Deus Ex – PC/Mac/Playstation 2, 2000/2002

Developed by Ion Storm Inc.

Published by Eidos Interactive

Story – 10.0/10.0

Gameplay – 9.5/10.0

Design – 9.5/10.0

Control – 10.0/10.0

Sound – 8.5/10.0

Fun Factor – 9.0/10.0

Overall – 10.0/10.0

Have you ever finished a game wondering if you’ll ever play anything better? No? Get a copy of Deus Ex. This is a game that rests comfortably on the same lofty echelon as Starcraft, Metroid Prime, Half-Life, and the like. You can not enjoy games like that. But you have to respect their quality. Deus Ex is a testament to storytelling through video games. Read on, and I’ll tell you why.

I’ll be reviewing (surprise!) the PC version.

Story – 10.0/10.0

When you start Deus Ex, you go through a fairly lengthy tutorial. It fills you in on a number of important things, both about playing the game correctly and about the setting. You’re introduced to a few important characters, learn who your enemy is, etc. Good tutorial.

Then you watch the introductory cinematic, which is really nothing more than a conversation between two men.

Then you play.

It’s hard for me to write a section on story for this game. I’m a purist, so I put a huge amount of value on unspoiled first playthrough experiences. Nearly anything I would say would take away from your experience. So, instead, I’ll talk about presentation. The story of Deus Ex is not shown to you. It doesn’t employ the overused “filler gameplay-cutscene-filler gameplay-cutscene-actually fun gameplay-extra long cutscene” formula that the vast majority of FPS games tend to rely on. Deus Ex is an evolving piece of art. By the time you complete your first mission, walk into UNATCO headquarters, and a guard you’re passing tells you his personal feelings on the way that you chose to handle your opponents, it will hit you:you’re in a multi-layered masterpiece.

It’s hard to make a game where using a name like Daedalus or Icarus doesn’t feel contrived or lazy. One way to do it is to make your game about mythology, like God of War or Age of Mythology. But even then, mythic names are expected. They cement the setting. A dystopian Cyberpunk game can’t get away with it so easily. Deus Ex is able to use such names because there’s a motion to the storytelling, a sense of urgency and legitimacy to the conflicts, a feeling of “I need to cancel my afternoon appointments or people could die,” to this game that it doesn’t feel like fiction. It feels like history.

Gameplay – 9.5/10.0

Deus Ex is an FPS/RPG/Adventure game. You’re offered an assortment of weapons, from stun prods and tranquilizing wrist-mounted crossbows to shotguns and rocket launchers. You move around the game, neutralizing opponents. So it’s Halo, right? Hardly. There are moral implications for the way that you choose to fight (or even avoid) enemies. As a bio-enhanced super-soldier (of sorts) you are able to invest a handful of points from the outset into various skill, such as weapon proficiencies, swimming, lockpicking, hacking, and environmental resistance. With four increasingly costly levels to each skill and not enough points to get them all, you begin to customize your nanomachine-filled beast of a player character, codenamed JC Denton. On top of that, you can also install permanent abilities through augmentation canisters found throughout the world. These abilities drain your bioelectric energy, so you can’t keep them on all the time, but they’ll undoubtedly end up saving your life more than a few times by the end of the game. With skills like completely silencing your footsteps while running, protection from radiation, increased jump height and run speed, increased strength for moving things, and detonation of incoming rockets and grenades before they reach you, it starts to sound a little bit less like Halo, doesn’t it?

You can build JC Denton into a different character each time you play, which will present you with a new set of challenges each time.

Inventory management is a downside of Deus Ex for a lot of people. It looks something like this:

The picture should speak for itself, I think. You’ve got limited space to hold things. You’re not going to be able to carry a sniper rifle, a flamethrower, a shotgun, an assault rifle, and have much room for anything else. The grid system with variable slots taken up by different sized items is a fairly logical, solid system. Haven’t you played Diablo II? This isn’t a design flaw. It’s a design choice. Limited inventory can be done wrong, though. We’re just lucky it wasn’t in Deus Ex.

You’ll have numerous conversations with other characters as you progress through the game, hack into lots of computers, (either by using your ICE Breaker, which gives you limited time in the system, or by finding the username and password elsewhere) learn lots of short sequences of digits to type into number pads, pick a lot of locks, or just blow everything you see to pieces. Although, you’ll find out fairly quickly that running and gunning can be extremely difficult, especially at higher difficulties. This isn’t quite Hitman, but Eidos games tend to favor stealth, and this is no exception.

Deus Ex also happens to do something very, very right. The goals screen, pictured below.

The primary and secondary goals are nothing special. As a matter of fact, you should really expect some kind of objective tracking. The really cool part is below that: the notes section. Find a datapad with the login information to a nearby computer terminal? It goes straight to notes. Read an email while trespassing in that system with critical mission significance? It goes straight to notes. And, what’s that? An “Add Note” button? Yes! I’m happy to say that you can both edit existing notes and create your own, right there! That might not be a big deal to some people, but I distinctly remember having multiple notebooks when I was much younger for game notes. Page after page of Megaman passwords, theories on how to solve puzzles in Myst, build orders for Starcraft, and so on. Taking notes really enriched my experience with many games in the past, and although I don’t do it nearly as much with more modern games, when I do it always pays off. I have a hand-crafted sea-chart of a completionist run of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker around here somewhere. Anyway, the notes feature is extremely cool, Ion Storm Inc.

I’m going to sum this up by calling Deus Ex a strategist’s shooter. Half-point penalty because I was dumb and missed one of the coolest augmentations in the game.

Design – 9.5/10.0

If you’re even passingly interested in Cyberpunk, stop reading immediately and get a copy of this game. I’m not kidding. It’s the perfect summation of the genre. You will notice certain similarities to The Matrix at times, but only in visual terms. JC Denton can look a lot like Neo, but it doesn’t seem like that was intentional. Deus Ex came out a year after The Matrix, but it was in the works since 1994.

Visual presentation perfectly matches the setting. There’s a profound darkness to the game. That’s the world you’re entering, though. It’s not Barney. It’s Deus Ex.

Overall, graphics were not stunning for their time. Far from bad, but equally far from setting a new standard. The Unreal 1 Engine can only be pushed so far, after all. You can easily tell what everything in the game is, draw distance is good for the era, and the explosions look awesome, so there’s not much to complain about here. I’m only going to dock half a point because of how the draw distance affects the Statue of Liberty. If you play the game, you’ll know what I’m talking about very soon.

Control – 10.0/10.0

The control scheme is unorthodox given how standardized FPS controls for PC have become in the 21st century, but it’s good nonetheless. If you do decide to play the game, I encourage you not to remap the keys, but instead learn this (probably alien) system. It’s a good scheme. It just takes getting used to. You can’t keep your left hand on WASD every second of the game, and you’ll just have to get used to that.

Beyond the scheme, however: controls are responsive and well thought-out. Allowing the player to remap the number keys at any point really helps add that RPG feel to the game, and it allows you to enter almost every situation fully prepared (if you choose to).

The controls of Deus Ex bothered me at first. Once I used them for about an hour, though? Pure gold. Gotta love ‘em.

Sound – 8.5/10.0

The audio of Deus Ex is something of a mixed bag. It’s likely that you’ll recognize a few (or even a lot) of the sound effects. They’re used well, though, so I’m not calling that a bad thing.

The voice acting is the big stumbling block here. Non-Americans sound like Americans trying to sound foreign. It’s cheesy. JC Denton is completely flat-toned at all times. It can be a little disconcerting. JC Denton’s lack of enthusiasm is justified by the in-game lore, however. Both he and his brother, codenamed Paul Denton, can never express emotion. Same with all other bio-engineered soldiers of their generation. Those darn nanomachine scientists sure have a rotten sense of humor, don’t they?

Luckily, other than the sounds feeling a little recycled at times and the lackluster voice work, I have music to talk about. The soundtrack to Deus Ex is absolutely top quality. There’s a surprisingly long list of songs, all of which help to accentuate and reinforce the context in which they’re played. Just like the custom notes feature and the storyline, the soundtrack is something not soon forgotten. Actually, you’ll probably never forget any of those.

Fun Factor – 9.0/10.0

Deus Ex is an Eidos game. If retrying from the same save file more than once or twice bothers you, well, good luck. This is a game that provides potential for stunning mastery, but don’t expect to find everything or make only wise decisions your first time through. Unless you use a walkthrough. But if you’re like me, you avoid those things like the plague. Winning a game because you poured time and effort into it will always be more satisfying than winning a game just because you poured time alone into it.

But I digress! If you don’t mind committing to the game, you’re going to have an unforgettable experience on your hands. Replay value is a difficult thing to appraise here, but I think that if you can commit to beating it once, you’re going to want to beat it again, and again, and again. One point deduction because it can get fairly frustrating at a few points.

Overall – 10.0/10.0

Treating Deus Ex as a whole, it’s basically flawless. Sure, there are a few things that the modern gamer will wish were improved here and there. That’s to be expected–the game will be ten years old in June. All I can really say is that there’s an excellent reason for this picture to exist.