Looks like an FPS, plays like an RPG. One of those games that doesn’t age well, but still carries a punch.
This game looks like a FPS for all intents and purposes, but only if you don’t breach the surface. As Denton, you’ll navigate your way through city streets and hidden NSF (terrorist) bases, bringing an end to their infernal plots against America. Initially, you’ll be armed as a basic police officer, carrying a riot prod (taser) and a couple clips of 9mm ammo into the maelstrom, but you’ll quickly acquire some more lethal weaponry, including silenced pistols, a sniper rifle, a variety of grenades, and more bludgeoning weapons than you can shake a . . . stick . . . at. All the ranged weapons you pick up can also be augmented as you move through the game, so you can increase the range, accuracy, and even the amount of ammo in the clip. In addition, your own abilities can be augmented either through finding nanotech canisters – which upgrades your physical attributes such as strength, speed, and even lung capacity – or by pumping skill points into skill areas such as computers, lockpicking, or light weaponry. These latter skill points are awarded through completing your mission goals or exploring hidden areas of the map, and give the game a RPG-ish kind of feel to it.
Deus Ex presents a number of other types of RPG elements as well, veering it further from the course of a straight FPS game. The game can unfold in a variety of ways, depending on the type of character you decide JC is. As mentioned, initially you’ll be equipped as a police officer, and your brother Paul reminds you that you need to act in that fashion. In other words, go in strong but silent, incapacitate the enemy, but don’t kill them. You may decide that course is for losers, so you’ll go in with acquired guns blazing. You may kill everyone in your way, or you may just ignore everyone. You may bust through the front door, or sneak through ventilation ducts or go through the roof. Will you meet the secondary objectives, or just focus on the primary mission? Whatever you decide, the choices will change how the variety of characters JC encounters will react to him. This type of gameplay opens a whole variety of ways you can complete the game, although the plot hardly changes based on your choices.
In addition to your vast array of weaponry, JC can also lockpick through doors, use multitools to bypass security panels, or hack computer terminals to gain access to cameras, door controls, or even e-mail. Since you can upgrade the abilities you use the most, you can customize your character however you like to fit your gaming preference.
Graphically, this game has not aged well. Deus Ex is a fairly old game, and on the PS2, a lot of the graphics look blocky, especially on the character models. A lot of the environments are very dark – and the PS2 is notorious for not doing “dark” very well – and it’s easy to get disoriented in areas that look nearly identical. These areas are also very small for some reason, so a lot of the game is absorbed by load screens as you move from one area to the next, and without a real map or any way to tell where you are in relation to where you’re going, you spend a lot of time going from small area to small area trying to figure out where exactly to go next.
Deus Ex’s soundtrack has a very edgy techno theme to it that fits well with its theme, and its voice acting is more or less adequate, but there aren’t any standout performances. In fact, the parts of the main characters – Paul and JC – are delivered almost in a monotone, so the dialogue tends to get a little droning in certain sections, especially when they’re speaking to each other.
While the story is certainly deep and perplexing, and the variety of methods you have at your disposal to accomplish your goals is intriguing, the frequent load times bog down the action, and sometimes that action is . . . not really all that gripping. The AI in Deus Ex is really weak, although you’ll really only notice it if you try and do a stealth route through the game. Enemies may or may not react to seeing you crouching in plain sight, and they may or may not see you in deep shadow. Sometimes they’ll go on alert the second you open a door, sometimes they won’t even notice you shooting them until they’re dead. When you are in situations where everyone is shooting at you, the action almost seems to come at you in a lethargic pace. The weapons all seem to have low clip capacities, so a lot of gunfights degenerate into four or five opponents standing around trying to reload. It makes them easy to kill, but it also strips back a lot of the challenge. On the opposite end of things stands the security droids the NSF deploys in their bases. These things are phenomenally difficult to defeat unless you have the right type of weaponry, and they don’t seem to reload or even tire from shooting you. As a result, if you see one, you’re probably already dead, and the next thing you’ll see is a load screen as you’re returned to the nearest checkpoint. (Which is the only good thing about having small areas)
Of course, if you can look past these minor flaws, you may find Deus Ex to be a wondrous gem in a world of stale FPS games. The story’s not quite epic enough to be of true RPG caliber, but it is an interesting perspective, especially considering the headlines of today.