Summary: 90/100

Introduction

Deus Ex is a state-of-the-art first-person role-playing action game. This means that you explore big, nicely textured 3D environments, mix in some conversations, stealthy maneuvering, and shoot-outs, and slowly come to understand a large conspiracy story.

The game is not really a shoot-em-up; in fact, much of the playing involves hunting for information and equipment, and avoiding confrontations with enemies by sneaking around them, picking locks, and discovering codes to bypass alarm systems. But there are times when shooting is required, and there are some big weapons out there for those moments.

Deus Ex tries hard to surpass the Unreal/Half-Life genre with good-to-excellent production values and a large, unfolding story. Happily, it accomplishes most of its goals to produce a best-of-breed game.

The Review

"Sometimes it feels like you and me against the world"
--Gladys Knight and the Pips, "You And Me Against The World"

It's the near future, and the United Nations has created a special peace-keeping squad to enforce world order in the face of the "Gray Death", a deadly plague that has been sweeping the Earth. You play JC Denton, an elite agent in this organization.

The game plays out in a series of chapters (or missions), each of which adds another piece to a growing jigsaw of conspiracies, politics, and international power plays. You are sent out on clear missions, and often receive clarifying information along the way via your built-in radio link.

The game starts out slow and uninteresting, but it builds. The first level (which you can download for free) is probably the worst in the whole game, which strikes me as a poor marketing decision. The problem is partly in the nature of that particular 3D environment, and partly the nature of the game: this early on you're still pretty much in the dark about who you are, what you're doing, and why. All of this is revealed as time goes on, but you have to get a few levels in before the context of the world starts to take shape.

The writing is consistently terrific. There are several points where you bump up against people having conversations. You don't have to stop and listen to them, but if you do, they're often having very sensible political discussions on the level of late-night dorm arguments; the plague has re-awakened interest in the rights and responsibilities of governments and citizens. The dialog is well-written, tight, and interesting. The voice acting ranges from first-class to pretty bad; happily the more important characters (who also have more lines) are cast with the better performers. The graphics is good to very-good, and the sound and music are nicely integrated and generally well produced.

The complex story unfolds with a collage technique, through a combination of direct conversations, newspapers, hacking into other people's email, and so on. There are probably a hundred or more characters to bump into. Most are there for decoration and for amusement; some of the bums are particularly fun to chat with. Generally the conversations play themselves out automatically, but there are a few multiple-choice conversations, where you decide what your character says next.

This is always something I dislike, because it snaps me right out of the game: I have to stop and think about how I want the game to go, and then pick the choice that I think will take me there. Deus Ex has this problem, but happily it is infrequent.

In this game you just about always know what to do next, and even roughly how to do it. You spend very little time being stuck or lost. It did happen to me once or twice, but a walkthrough from the net cleared the way easily.

The game mechanics are excellent. You can quick-save anytime with a single button press. Reloading is just as easy. The game was smooth and never crashed or broke (I ran this on a Dell Pentium III using Windows 2000). The game did sometimes leave my computer in a confused state after I exited, which required rebooting. This was annoying, but not atypical for high-end games.

The game is not quick. I probably played for about 45 hours total, but I was having a good time and investigated every nook and cranny.

As with all games of this style, I highly recommend a walkthrough and cheats. After a while it just becomes boring to have to figure out yet another patrol pattern for yet another bad guy, and then lurk in the shadows until it's safe to dash to the next place to hide. Once I had done this a few times, I felt I had mastered the skill and simply preferred to get on with the game. I would generally make myself invulnerable to enemy fire, step out in the open, and then use some ammunition from my infinite supply to take out the bad guys. This let me forget about the fighting part, which didn't particularly appeal to me, and focus on the exploring and the story. You can find many walkthroughs and cheat codes easily on the web; I particularly recommend http://www.deus-ex.org/help/walkthrough/.

Conclusion

Deus Ex tries to push the envelope for 3D action-adventure games by blending a huge conspiracy story with traditional exploration and fighting gameplay, and generally it succeeds. The production values, from the writing to the graphics and sound, are generally quite high. The environments are interesting and fun to explore.

The game starts out rather poorly, but it just gets better and better as it goes. It does not transcend the genre, but it does take it a step forward. Deus Ex is best of breed.