Deus Ex

Title: Deus Ex
Platform Played On: PC
Release Date: June 26, 2000
Date Played: February - September 2011
Time Played: 23 Hours
Completed (Y/N): Yes
Score: 4/5

Opinion:

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Deus Ex came out over a decade ago... a year before September 11th attacks. It portrays the statue of liberty in pieces and no sign of world trade center rising over New York. The game is set in the year is 2052 and the world is falling apart. A new disease is spreading called Gray Death and the cure is in very limited quantity. The terrorists are attempting to steal the vaccine, and you JC Denton a genetically modified human is sent in to stop them; however you start unraveling a major conspiracy theory behind it all.

I first heard of Deus Ex when it came out, everyone claimed it was the next evolution in gaming, a new era in FPS and RPG genres. As expected I grabbed myself a copy and installed it. My first impressions were, this looks cool, but what is up with the shooting. After trying to get into it for a few hours, I gave up and went back to playing Counter Strike.  I simply could not get into it. At the time it was revolutionary, which is easy to see retrospectively. But I simply did not get it.  It didn't help that it has an extremely convoluted story line with some of the worst voice acting.

And so the game went on the shelf for many years.

Half a decade later after talking with some people the game was brought up again, a lot claimed it to be the best game they have ever played.

Again I attempted to give it a shot, unfortunately it was a similar situation, it felt slow, the shooting didn't make sense, and the graphics started to look dated. Again it was put on the shelf.

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December 2010 rolls around, it has been over 10 years since the game's release and Eidos puts Deus Ex 1 and the sequel on a Christmas sale for 3$ (bundle) in order to promote the new Deus Ex: Human Revolution coming out in late 2011. I decided to pick up the bundle and give it another shot.

I started my 3rd attempt at Deus Ex in February of 2011. Now the graphics looked terrible, but charming. I liked them in a special retro way. And in addition to running nicely at 1080p resolution it features a really good soundtrack.

The combat still felt slow and frustrating, but this time I decided to take on a stealth approach as opposed to a shooter approach. This allowed me to actually make my way through the first level and move on with the story.

It was not until I was about 40% through the story when my character got sufficient amount of experience and upgrades to allow me to play the way I wanted to play. A playstyle in which using a gun was actual feasible  and I wouldn't miss my target at point blank range.  Prior to getting these upgrades it would require a ridiculous amount of bullets to kill someone, so the guns were not fun to use, yet the enemies seemed to kill me in a shot or two.

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Along with the enjoyable shooting, at this point my character also started gaining useful abilities that were fun to use (i.e.  Regeneration, Run speed etc.) and at this point I actually started enjoying Deus Ex. However it was not until a bit later in the game when I realized the amount of approaches you can take in order to finish a level. It is actually quite impressive (even now in 2011) and I can not think of even one game that has given you as many options as Deus Ex does.  This makes it a lot of fun to explore, you know that there is not a linear path to your objective, but through exploration you can find new, and better ways to get to your target.

It took me about 5 months of off and on playing until I got to the point where I liked the game, once that happened I finished it fairly quickly. It also helped that about 4 months in or so through the game a 10 years in the making mod called New Vision was released. It replaces in-game textures with higher resolution counterparts in order to make the game look better. So I ended up playing the first 40% or so with old textures and the latter 60% with the higher resolution textures.

What I think they should have done to make Deus Ex a much better game is give you at least one ability that is maxed out (maybe you choose one based on your play style), because going in as this special augmented human who somehow is unable to do anything to any degree of satisfaction just plain sucks, and the game does not do a very good job explaining why you suck and how to get better, you just have to experiment.

I should also probably mention that about 30% through the game it is possible to encounter a game breaking bug, which I had the pleasure of encountering. Basically an NPC that you are supposed to talk to does not spawn. Everyone on the internet said that there is no fix and you have to restart the chapter, or the game if you dont have a save game from the previous chapter. Luckily I was able to solve this problem for everyone on the internet and posted it in the official forum and in steam forums so that people dont have to do that anymore.

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Overall I enjoyed Deus Ex starting at about 40% and on. I wish you would get better at skills/abilities a lot sooner than you do, and I also wish there was not as much walking and backtracking with nothing interesting happening (a good 20% of the game is just running from point A to point B, and back). Or perhaps they should have done the typical (maybe not so typical for year 2000), given you a ton of awesome abilities to show you what you will be able to do, and then taken them away.

I now understand why Deus Ex is on some people's best game ever made lists. It is impressive, and very innovative. There are just a few things that could have been done better. You have to play it as an RPG, and if you approach it as a shooter, you will absolutely hate it.  Shooting feels terrible until the very end game.  As such I would recommend Deus Ex to anyone who likes RPGs.  And one piece of advice I would give to everyone, is to stick with it. The first couple of level are not a good representation of the game. It gets a lot better during the second half once you get good weapons and upgrades.

PS - There are 3 endings, I picked the New Dark Age one.