What's really intriguing about the game is the dynamic difficulty system, which we got to experience first hand. Like most shooters, Emergence will keep track of all your statistics as you play the game, such as your hit percentage with various weapons, your number of kills, and so on. However, this data isn't just for you gloss over at the end of the game. Instead, Emergence will dynamically adjust the difficulty level depending on your performance. As Ritual's Tom Mustaine explained to us, if you start getting good at nailing head shots, then the game will subtly adapt to that. Enemies may start appearing with helmets, or they may dodge faster to incoming rounds. The idea is that you'll constantly be faced with a difficult challenge, no matter what your skill level. What's impressive is that Mustaine said that they've discovered that with dynamic difficulty turned on, both newcomers and first-person shooter veterans take about the same amount of time to get through the game.

We were brutalized by the dynamic difficulty system as we blitzed our way through a level of the game using our highly-refined shooter skills. At first, it seemed a bit easy to take out the bad guys, but it didn't take long for the game to adapt, and before we knew it, enemies started using different tactics on us, such as utilizing the secondary fire mode on their weapons to really unleash on us. If they do that to you, then you know you're doing better well, and the game is trying to compensate for that.