| Dr. Boogie |
Aug 1st, 2011 06:27 PM |
A friend of mine has been playing the leaked DE:HR preview build, and I've been looking over his shoulder.;)
It's pretty fantastic, I've gotta admit. I was worried it might be dumbed down for consoles like Invisible War, but thankfully that is not the case. Some elements have been left out, but the game feels smoother for it.
Stealth, for instance, is way better, if for no other reason than because they introduced stealth kills in a way beyond sneaking up and goosing the enemy with a cattle prod. Instead, when you get close to someone, you hit a button, and you and your prey are transported to a pocket dimension where you can subdue him without him making a sound, no matter how much time he would have to cry out while you punch/stab/arm bar him, all while time is frozen in the outside world. They give you the option to do either lethal or non-lethal takedowns, a la Splinter Cell, with lethal ones being permanent while nonlethal ones net you more xp. Also included is a little radar that can be upgraded, but is pretty good on its own, showing positions of enemies you can either see or hear and displaying the alert status of nearby enemies.
They also replaced hacking with an actual minigame where you have to take over nodes on a grid not unlike the one from Shadowrun (the Genesis game, not the modern one). You work your way along the paths between nodes, capturing nodes as you go. Each time you capture one, there’s a chance you’ll active a trace, at which point you’ll only have a few seconds to make it to the final node before you’re kicked out and an alarm/countermeasure is triggered (if there’s one around). While you’re looking around each grid, you’ll have the opportunity to capture data stores for more money, more xp, and special viruses for covert hacking or freezing the trace process for a few seconds. It took a little getting used to, but it’s fun and rewarding once you get the hang of it.
Combat is mostly the same, although they’ve added an entirely optional cover system, along with an abundance of chest high walls to crouch behind. Accuracy is determined solely based on the weapon, with the odd upgrade part to improve accuracy showing up from time to time. There are some augmentations you can get to improve your accuracy by moving, but I can’t see why you would spend the upgrade points on that when enemies are typically accurate enough to nail your ass if you spend time away from cover.
That’s really one of the few criticisms I have of it: your skill/augmentation tree still a handful of semi-useless skills. One of the branches labeled “stealth augmentation” just unlocks HUD elements that show you cones of vision and noise levels, but these seemed easy enough to circumvent by crouch-walking everywhere and using the cover system to peek around corners. Granted, it’s not required that you purchase those or augmentations of similar value like the ones that let you sprint for a little longer, but it seemed like by the end of the preview, nearly every augmentation you’d want for the rest of the game had been purchased. The preview build was pretty long, but still...
The other thing that kind of bugged me was the power meter. Instead of a long bar, you’ve got a series of batteries that drain based on the power you’re using. Partially filled ones will regenerate automatically, and if you use them all, a single one will always refill itself. To refill empty batteries, you have to special candy bars and jars of Robocop-esque baby food. For the most part, it’s not a big deal. The cloaking power, for example, starts off granting you 3 seconds of invisibility per battery, but stealth kills take an entire battery to execute, thus you can’t execute too many stealth kills in a row. That seems like kind of a design flaw, giving a guy mechanical arms that run out of juice every time he punches someone in the face.
Beyond that, my only other complaints were minor ones about some stiff animations during conversations and a few button prompts that didn’t light up properly for the mouse cursor, but even if those weren’t resolved in the final product, I’d still get the game. Above all else, they’ve fully realized the multiple routes to solving situations that’s so iconic to the series.
All I know is when this finally comes out, I’m going full hacker.
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