themselves be beefed up with Praxis points, but I’d been neglecting that branch of the upgrade tree. I had two blips of battery to put toward my cloak, which equated to around five seconds of invisibility.

Both guards were set to burst into my hidey-hole at the same time. I waited in a crouch, one finger hovering over F1, watching the door. The one on the right twitched first, and I flipped on my cloak. I had but a few seconds to make it past him and launch headlong into the void, but were I to sprint, Adam’s robo-footsteps would give away my position. I shuffled slowly past the suspicious guard. Once behind his back, I stood up, still invisible, and ran for the lip of the walkway. I rematerialised in the visible light spectrum a millisecond before I began my jump. Any guards looking my way would’ve seen a man appear out of thin air, fall a few feet, then turn into a shimmering human fireball and drift slowly to the ground.

But none did. Once on the ground, I was able to squirrel into a nearby vent and wait out their extended patrol routes. Human Revolution’s augmentations had yanked me out of a spot almost impossibly tight.

It’s that rarest of games: it rewards both meticulous planning and split-second reaction calls. To experience everything Human Revolution has, I should plot an entirely different Adam come the full game’s launch. But I don’t want to. I want to make exactly the same character. In ten hours, I know my Adam Jensen. I know he can get out of trouble with his head or his hands. I want to get to know him better.
PC Gamer
Hitman Absolution - snaaake
IO have followed up on yesterday's Hitman Absolution teaser trailer with news of the sequel's brand new engine, and a few hints about Absolution's dark, conspiracy-laden story.

Absolution has been built "from the ground up" in the new Glacier 2 engine, created by IO Interactive, and will have Agent 47 running from the law "on a personal journey through a corrupt and twisted world" that will be "both a familiar and yet significantly different experience to any of the other Hitman games."

Agent 47 has been betrayed by his most trusted allies (again), and must take on a new and dangerous contract to uncover the truth behind the conspiracy that surrounds him. IO say that Absolution will be "something our silent assassins will relish as well as those who are new to the Hitman world.”

Keep an eye on the new Hitman Absolution website for more information in future. Hitman Absolution is slated for release next year.
Deus Ex: Game of the Year Edition
Deus Ex Human Revolution - action shot 2
We've had the first ten hours of the PC version of Deus Ex: Human Revolution on our Steam accounts for a week or so now. We can't talk about what's in it or how good it is overall until the 11th (Wednesday next week), but we've been given special permission to talk about how it holds up on PC early. Elements of the PC port are being handled externally by Nixxes, and we've talked before about whether that's good news or bad. But now we can actually tell you how it feels.

Bearing in mind, obviously, that this is an unfinished version and polish is usually the last thing to be done:

Mouse movement
Feels a little off right now: the horizontal sensitivity is way higher than the vertical sensitivity, and there isn't an option to adjust them individually. This may be because, as the saying goes, Console Gamers Can't Look Up. Personally I got used to this after about half an hour so it's not a persistent problem, and it seems like the kind of thing they're bound to tweak. Other than that, the responsiveness is good and it doesn't have that treacly sluggishness that some console ports do.



HUD
The Deus Ex 1 toolbar is back! So cool. Whatever you pick up puts itself in the next free slot on your toolbar, and you hit the appropriate number key to switch to it. You can also hover over anything in your inventory and press a number key to assign it to that slot. And like Deus Ex, there's a hotkey to toggle it if you're confident you can remember what slots you put everything in. Personally, I switched stuff around a lot and preferred to keep it on.

Object highlighting, etc
On the easiest mode, the game highlights interactive objects and marks the direction of your next objective on-screen. It also shows an on-screen prompt when you're close enough to someone to do a melee takedown, telling you what to press. Thankfully, all three of these can be turned off, and they're not even on by default on Deus Ex difficulty.

Graphics options
You can toggle anti-aliasing, post-processing, V-sync and triple-buffering, and adjust anisotropic filtering and shadow quality. With anti-aliasing, it looks a lot nicer than it did when I played it on 360. But I'd like to be able to choose how much: it's still not quite enough to make it look truly smooth on my home machine.

There's also no option for texture quality. It never actually bothered me, but I have to mention that a few textures are very blurry in this build.



Inventory, map, etc
The inventory is a grid-based system just like Deus Ex. You can drag stuff about (a little laggy currently), combine it or drop it. The system can also auto-rotate an item if you only have a tall, thin space for something that's usually wide.

The map is a dynamic 3D one rather than the aerial photos of old, which is an improvement. Main objectives and sidequest objectives are marked on it, but you can toggle any of these off, and you can scroll through the floors of a building to figure out where you're going.

Like Deus Ex, it keeps a comprehensive log of all the e-books and pocket secretaries you read. And like Deus Ex, all these things are accessible as tabs along the top of whichever screen you're on: inventory, map, augs, media log, quest tracking.

Keypads, computers, etc
The game automatically stores any key codes or login details you find, then displays them on-screen when you use the keypad or terminal they work with. You type them in yourself, something I always got a nerdy thrill out of in Deus Ex 1.

Hacking is mouse driven, but this build has a bug that makes it hard to click on the right context-menu option when capturing nodes.

Performance
Runs great at 1920x1200 on my 2.8GHz quad-core Q9550, 4GB RAM, and Radeon 4800. We also tried it on our puniest machine, a dual-core E6750 with 2GB of RAM and an 8800GTS. I'd describe it as functional but not pleasant - averaging around 20fps. That rig can't run Crysis 2 at more than a slideshow even on its lowest settings, but does run Portal 2 perfectly.

The most noticeable thing on a good PC is that loading times are pretty long, even to reload a save on the same level. Performance is another thing that can change a lot towards the end of development, so I won't pretend to know how this'll compare to the final code.



Despite these few niggles, it already feels like a PC game to me. The real test is if, once you've been playing for an hour, you still feel like you're fighting against the controls, visuals or level size. Other than the hacking bug, I don't. The game clicks, and I'm immersed.

We'll have lots more on the game itself next week, including very different accounts by three of us who've played it for more than twenty hours each. If you've been holding off getting excited, it might be time to stop.
Deus Ex: Game of the Year Edition



The Human Revolution devs get together again to discuss the changes to the UI design they've made for the PC version of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Eidos Montreal told us earlier this week that the UI was part of a concerted effort to make Human Revolution feel like "a true PC game." Alterations to the Human Revolution engine will also offer full support for DirectX 11 and 3D, as well as AMD Eyefinity across five screens.

Keep an eye on PCGamer.com. We'll be bringing you our impressions on how Deus Ex: Human Revolution looks and feels on PC very soon.
Deus Ex: Game of the Year Edition
Deus Ex Human Revolution Thumbnail
Eidos Montreal have been telling us about the extra effort that has gone into developing the PC version of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. As well as the Montreal team, they have drafted in developers Nixxes to make sure that Deus Ex: Human Revolution will feel like "a true PC game," with its own UI, proper mouse support and advanced graphics options that will take advantage of our gaming machines' superior hardware.

Director of technology on Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Julien Bouvrais explains the daunting task of getting Deus Ex: Human Revolution right on PC. "Certainly the biggest challenge in developing Deus Ex: Human Revolution for PC has been ensuring that the franchise lives up to the expectations of the gamers who have been following the franchise since it started in 2000," he says, adding that "the PC version of the game needed to be a game in itself and not just of port of the console version."

This lead Eidos Montreal to contact Nixxes, who have been working on extra PC features. Nixxes founder and president, Jurjen Katsman explains. “We’ve been developing Deus Ex: Human Revolution on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 simultaneously since the beginning, with the same level of importance.”



“Nixxes stepped in pretty far along in the project to give us a hand on the PC version because by its very nature it’s the version that requires the most platform specific work.”

He goes on to describe a few of the features we can expect from the sequel, saying “Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a true PC game. Yes, you will have a lot of options, no 'Press start' screen, full mouse support - everything we feel a PC game should have.

“Further, with the graphics, there are multiple options for anti-aliasing, shadow quality levels, and the ability to enable or disable various post processing effects. All controls can be fully remapped as expected from a PC game as well.”

Deus Extras

Katsman adds that there will be “additional graphics features and a different weapon selection bar to tailor to the keyboard and mouse. There is a simple drag and drop interface to bind things in your inventory to specific keys on your keyboard, making them quickly accessible, and you can then also cycle through these with your mouse scroll wheel while in-game.

“For graphics, there are some unique features, like smoother shadows, more realistic ambient occlusion effects, stereoscopic 3D-- various things that the extra hardware allows us to do. Our focus has been making sure that the game is built for the PC platform as well as possible.”



There will also be full mouse support for the game’s menus, and the team have entirely re-thought the interface for the hacking mini-game. There are also a few extra surprises in store.

“There is a lot of cool stuff in the game, says Katman, “But one thing specific to the PC version that we think is quite cool are some features we have been working on with AMD. I can’t talk about these right now, but a video and details will be released on Thursday.”

We’ll be bringing you more on Deus Ex: Human Revolution throughout the week. If you haven’t already, check out the first Deus Ex: Human Revolution PC screenshots and have a glance over the game’s system requirements. Alternatively, check out our huge Deus Ex: Human Revolution preview.
...