Deus Ex

[Stephen Speicher 0]

Game suggested for rating by Michael Jenkinson.

[egochick 0]

By far one of my favorite video games! It has a good story (a flaw in many games) and makes for many good hours of gaming. In a fun (and a bit satirical) way, the plot incorporates all sorts of modern conspiracy theories - ECHELON, the Illuminati, Men in Black, conspiracies over the Knights Templar and Area 51, the Roswell UFO incident, etc.

It was a very good mystery to be unwrapped in that you go through the game and talk to people/read newspapers and such lying about the world to gather clues and piece them together - without dropping the combat in the game at all. If you do secondary missions, you gather more information and talk to more people that could help you out later on. Most of the ammo and health kits and so on are hidden, altho a fair bit is out in the open. To get new cool stuff earlier, you have to look around the world and explore. You can choose whether or not to go on a lot of missions and choose one of three endings depending on your own ethics. For a lot of the time, you aren't pushed along a plot. The game, once I started playing it, is absolutely addicting with new twists and turns.

The best thing about the gameplay is that it has a little bit of everything - for example, you pay in skill points to upgrade your abilities in lockpicking or in handling a specific class of weapons (from melee, pistol, rifles, heavy weaponry, and grenades). You can go through the game sneaking around and sniping, or rely on small arms and melee weapons in close combat, or can rove through the levels like Rambo. Like in real life, you also have a limited inventory - that is, you can't go through the game as a moving arsenal of 800 pounds of weapons.

It's also one of those games where each time you play it, you pick up on things you missed the first or second time around - either by paying more attention to the world or by making different decisions in the game. There's an extensive list of little tidbits of trivia on Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_ex

All in all, I gave the game the perfect 10.

Spoiler

And one of the *best* parts about the game is that the United Nations is portrayed as exactly what it is, a power-hungry political group wanting to make itself the one-world government.

End Spoiler

[Eastgate 0]

I agree with all of egochick's comments.

I can add that one of the things I enjoyed most about the game was that it is very open ended (i.e. not like Doom 3). You can almost go anywhere and do anything. There is a storyline to follow which is linear to some extent, but even that has some major forks that are directly affected by your own actions. This gives the player the sense that they are in control of what happens in the story, and also adds replay value.

There is something for everyone in the gamplay. You can choose any approach to solve a problem; you can be a demolition man or a ghost or anything in between. It all depends on which skills you have specialized in, which equipment you choose to carry and ultimately your personal preference as the player.

Deus Ex looks a little dated today, however it was (and still is) a highly original game, sucessfully combining elements of the RPG genre with an FPS. There was also a sequel made, which I think is worth playing if you enjoyed the first game. However, I would not recommend the sequel as heavily, as it does not have the same groundbreaking originality, lacks some of the nice features from the first game, and the locations are just not as realistic. I would strongly recommend the original Deus Ex, it is quite an experience for any gamer who is a fan of the RPG or FPS genre, or just story-driven games in general.