Deus Ex: Human Revolution Preview Build Review

[Stavros]

So, I recently learned that someone leaked the DE:HR preview build. I sat down and have been playing it since last night. Anyone who has played the original Deus Ex in its entirety and played the sequel knows that the sequel was vastly underwhelming. Criticisms from the players varied from the dumbing down of the inventory (going from a backpack-type inventory with weapons and items of various sizes to having a set number of spaces and every item taking up one slot) to reducing the augmentations and significantly shortening the length of the game. Other criticisms include critcisms of the story, but that is too subjective. I'm going to review my feelings and experience of gameplay and aesthetics.

Having played the leaked Human Revolution I have to say gameplay wise is reminiscent of the first Deus Ex. There's an augmentation three comparable to the first Deus Ex. The Detroit level is very expansive and feels like a city. There are differences. The first Deus Ex was more RPG than FPS. It had skills like pistols and rifles. Human Revolution doesn't have this. It takes less of an RPG approach and more of an FPS approach. One can fire from the iron sights, from the hip or blindly around a corner. Also HR has a cover system. Holding the right mouse button when standing close to a wall or waist high obstacle, Jensen (the protagonist) will hug the wall. Of course there's the peek out and shoot. This applies to all weapons except the rocket launcher (I think).

As for aestethics the preview felt like there were temporary textures. For things like books on shelves the text looked slighty fuzzy and lower resolution. Some textures (one I saw on an NPC) seem like they had a temporary stand in. Anti-aliasing felt like it didn't work that well even though I had it set to 8x. There was some input lag even though I'm running a 580GTX and i7 950. As for the color palette I like it. The Preview has DX11 options, but it doesn't work.

All in all I have to say that a lot of my fears about how the game would play have been quelled. What I'm most worried about now is if the graphics (anti-aliasing, texture resolution, etc) will be fixed. I feel like this will be a good game gameplay and story-wise, but I think that to give it that extra shine will need to fix high resolution textures and add DX11 support (which is supposed to work on release). I have to say that I'm liking the game, but remain cautiously optimistic.

[bad_brain]

hmmm...sounds interesting, I liked the first Deus Ex games, but there kinda wasn't enough action sometimes. but ok, I am a hardcore FPS gamer...
the DX11 problems will surely be fixed for the final release (or more likely with the first patch ^^), but my g-card isn't DX11-capable anyway and the benefits of DX11 compared to DX11 are just very subtle compared to the step from DX9 to DX10.

I will definitely give it a try...

[Stavros]

You should definitely try it. It's not an FPS even though it's in First Person. It is first and foremost an RPG although a watered down RPG similar to S.T.A.L.K.E.R., but DE:HR felt more like an RPG with FPS elements where STALKER felt like an FPS with RPG elements. The beta is about 5 hours long (total guess; I started between 11:30 and midnight and didn't go to bed until aobut 4 AM then played another two or three hours) with a good amount of side quests. Definitely worth downloading just to see if you're interested.