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Published on August 17th, 2011 | by Dan

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>KBMOD gets hands on with Deus Ex: Human Revolution

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We here at KBMOD would like to thank Aussie reader @Mrmattymouse for writing this. He offered to do this for us as he was going to a Deus Ex preview event where he would get to play the game hands on. This is the first article of this sort we’ve had, and we are genuinely grateful for Matt doing this for us and the community here at KBMOD. We can’t thank all of you enough for the support!





Without further ado, our hands-on preview of Deus Ex: Human Revolution:

Hello, fellow lovers of the keyboard and mouse!

My buddy Chris and I were fortunate enough to attend the Deus Ex: Human Revolution event that was held in Sydney tonight. Boy do I have some good news for you guys! First off, the event was held in a nice bar in the city, obviously the first thing one does is walk in the door and go get a beer (the beer was free all night!) In an adjacent room all the screens were setup to play the game. I walked in, I looked around, I saw 3 X-box 360s and 4 PS3s, and my heart sank. Are you kidding me? You’re going to make me play a Deus Ex game on console?! I won’t lie…I started to panic. What’s the use of posting an article to KBMOD if I only got to play it on console? However, off in the corner, sitting all by its lonesome, was a PC, in a clear case, surrounded by LED lights. Turns out the good fellas over at AMD were here to make sure the PC crowd had a presence. The PC was an X6 1090T, liquid cooled, with a single HD 6970, a 1500W PSU, with a G15 keyboard, a G9x mouse, and Human Revolution booted up on an SSD. All this hooked up to 3 monitors in Eyefinity… beautiful!



I was able to talk to the AMD guys there and ask them what kind of performance they had been getting out of the game. They told me the rig they had for display with all 3 monitors hooked up would keep the game at a constant 30FPS no problem. There was some slight screen tearing issues and when I brought this up with the guys they said it was due to the 3 monitors, and that with the graphics turned up you’d be needing either 2 6970’s in crossfire or 6990 to get it running flawlessly. When they brought it down to 2 monitors they got around 50-60FPS, and around 100FPS on just a single monitor. I asked what they would think be the lowest specs that the game would run on. Without going into any Nvidia products (for obvious reasons) they said any high clock dual core CPU and a 6800 series Radeon card should run the game just fine.



That was when I got my paws on the game. The first impression was the only true negative that I had, the load times were very long. Loading up a new game took at least 30 seconds, and even a save file took a good 15-20 seconds, and this is installed to an SSD. When it did load up, the first thing I thought was that it looked incredible. The prologue had you walking through a lab and everything was just stunning, the shadows were wonderful, the lighting was amazing. Everything looked impressive. I jumped into the start menu to check the graphical options, to make sure as previously stated that the PC version was the way to go, and it definitely is. Everything is customizable. You can change the type of anti-aliasing, tessellation, Multi-Core Processing, even turn DirectX11 on or off (not that you’d want it off). You can also choose your own Field of View easily.


Back in game, a group of Augments (cyborgs) attacked the lab I was in. Lab workers were getting smashed against doors, everything was gettting lit on fire. This was also the first time I got into a gunfight. I realised 2 things: I had picked the hardest difficulty setting and this really was challenging. You take a lot of damage very quickly, your health regeneration is very slow, and there is a hell of a lot of recoil. If you like challenging games, then this will probably be something you’ll enjoy. Taking cover is going to be incredibly crucial to your survivability in this game. The game signals this by binding take cover to your right mouse button. This might sound clunky, but the ability to move around, in and out of cover is actually an incredibly smooth process. Hold down space and the direction you want to go to move around the piece of cover, tap space and the direction to slide, leap, or barrel roll to the next piece of cover. You also possess the ability to pick up and move objects around. You can either throw them at your enemies or, depending on there size, use them as cover as well. The size of the object you’ll be able to move will depend on the skills you have.





The skill system is based in augments. You have different augments throughout your body, and each different area will give you different abilities. Head augments can allow you to see through walls to spot enemies and objectives. Skin augments will allow you to withstand greater damage. Leg augments will allow you to sprint longer and faster. Each different ability also has a skill tree within it, this allows major customization. At the start of each mission you can pick how you want to tackle it. One of the missions I played I got choices between being either lethal or non-lethal, and whether I want a long or close range weapon. The melee take downs are also dependent on whether you are being lethal or non-lethal; you can either strike someone with a quick blow to knock them out, or have blades pop out of your elbows and stab your enemy multiple times. There is a full inventory within the game that you can fill with enemies weapons and keep them to use in later levels, as wells as power bars, and credits to buy further augmentations.



The RPG and production elements of this game really shine through. Human Revolution has exceptional voice acting, which adds a lot to the atmosphere of the game. When interacting with key characters in the game you are also presented with dialogue options similar to a game like Mass Effect. The difference being that the choices you make in this game aren’t clear cut. This game gives you the ability to choose the dialogue based on how you want your character to behave.


In the 4 hours that the event ran for I had 30-45 minutes of play time. My final verdict? If you would like to play a game that is incredibly customizable, stunning to look at, and incredibly rewarding to play on a higher difficulty, then Deus Ex Human Revolution is it. Now if you’ll excuse me, Steam just finished downloading Deus Ex (the original!), I need to get myself reacquainted.


–Matt


images courtesy flickr free use and gamerant.com






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nipnops

Avatar photoDan

I put the OO in Swagoo. One of the founders of KBMOD. I stream on Twitch as well as writing and editing for the website.


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