Deus Ex

There's a sort of unofficial slogan for the game Deus Ex: When it's mentioned, someone will reinstall it. It was created by Ion Storm, a division of Eidos noted for games that became cult classics. It was released in 2000, followed by a watered down version for the PS 2 a couple years later. Your average gamer has either never heard of it, or considers it one of the finest games ever made. There's very little middle ground. It's one of those games that people like to pick up and replay every couple years. So what is it that has made it such an enduring game?

Deus Ex is a first-person shooter with role-playing overtones (it was described when it came out as "the first person RPG"). takes place sometime in the 2050s. The exact date is never really pinned down in the game. The world is your classic Twenty Minutes Into The Future cyberpunk dystopia; urban decay, eroded values, a populace made shiftless with ennui, mega-corporations, and corrupt governments. On top of that, a mysterious plague known as the Gray Death is threatening to wipe out humanity, especially the poor. Domestic terrorism has reached new heights, with its main goal being the confiscation of Ambrosia, the only known cure for the Gray Death.

In Deus Ex, the player takes control of JC Denton, a raw recruit in UNATCO (United Nations Anti-Terrorism Coalition). JC is a recipient of nano-augmentation, a radical new technology being tested as a replacement for disfiguring and soul-destroying cybernetics. He is only the second person to have received nano-augmentation, the other being his older brother Paul Denton.

The game starts with JC being transported to Liberty Island in New York (regardless of what New Jersey has to say about it), where UNATCO headquarters  is located. On the dock, he's approached by Paul, who briefs him on a situation developing. It seems that terrorists have stolen a shipment of Ambrosia and are currently holed up in the Statue of Liberty. Or rather, what's left of it. A terrorist attack on the Statue years earlier resulted in the head and arm being blown off, and much like the site of real life terrorist attack, nobody's done much with it since. To the right is a screen shot I took (with an added caption).

Paul advises you that you've been ordered to go and locate the Ambrosia so that UNATCO can reclaim it. Since you only just showed up and aren't carrying anything except some stuff you found lying around on the dock, Paul gives you a choice of three weapons to take with you: a hand crossbow with tranqulizer darts, a sniper rifle, or a rocket launcher.

And right there is one of the neat things about the game. The world is very open-ended, and it allows you to customize your character to your style of play. You can't carry every single item you find in the game, so you've got to choose what you carry with you based on what you consider the most important. If that sounds annoying, don't get too upset. They made it even worse in the sequel. The game has a large variety of weapons to choose from, in all shapes, sizes, and categories, so whether you like sneaking up on a guy and tazing him, shooting him from 300' away, or blowing him to holy hell, there's something in the game for you.

Nano-augmentation also forms a large part of the game's customization. When the game starts, JC only has a couple augmentations: nightvision, and a computer in his brain that allows him to store data, as well as working as a video phone that only he can see and hear. Throughout the game, you find augmentation canisters, each linked to a different part of JC's body. These can be used to gain new abilities. Each canister will give JC a choice of two new abilities: which one you choose depends on your style of play. For instance, the first canister you find will augment JC's musculature. One choice lets JC inflict more damage in melee combat, the other lets him lift heavier objects. Folks who like getting up close and personal in fights will prefer the damage bonus, while those who like exploring the game world will find the lifting bonus more useful.

Also, when building your character, you are given a number of points which you can use to buy and upgrade skills for your character. There's a number of skills, which do a variety of things like determine how well you can pick locks, how accurate you are with different variety of guns, or more esoteric things like how long you can survive breathing toxins. Some guides will probably tell you things like "ignore this skill, it's useless," or "you should really get some points in this," but really, it's all up to you and your style of play. If you feel that having more time to disarm a mine is more important than being able to fire a handgun more accurately, then do it that way.

As I said before, Deus Ex is a very open-ended game. There's no one right way to complete an objective. As a simplistic example, take a situation like the one presented in the screenshot on the right. Regular handguns and rifles are useless against a massive armored robot like the one in the picture. But, there's still a number of options for getting past it. If you have a rocket launcher (and you might not, as they take up a lot of inventory space), you could simply blow it to Kingdom Come. Also, the game has a number of grenades, which can all be mounted on walls and turned into proximity mines. Robots in the game all move in perimeters, so planting one in it's path shouldn't be a problem. Or, if you don't have anything to attack it with, or don't think you'll be coming back that way again, you can just sneak past it. The game even has ways of facilitating that, including an augmentation that turns you invisible, another that makes your footsteps silent (and some NPCs in the game can hear you tiptoeing across shag carpet from the next room), and other items to help you sneak around.

That's one of the things that gives the game the its replay value. The world is so sprawling, and there's so many ways to accomplish your goals, that even if you're careful to explore as much as you can, you probably won't see everything in the game your first time around. Another big thing is that the way you play the game affects the game itself. Nothing huge, the overall plot doesn't change, but people's attitudes toward you, and other small but sometimes significant things, can change depending on something as simple as whether you run into a room guns blazing or sneak in and tranq everyone inside. The main reason I'm replaying the game now is that I had done (or rather, hadn't done) one big thing that I thought was impossible to do, and now I want to see what the game's like having done it different this time. I won't say what it is for folks who haven't played, as it's a pretty big spoiler, but I will drop a hint for those who have played it. What I'm talking about involves Paul in the 'Ton Hotel before you go to Hong Kong.

If the game has any drawbacks, it's that the graphics aren't all that impressive, even for the time it came out. But they're not horrible or distracting, so I see that more as an aesthetic issue than a gameplay issue. Plus, these guys have been working on a patch to improve the graphics of the game. It's not complete (and considering the last update was in 2006, I wouldn't hold my breath on it), but there is a demo version you can download which touches up some stuff here and there. Also, if you pick up a copy of the game, make sure to get the latest patch for it. It was pretty buggy when it first came out. It's actually fairly notorious for its bugs, I've seen pages dedicated to documenting weird bugs in the game. Nothing fatal, I think the worst I ever encountered was a door in one area that kept opening and closing on its own. It was a bit spooky, but that's it. I also found an exploit in the same area where repeating one action kept giving me skill points, but if I did it too much, the game crashed. It's probably been fixed since then, anyhow.

I can see where the saying mentioned in the beginning comes from. I'm having fond memories of the game just talking about it, and I'm playing it at the moment. So, if you play games on your PC, and you like first-person shooters, then Deus Ex is a game you really ought to check out. And if you do, don't be surprised if you find yourself throwing it back on your PC a year or so later. Have fun.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights