Deus Ex

In this game you’re JC Denton, a nanotechnology-augmented secret agent (think Six-million Dollar Man meets Terminator, in a trench coat and dark glasses). The story revolves around the standard bleak future-world plot: illuminati, conspiracies, deadly viruses etc. Add a few more random plot points from favourite bleak future-world movies/books and you won’t be far off.


The sound is below average. Machine gun fire sounds like a looped sound clip in a painfully obvious way. Voice acting is OK, good in some cases. The music becomes repetitive really quickly and deserves to be turned off, but then that's the case for most games.

This game is an innovative First-Person Shooter (FPS) / Role Playing Game (RPG) combination: you'll collect "augmentations" that allow you to be slightly more bulletproof or slightly more radiation resistant etc. Said augmentations will only last for 1-2 minutes before draining all of your "bio-energy" though, so don't get too excited. By the time you're in a fire fight and realise "ooh, I should turn on my bulletproofing augmentation" it'll be too late. Fortunately the stellar AI will allow you, on the second try, to lure all your enemies around a corner and take them out one by one with the tried and tested shotgun-in-the-face technique. Special agents, robotic commandos and normal grunts are all equally stupid, so lucky for you, you'll rarely ever need those augmentations (thereby saving a heckofalot of "bio-energy")

When the "run fast" augmentation says that on "upgrade level 4" you'll be able to "run like the wind and leap from the tallest building" you should add "thereby breaking both legs" since any attempt to carry out such a feat will inflict serious damage on poor old Denton.

You'll also be able to upgrade skills. After learning to lock pick, hack and shoot a rifle well enough to take out security cameras, I really couldn't find a use for any of the other skills, so at times I’d stacked up close to 10,000 unused "skill points", only to end up spending them on something I didn’t really use anyway. The game is to be commended for its economy, unlike such wasteful and frivolous exercises as System Shock 2, where I rejoiced everytime I could upgrade anything, because the upgrades a) were really useful b) were fun c) enabled me to survive just that bit longer in a scary, scary, totally immersive environment. Deus Ex luckily didn't pander to frivolity by incorporating any of points a-c into its game design.

You'll visit many different locations. They'll all be varied and stimulating, for instance grey secret labs, grey secret military bases, a grey French châteaux, a very grey New York, grey Hong Kong and grey Paris, to mention but a few. To add to the excitement, the greyness will be interspersed fairly regularly with a brown crate or two, that you'll smash open to pick up ammo or other supplies. Sometimes you'll even have to stack two (grey) crates on top of one another to reach a brown crate!

Each grey secret location that you infiltrate will present a huge challenge, the enemies sometimes requiring as many as TWO sniper shots to the head from afar before they go down! After you've taken down all the enemies in a new (grey) location, you'll have lots of fun exploring and opening (brown) crates. You'll also have to jump over or crawl under red(!) or blue(!!) trip lasers to avoid setting off gun turrets. (Or you can just hack to turn them off)

You'll have meaningful conversations with NPCs (none-playable characters). Occasionally you'll get to choose what Denton says. This makes a huge difference to the game, such as whether a character gives you a secret code or not. Of course, if you choose the "wrong" conversation path, you can always, with the greatest of ease, hack or smash into whatever they didn't give you the code to. Sometimes, albeit rarely, this holds the added advantage of setting off an alarm, so that you can hide around a corner and conveniently deal with a whole squad of military super-geniuses with your trusty assault shotgun. It really saves on having to creep around grey air ducts looking for them - highly recommended.

Weapon upgrades will allow you to improve your weapons' accuracy, range etc. In a stunning leap of creative inspiration, the game designers allow these to stay on permanently and make a real difference to your weapons' effectiveness, ALL the TIME! Consequently, looking for weapon upgrades becomes the most interesting aspect of the game. But these are few and far between, so most of the time you’ll be infiltrating secret grey locations, sniping enemies from afar or committing mass-shotgun-massacres for no discernible reason at all.

The storyline is truly excellent. Two, or maybe three, or was that four, different secret factions want to unleash/prevent the unleashing of, a secret grey virus so that they can rule the earth. Compelling indeed, wish the game was open-ended enough to allow me to unleash the virus for them and get it over with. Sometimes in a grey secret lab you'll find the (gasp!) luminous green viral antidote. It doesn't *do* anything, just thought I'd mention that the game also contains something that's (gasp!) luminous green. Radioactive areas are also non-grey: they're, wait for it...luminous green! But you won't want to hang around enjoying the colour since you'll be dead in short order, even *with* a "hazmat" suit on. Of course you can spend lots of "skill points" becoming radioactivity-resistant. Given the lack of interesting things to spend skill points on, you may want to do exactly that, so that, a few times during the course of the game, you can hang around luminous green areas without dying, breaking open a few more brown crates.

I played the game on “normal”. Higher difficulty levels only add to the amount of damage you take, it doesn’t do anything to make your enemies smarter or the game more interesting, so don’t bother with the additional frustration of dying more often.

The game has been much-lauded for its open-endedness. This open-endedness often allows you to reach your next objective, (usually a secret grey control room/lab) by several routes: you can crawl through a duct, jump over red trip lasers, jump over blue trip lasers, run through a luminous green toxic room or commit a mass-shotgun-massacre and go the direct route. Such re playability! In one particularly brilliant example of “open-ended” game design, you can either surrender to one of your arch-nemeses, or choose to fight. If you choose to fight, however, you’ll realise, after much expenditure of ammo, time and patience, that said nemesis is conveniently “immortal” at that point in the game because you’re only “supposed” to kill him later. So you end up captured whether you “surrender” or “fight”, but with a varying amount of wounds. See, in this game you can choose to do whatever you want!

When “thinking-man’s FPS’ ” are discussed, three names usually come up: Half-Life, System Shock 2, and Deus Ex. System Shock 2 is my all-time favourite, an immersive environment more than it is a mere game, to me anyway. Half-Life is my second favourite. A long way away from SS2, but an equally long way ahead of anything else. Deus Ex does not compare even remotely to either of those in terms of immersion, atmosphere, internal consistency, cerebral challenge or adrenalin-pumping FUN! (OK, maybe it’s more cerebral, in an anal kinda way, than Half-Life) What’s especially frustrating is how good it could have been with fairly minor changes. As it is, it’s a teeth-gritting chore more than a fun experience.

If you still haven’t played this game, after all these years, you should. It’s required material for any FPS gamer, if only to know what all the fuss was about. Besides, it’s dirt cheap now. But to me, it is seriously overrated and frustratingly incapable of fulfilling the potential that shimmers enticingly just beneath its (grey) surface. I don’t think I’ll be playing Deus Ex 2.