Note: a big ol hunk of preview text ahead. Read if you're bored, or skip if your eyes go cross just looking at the length. I suppose most of this stuff is subjective as well.
Got some time with the game, but I'm only 80%-ish done with the first mission. The first mission (warehouse) is really part of an extended tutorial, or at least it seems so. It's almost totally linear and introduces you to game concepts along the way. Level layout is identical to Crysis 2: go down corridor A till you hit open area A and do something with guards patroling on set paths to get to corridor B. Follow corridor B to security/hack/etc tutorial and get to corridor C. Rinse and repeat. From what I've read it opens up later on, and the level is basically one giant tutorial. At least I hope
They do have the classic Deus Ex inventory system, which I'm thankful for. It lets you choose if you want to carry a bunch of weapons, a bunch of items and a select weapon or two, or a bit of a mix. Weapons also retain the ability to be individually upgraded with some weapons having unique attachments. I really enjoy the combination of the two: do you drop this custom-modded weapon you found as a generic gun in the first level and carried with you ever since in order to pick up this other weapon that might help for just this one fight? Or, do you keep that custom pistol that you named Betty to fight with you another day and try to tough it through the encounter or go about it another way?
Conversations do have a version of the Reply Wheel, as I call it, and can be selected with the mouse. It's pretty much what you've seen elsewhere, though I think something like Alpha Protocol's time-limited reply system would have been a nice touch for the Deus Ex series. According to the augments you can get, you can also see how the other person in the conversation is reacting to your replies and it looks like that can eventually open up to a conversation minigame or something, but that's just going by the tooltips on the augments.
Speaking of the augments section, it's been expanded a bit and some augments have a branching tree structure. Other augments are just basic 1/2/3 upgrade structures. I'm not too sold on the "energy cell" system where some augments or actions take up an entire energy cell where you can only have -- I think -- five maximum and have to consume energy bars (yea, cyber protein bars) to refill all but the first cell, which recharges slowly over time. You can buy upgrades to recharge time and increase your count beyond the initial two you start off with, but the tooltips don't seem to indicate that these augments allow you to self-recharge more than the first cell or not.
Combat is, IMO, better than Deus Ex 1. You're a fragile beast without armor, and only three or so pistol hits to the chest on normal will take you out. Likewise, enemies are the same. Health does self-regen, but slowly so you can't hide behind a crate for five seconds and be good to go. At the start of the game, recovering from near death to full HP takes somewhere in the ballpark of 30 seconds to a minute. So you do really have to use the cover system (ditto for stealth), which thankfully is integrated pretty well and for the most part isn't *TOO* "this crate is here just for cover and has no other reason to be here".
The AI seems a good bit above average. If you miss your target with a silenced weapon, for example, they'll hear the bullet impact and start figuring out where that sound came from. Some enemies will see your downed target and move to investigate, while others will immediately sound the alarm. I'm not sure if they respond to other sound stimuli such as shell cases hitting the floor since the only silenced weapon I have is a single-shot tranq dart rifle. I have yet to see enemies work in a cohesive fashion, such as in FEAR where enemies would work to keep you distracted while another would try to flank you. That might change when I get past the "tutorial" mission or not. They do try to use cover, sometimes moving around for a better shot, and stay at a more ideal engagement range for thier weapons. I haven't found anyone charging my face with a pistol, for example, but they'll close in some to get a better shot.
I get ~90 FPS with settings maxed and MSAA (I do agree with an above poster in that it's fuzzy), at 1920x1200, 4.5GHz 2500k, Crossfire 6950s in DirectX 11 mode. Note that so far, all the areas I've been in have been fairly enclosed so I'm not sure how the framerate will pan out later on. Honestly, I don't notice much of a visible difference between DX11 and DX9, but that's not to say that some of the more "visible" aspects of DX11 won't manifest themselves at a different time. Note that I always play with Vsync off since I'm not usually a person to notice tearing, and only enable it if I'm pushing 200FPS or above to reduce the capacitor squeal.
The textures are good, with many in the higher resolution ranges and sharp. Yet there's also a good deal of lower resolution textures that don't seem all that buffed up (if at all) from the consoles. At the very beginning, a lot of the environment textures look very early 2000's, though this seems to improve once you get into the actual first mission. Poly counts seem high and animation is on the whole smooth without too many jarring instances of jerky or half-assed animation. At first I thought that some of the characters had really low poly counts, but it turns out it was just the style of clothing
That being said, the in game graphics on the PC, maxed out, is anywhere from a little to several steps above the prerendered cutscenes. I usually want to skip the prerendered portions since they look really bad compared to the in-game graphics and animation, and detract from the overall experience.
Some of the interface is still console oriented, but does have KBM modifications so that -- as a whole -- the interface works fine with a mouse and keyboard. Some of the bindings might be weird, such as the crouch key, but a little rebinding and everything is OK for me. There are also are some options for toggles so you can choose if you want to hold a button to stay in cover, or just press the button to toggle cover on and off. The "wobbly" main menu is pretty bad, somewhat mimicking the kinetic snap in iOS but with a pretty jarring result.
Some interface bits have more clicks than necessary. For example, to get information about an item in inventory, you have to click on the item, then click on Examine. A simple tooltip would be sufficent in almost all cases, or utilizing the never used right click to shortcut to the Examine screen. A very minor issue, really, but it would have been nice for more robust tooltips to make it ingame.
I do have some interface qualms with the map and hacking interface. They were obviously designed with the idea that you'll have a second analog stick to pan around the area/hacking map. Utilizing a mouse, you have to left click and drag, but it does so very slowly for exaggerated mouse movements. While this is simply annoying in the map, it can be very detrimental during the hacking minigame where you can be timed and have to follow a sequence. I can waste several seconds if I need to jump back and forth from one end of the node map to the other. I had one instance in which I could select the node and even highlight the hack option, but it wouldn't accept my click until I dragged the map further into view. Left click is also used to select a node and action, so it is possible to inadvertently misclick on a hacking attempt while trying to drag around the map. Perhaps the WASD or arrow keys can move the maps -- I haven't tried.
My mouse controls don't feel floaty, though the default in-game sensitivity artificially imposes pixel skipping and interpolation on my mouse movements. It was pretty minor and looked easily fixable, but I didn't really dig too far into tweaking the mouse controls since the first level is pretty much CQB and little need for precise aim. Also, without augmentations, such things as recoil, scope swing, and enlarged targeting reticules act to deter accuracy from an intentional gameplay perspective. When all that was tossed it, I didn't notice the jumping. Next time I sit down at the game, I'll tweak it a bit.
Finally, the load times are a little longish sometimes. I could understand if they had a long initial load time for main game resources and shorter load times for specific level or area resources, but right now it takes quite a while to reload a save. I have it on a pair of Segate 1TB 7200RPM SATA drives in RAID 0 and hover around 10-15 seconds a load. I'm not sure if the game simply clears out all resources and reloads every time, has some sort of uber compression/encryption on the resource files, or what.
So, yea, I went a bit verbose but I'm stuck at work with nothing better to do right now It feels a lot more like Deus Ex than Invisible War ever did in terms of gameplay. The game does manifest a console/PC duality, but lacks many of the normally rough edges of a rushed port. If someone lacked prior knowledge that the game was co-developed for consoles and played with a keyboard and mouse, they probably would never realize that it had console bretheren. A few nagging interface and textural aspects aside, so long as the story properly develops and the areas open up to more freeform aspects in "real" levels, I can see a worthy successor to Deus Ex.