Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Deus Ex: Human Revolution's hacking mini-game involves capturing nodes against the clock before a red line representing anti-intrusion measures can reach the first node and trace your location. By acquiring computer viruses and other goodies later on, Jensen can make this process easier, and the developers claim it becomes quite tactical.

Of course, Jensen could always have gone off and found the door code somewhere. He could also have gone in via a manhole, ran around in mazy sewers and found an entrance there. But it doesn't matter now, because he's in.

He's in a maintenance corridor surrounded by bottles of bleach, trolleys, ladders and other paraphenalia. He goes into cover at a corner and peeps round to see if the coast is clear, then moves beneath the green detection beams of a security camera, before switching to X-ray vision to locate nearby cops.

There's one on the balcony, so he carefully moves from cover point to cover point as his unwelcome companion ambles away, half-turning every now and then to heighten the tension. Jensen manages to stay out of sight, but then he comes up against a pair of cops having a conversation.

Fortunately he has a cloak augmentation. It drains energy from a meter in the top left, but it allows Jensen to move around in plain sight without being noticed. As he moves downstairs he darts among desks stealing things like painkillers from under people's noses.

Approaching the morgue though, he comes up against another meandering cop, and a security camera, and a door with a security system that only appears to open it when a cop walks through. Rather than worry about that, Jensen moves some nearby barrels and climbs into an air conditioning vent, but this brings him to another dead end - a hatch he could kick out, but not without alerting two more cops standing right in front of it.

He backtracks, only to find the original meandering cop at the other entrance. Helpfully, he's facing away. Jensen uses a non-lethal chokehold to incapacitate him, then grabs a foot and proceeds to drag the unconscious cop toward the door. It detects the cop and lets Jensen through in the process.

What's more, rifling through the cop's pockets reveals a PDA with the morgue door code on it. Who needs mine templates? The coroner mistakes Jensen for a military man and gives him the neural implant.

We've seen the demo played through three times, but if you changed the graphics you might not realise it was the same game three times in a row. And whe developers have chosen to stress extremes of violence, pacifism and stealth, you're more likely to mix and match. The important point is that you can tailor your approach to suit your preferences, one of Deus Ex's core values.

Eidos Montreal may never convince everyone that it has the right to create and tell new stories in the Deus Ex universe, but perhaps its latest demo will convince a few more people to give it the benefit of the doubt. If not, well, hey, that's the power of choice and consequence.