Detroit: Become Human is an upcoming Action-Adventure game in which you switch between a trio of androids questioning their purpose in life.
Developed by Quantic Dream, Detroit: Become Human sees the company who previously gave us Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls not drifting too far from their established formula while at the same time taking advantage of the additional power offered by the PS4. However, since the game was debuted during Paris Game Week 2017 with its tonally problematic trailer, it has been one of the games we here at Game Warp have been keen to get our hands on, especially after seeing the gameplay demonstration at PSX last year whose hostage ‘negotiation scene’ you can now see with the release of the demo playthrough for yourself.
While the finished game will have you switching between three androids Kara, Markus and Conner – the later who you take control of in this demo and from what we can tell will form the baseline for the main game – the plot-lines for Kara and Markus will focus more on the role and position in society that androids inhabit.
Playing as Conner right from the start, there is a cinematic quality to the gameplay as you walk into the scene and immediately are thrown into the action happening around your character with the choice system starting off light as you can either choose to save or leave the pet fish on the floor beneath a smashed fish tank. Needless to say the choices you will be making later in the scene won’t be so easy.
This unquestionably a cinematic experience, especially as NPC’s follow their own paths, moving around you as you analyze clues and gather information that will ultimately aid you in your attempts to defuse the hostage situation involving the house android and its owner’s daughter. Of course depending on the clues you discover and your dialogue choices you may go down any number of paths that Quantic Dream have worked into the game, and looking at the choice map at the end of the demo it’s actually quite astounding just how many paths a player can take in just this scene alone. In the full game, characters will also be able to die with the story adjusting to exclude the killed character.
It’s during the clue gathering sections that the game really comes into its own as the more information you gather from a scene the more it can assist your interactions. The real highlight of this detective mode is the ability to create reconstructions once you have collected all the information from a scene, enabling you to play out the scene from 360 degrees. It’s equally nice whenever you examine a piece of evidence or find an item of interest it pops up with an info box giving you little details about each piece and no doubt telling you more than possibly wanted to know about gunshot wounds if the demo is anything to go off.
While the demo might be limited, this is truly a stunning looking game and certainly has us excited to play more when it gets its full release at the end of May. At the same time, Quantic Dream is clearly carrying across the parts from their previous games which worked with multiple outcomes and permanent character deaths being already confirmed we can only hope that we don’t have to play through a training level like the one we got at the start of Heavy Rain. Needless to say this is still one of our most anticipated titles for the year.