CLASSIC GAMING
Deus Ex
Developer - Ion Storm
Publisher - Eidos Interactive
Genre - First-person Shooter/RPG
Year - 2000
System - PC/Playstation 2


Now whenever we play a game, we almost always know from the beginning WHAT kind of game it will be.  Medal of Honour?  Shoot-em up.  Final Fantasy?  RPG.  Resident Evil?  Horror.  And most videogames have always kept themselves at very strict boundaries on their genres, mainly because some genres, when mixing together, can become quite bad, and end up something horrible like in that movie The Fly.
One such game that dared to mix two genres has managed to successfully integrate two separate categories into one fully blended interactive masterpiece.

Story - Deus Ex is a game that takes just as much care with its story as well as its gameplay.  You play as J.C Denton, a nanotechnologically implanted agent of the United Nations Anti-Terrorist Coalition, a.k.a UNATCO.  The game takes place in the 2050s and the world is enwrapped within a dystopian future with higher crime rate, more urban poverty, and a deadly disease known as the Grey Plague and also called the Grey Death killing humanity everywhere.  UNATCO are charged with the mission to recover shipments of the plague's cure, named Ambrosia, which are being stolen by underground armies.
At first this looks like the simple case of "every man for himself", but as you progress through the game, all that JC ever knew of in his short career is slowly broken bit by bit by uncovering new truths and new lies that darken UNATCO as well as the powerful business industries, a conspiracy theory found anew.


This of course later puts JC and even some of his friends into danger and the game has as much scope as a Dan Brown novel, in a good way.  Many new players come into the story at almost every chapter with new friends and enemies made to aid and hinder you in your slowly straightening quest to find the real truth behind the world itself.  First it was the reason for the stealing of Ambrosia, then it was the reason of the Grey Death's existence, then it was the reason for the companies existing, there comes truth after lie after truth.  Some of the time you feel so insignificant trying to face such eye-opening concepts that you alone must choose how to take care of.
Not only that, but all of the characters in the game have their own stories to tell.  They all revolve around JC one way or another as either his friends or enemies, and when the time comes, you shape their destiny by whatever input you give them, which range from being nice to them to dealing with their last moments.
Quite an ironic fact that the story contradicts its title, which comes from the Latin phrase "Deus Ex Machina" or "Machine of the Gods", which is defined as "a person or event that provides a sudden, unexpected solution to a story".  The executive producer of the game, Warren Spector, said the title was a literary criticism on how most videogames had bad story telling and as such had a character or event that suddenly would clear everything up, the deus ex machina.


Gameplay - This is truly the most strongest aspect of the game.  Deus Ex has gameplay that rival Half Life's interactivity.  The world is incredibly deep in the number of things you can do.  First there is the HUD.  JC Denton has his health which can be recovered by medipaks or even less so by food such as candy bars and soy food.  As well as taking damage, he also can lose a little bit of health if he smokes a cigarette (not as long-standing as in Metal Gear Solid but nevertheless something to note).  Depending on your difficulty level, you will have less health on harder modes.  You have Easy (400 health points), Normal (300), Hard (200) and Realistic (100).  As well as health, JC also has a bioelectric meter that would decrease whenever he used any of his nanotechnological abilities.

JC has abilities granted by his nanotechnological biology.  In the beginning you only have a flashlight within your retinas that illuminate your path.  Later on, you can get upgrades to various parts of your body.  For the most part, you are only allowed one ability for each part of the body, and for each body part there can be up to three different abilities.  For example, in your legs you can either have the ability to run faster and jump higher, or have the ability to sneak more better.  This choice of variation alone can determine what path you take through the game.
Aside from this, JC can also upgrade his skills.  There are a grand range of skills ranging from better use of certain weapons, swimming, lockpicking, hacking computers and demolitions.  Again this can greatly affect how you will be able to progress through the game.


Now I have mentioned progress and this is the best time to explain one of the things of Deus Ex that make it like an RPG.  As well as the skills and nano-abilities, there are points in the game where you can choose entirely which way to go.  A typical situation would consist of entering an occupied building by either going in the front door with guns a-blazing, sneaking through the vents behind the bins or swimming through the sewers by way of an underground entrance in an earlier level.  And if that's not enough, you can even choose how to deal with enemies.  You can kill a few and incapacitate the rest.  You can blow them all up by using the explosive barrels.  You could just incapacitate them all, heck you could even go through almost the ENTIRE game without actually killing a single person if you have enough non-lethal ammunition.  Even in the most momentous and important parts of the game, you have a choice.  This multi-layered layout of the world's story is a marvellous effort by the makers to give a real experience of the game's living and breathing (or rather, dying and wheezing) world, and these choices appear before you right to the very end of the game, not just beyond a certain point.  In effect, this game is more like an RPG than Final Fantasy has ever been, by its true essence of non-linear gameplay and story.  The story will be generally the same, but YOU alone will be changing it with every step you take.


Elaborating further on the characters and how they revolve around you, the game takes great note of their mannerisms and daily lives by the passing conversations you hear between them, emails from them, and how they respond to you depending on how well you treated them in the game.  Deus Ex takes great care in making the world as free and easy to breathe as possible.  Whether you wanna be a shithead to everyone or be totally non-lethal throughout the game is ENTIRELY up to you to a large but certain extent.

Graphics - Graphics in the year 2000, while admirable at the time, always come off as being somewhat blocky.  Deus Ex has managed to clean up somewhat on this in terms of background and character motions.  However it's not perfect.  Some characters move a little jerkily, ragdoll animations are unheard of in this game with having every enemy either fall back or collapse forwards on their knees and even lay splayed out halfway on thin air with the other half on a dumpster.  The levels however are better to look at.  The main locations of the game are all gritty and dank looking in that dystopian urban feel of the world you're running in, and while you only get a few skyscrapers and beyond that is the basic painted skyline, the more interactive parts of the levels are the better part to view.  They look vivid enough, especially in the Hong Kong sections, and the lighting is not bad on the characters themselves, as well as ambiguous interactive miscellaneous objects.


Music/Sound - The music gives great atmosphere to the various locations of the game.  From New York's beaten-down slum-like whiney music, to the more rapid ethnic pace of Hong Kong's markets, every single location has its own unique feel partly by the music.  New York at first sound like a slum from its music, a sort of despairing whine of the synthesiser, which later on in the game when you revisit a certain area of NYC, becomes more upbeat and like something out of an 80s cult film soundtrack, showing your success in beating the conspiracy, and the hope of the people perhaps in the future unveiling before you.  Not every section has their own unique music though, some are reused for certain sections but they nevertheless echo an eerie familiarity with either the location's purpose or the intentions of those within, even.
Voice acting as well is quite impressive, and makes the game feel as just as good as any Die Hard film at least, which again offer a better insight and a richer colour into the game's despairing world, and a world that feels so believeable in some parts that you almost feel afraid for how easily our world can become like Deus Ex's.


This is a game that has since its release become a modern classic among gamers for its unique title, its multiple paths upon paths of progression through the game, and its deep layers of treachery, confusion, dystopia, and the unveiling of the truth about mankind itself.  It's definitely better than the Da Vinci Code at any rate for a whole number of reasons.  And one of them I will tell you now is that you can become JC Denton.  You can become one man fighting a massive power beyond the grasp of what any non-religious mortal can think of.  And that quest alone is most definitely worth exploring.

Final's Final Rating - 10/10