Amongst the FPS genre, one of a very few that really stood out as a truly innovative game, Deus Ex pitted you against very high-stake odds to come out on top and look pretty tight doing so. Using the classic Unreal Engine, Deus Ex took the player into a stark and shady world, in the guise of a nano-augmented agent, JC Denton. Taking place sometime in the 2020’s, you sneak, snipe, and tazer your way through terrorists, military-types, MIBs, and other various victims in a FPS/RPG/Steatlh style that rivaled any other game’s story telling abilities at the time.
The story is very much that of a dismal world fraught with peril from active terrorists groups, a plague that’s slowly eating away at human life, time and precious resources; and an underlying conspiracy lurking in the shadows. Much like the earlier System Shock games, you end up wading through multiple menus for inventory, augmentations, health, skills, and mission objectives. The skills themselves, as well as the augmentations can compliment each other in interesting ways but can also feel a bit unnecessary at times when you’ve leveled up other key, and usually more important skills, as is the case between Swimming and Lock picking. There are a fair bit of glitches in the game, but the game is usually pretty effective at playing smoothly.
As an older game, you won’t get orchestral symphonies, but that doesn’t mean the music and sound design don’t express the game well enough already, with mainly techno-based themes keeping up the atmosphere while you traverse the sometimes blocky and overly darkened levels. The lighting doesn’t always tend to work as well as you’d expect, and so hiding in the shadows can be a bit difficult. Over all the game itself is a very good piece of work, and is a definite addition to your older game collection if you don’t have it already. The story is compelling and meshes with your decision making, the dialogue is firm, and the game play, though not perfect, does the job pretty well considering the standards of game play at the time of Deus Ex’s release, as far as FPS’s go.
