They say you want a revolution? Deus Ex 3 delivers.

The four pillars of DX:HR
To focus on the essentials of what makes Deus Ex so memorable, Eidos Montreal has planted 'four pillars' of gameplay that everything else is built upon. Two primary pillars, Combat and Stealth, and two exploratory, Hacking and Social. Everything in the game revolves around these foundations.

"[You can] play it more Rambo style, or you can play it more like James Bond and be sneaky and invisible," says Dugas. "The player crafts a character that fits their gameplay style. It's the start of the player fantasy of expressing themselves through Adam Jensen."

"You can play the entire game shooting, or being stealthed, or going back and forth. You aren't forced to play one way or the other, like if you chose to be a warrior or a mage or something like that," says Dugas. "You go the way you want, the game is flexible and adapts to your play style. You can also decide to not kill anyone, minus some boss encounters. Or you can try to destroy the world if that's what you like."

In a gameplay demo during our visit to Montreal, the team gave us a taste of all four pillars as part of two live demo sequences controlled by an Eidos team member.

In our demo of the exploratory pillars, we walked through an encounter where Jensen is trying to meet with a gang leader named Tong in a club called The Hive. After negotiating entry to the bar with the doorman (this can be failed, and finding stealth entry to the bar would have become a necessity), we get into an extended conversation with a barman. There are plenty of conversational paths to choose from, but in this case we fail to get what we want. This forces us to explore the bar in search of an alternate route to the information we're looking for. Jensen finds a digitally locked door, and we enter the hacking mode to get past.

Hacking is a minigame, with a direct file system hacking metaphor to maintain that cyber-vibe Deus Ex thrives on.

"You start at a node, and you have to reach a target through a network. But you have to pass through different computers with different levels of detection. Depending on your skill level that will be easy or hard."

If you are detected, the clock starts ticking as the system tries to find you and shut you out. Some augmentations will slow this down, or even let you stop it.

"We wanted to create something consistent with the world," says David Anfossi, Producer of DX:HR. "And we keep you in the game world as you play this. You can move the camera, and you can be surprised by enemies during the hacking."

With the combat demo, it's hard to get a true sense of play without being hands on, but the demo showed off a system that blends balls out FPS with stepping back into a considered stealth style of play. The game is mostly played in first-person perspective, but for certain encounter situations the camera pulls back into a third-person view. If you hug the wall at a corner you will shift to third-person to get some view of what is waiting around the corner.

Extensions of the typical FPS come in the form of takedowns. Takedowns are a way to quickly dispatch enemies when you get up close and personal, and they can be used anywhere, anytime. Takedowns can all be engaged with either a lethal or non-lethal finish, depending on how you want to deal with the situation. In our demo, we see this difference partly in whether or not a massive blade popped out of Jensen's cybernetic arms. Many takedowns happen based on context, but none are scripted so the results are always dynamic.

"You can use this anywhere you want, as long as you have enough energy," says Dugas. "You will have an energy bar, so you have to balance out how you use your active augmentations versus passive ones. Passive augmentations are ones that trigger automatically and don't consume energy."

The stylistic attention, and flair, in DX:HR was very apparent during our game demo. In one spectacular moment, Jensen has climbed onto the glass roof of a building he needs to infiltrate. He crashes through the glass, dropping to the floor far below. But he lands safely, and even generates a burst of power as he lands that stuns enemies nearby. Then Jensen twirls quickly, unleashing a flurry of miniature bombs that take down the combatants before they have a chance to respond.

Most impressively, we find that what looked like a cut scene was an actual part of gameplay, with our Eidos gameplay driver actually making a series of decisions to create this combo effect. Choose the right set of upgrades when you play, and you'll also be ready to pull off awesome moves just like that.