The ability to just decide how you're going to do things instead of sticking to protocol keeps me coming back for more.
I'm going to rob you, my friend. You in that little house of yours, with the nice grassy lawn. Question is, do I go through the front door? Do I go through the back door? Do I go through the garage? Do I climb the roof and Santa Claus it? Or do I just avoid the hassle of run-ins with de law and go home and play Deus Ex for my open-ended, stealth/shootout needs?
I think I'll play Deus Ex. Not that I'm scared of being shot, mind you (although I am), but because everyone should have at least a 5 hour helping of that game. You see, Deus Ex -- created by genius Warren Spector and his team Ion Storm -- is something special. It takes some of the best aspects of different games and rolls them into a ball of gunk for you to play around with. Whether you like to sneak around a la Metal Gear Solid or Thief, or you like gibbing soldiers with a well-placed rocket, or you feel the need to build a character from scratch with different skills, Deus Ex does it. And well.
Deus Ex is short for the phrase, "Deus Ex Machina", or "God from machine." From what I hear, it represents the sudden manifestation of a problem's resolution when a situation seems fruitless (correct me if I'm wrong please). Deus Ex has you fill the role of J.C. Denton, a new breed of agent with nanotechnology running through his blood. He is the second generation of "augmented" soldiers, the augmentations being enhancements and add-ons to one's natural abilities. You start out working for UNATCO, a peace-keeping organization trying to rid a desolated world of terrorism, specifically a group called the NSF, while distributing the vaccine for an eerie fatal plague known as "Gray Death". After your first mission which involves recovering a canister of the vaccine intercepted by the NSF, you learn more about UNATCO, the NSF, the current situation of the world, and more. You're then taken on a ride through government conspiracies and rebel organizations with plenty of plot twists to keep your brain tingling with glee.
The story is kept moving along with in-game cutscenes (no grainy FMVs here) accompanied by mostly good, but inconsistent, voice acting. It also uses newspapers, books and e-mail terminals to vomit tons of information and interesting plot points. But although the plot is interesting and just plain cool, I never found myself genuinely caring for or indentifying with the characters in the game except for J.C.'s brother, Paul Denton, and their physician, Jaime Reyes. Perhaps it's the lack of true character development, or the coldness of the characters (it *is* a bleak future, after all), but something just made me not really care about the possibility of them dying or getting captured or whatnot.
Still, I enjoyed the plot, and the gameplay would have sucked me in regardless of the plot. That's what's important, right? I still haven't decided what the gameplay *is* although I personally feel it's mostly FPS-RPG with action and adventure thrown in. That's the best way to describe it -- a huge hybrid. I'll touch upon the character building first. You can train yourself in different skill areas such as weapon proficiencies, lockpicking, computer hacking, etc. The points you use to distribute are amassed by completing missions and tasks, and exploring or discovering new areas. Each of the skills has different levels of proficiency, and achieving higher levels obviously costs more points, so as you move along you'll find it hard to just dump your points in all of the categories. This leads to a deep strategy of how you want to build your character and ultimately how you want to play the game (although being well-rounded is still a possiblity). You can build up on heavy weapons skills if you want to haul around that sweet GEP gun (the rocket launcher). Or you can go Thief and build up your lock-picking skills. Enjoy headshots from a distance? Build up your rifle skills and enjoy the sniper rifle.
In addition to your skillset, there are also the augmentations, which as I said before are additions and enhancements to your character (provided by that cool refreshing nanotechnology running through his blood). You can augment different parts of your physiology, such as lungs, arms, legs, and sensory abilities. These augmentations come through canisters that are picked up throughout the game, and can be upgraded using a different type of augmentation canister. When you install a new augmentation, you are restricted to one of two choices. Again, this dictates how you will play the game. For instance, the sight augmentation gives you the option of targeting versus enhanced vision. If you're a gung-ho shootemup kind of player, targeting will give you info on your target such as health remaining. On the other hand, if you're looking to avoid people, enhanced vision ultimately lets you see through walls. It's your call. Combined with the skillsets, all of this molds what type of Agent you want JC to be. It's pretty deep and very, very cool.
It's also very important to consider what kind of character you want to control, as the open-ended nature of the game presents at least two or three different paths for completing each mission. A hacker would be best suited to finding computer terminals to unlock doors and redirect turret fire, while someone with high weapon proficiency and physical defense augmentations would just want to tank through enemies the brute-force way. Different things may also happen depending on how many enemies you kill and/or who you talk to, which vastly increases the replay value. For instance, kill too many people in your first mission and the quartermaster in charge of ammo at headquarters will refuse to supply you with extra bullets, tossing you tranquilizer darts instead. During conversations with characters, you are also given different choices of what to say, even further affecting the game. You can beat the answer out of someone, running the risk of ultimately not getting the answer. You can try smooth talking, and then if that doesn't work, the almighty credit bribery works like a charm.
Then there's the interface. While complicated and intimidating at first, I found it very functional as I continued to play. Your health is divided between your arms, legs, torso and head. If your legs lose their HP, you can't run. If your head loses its HP, well, uh, it's quite obvious. You also have a screen for your Augs and very detailed descriptions of each of their functions. There is a map and images screen to help you with missions, and the inventory -- which functions much like Diablo's (what-to-keep-and-what-to-drop thinking sessions included) -- displays in-depth data on each item you carry. The Log and Conversation screens are perhaps the most useful, as they display vital information for your mission: goals, important notes (such as passwords), and information obtained from speaking with people. My brain sucks, so I found myself constantly referring back to the logs in order to progress.
The in-game action is pretty slick too, but suffers from a few small flaws. Sneaking around in the shadows is always fun, as is peeking around corners to check the situation. However, while the enemy AI is fairly realistic, once in awhile it gets ridiculous. You can hide in a dark corner of a really small room and peg two people in the back, and the third one still won't figure out where the shots are coming from. You can hide in ventilation shafts that are entered by crawling on the ground, fire rounds upon rounds, and wonder why other soldiers don't have the ability to crawl in after you. On the flip side, sometimes the exact opposite happpens -- you'll be 200 feet away crouching behind a blockade, and hitting someone with silenced sniper fire will send hordes of soldiers heading for your exact hiding spot without the slightest bit of hesitation. It's mostly well done, but you're guaranteed to run into these consistencies somewhere along the line.
The actual combat isn't as fluid or smooth as your normal first-person shooter. J.C. runs a bit slower than you may be used to, and because your targeting reticule resembles the ones in Tom Clancy's Rogue Spear and Countrstrike (you have to stand still as the crosshairs converge to get the highest hit probability) it becomes hard to run around and pelt someone accurately. However, using weapons such as assault rifles, shotguns with autofire, and mini-crossbows with tranquilizer darts it a pleasure once you find out how to connect. Combining stealth with sniper rifles, silenced pistols, and grenades (which you can plant on walls as proximity mines) had me cackling evilly.
Personally, I felt that the lock-picking and electronics bypassing was done rather cheaply. Locks and machines have a certain amount of resistance to lockpicks and electronic multitools in the form of a percentage. Now, the lockpicks and multitools are gathered as if they're disposable. To unlock a door, it will take a certain amount of picks to bring the door's resistance down to 0 percent (at which point it can be opened). Now, when you boost your lockpicking ability, you decrease the number of locks you need to use to open a door. The realistic thing to do would be to have one lockpick, and an increase in skill would reduce the amount of time that one lockpick would take to unlock a door. If that was too simple, then Ion Storm could have formulated a lockpicking "system" that had you actually doing something, something they finally implemented in Anachronox, instead of going up to a door and clicking. Disabling electronics (laser tripwires and gun turrets) is done in the same fashion, only with multitools.
On the whole, however, I still couldn't resist the depth of the gameplay. The lockpicking issues didn't detract from my enjoyment at all, and the scattered enemy AI was little more than a curious nuisance. Sadly, "curious nuisance" isn't enough to describe the game's graphical problems. On the plus side, areas are made up of many buildings and structures to explore. As per the game's open-ended nature, there are a whole lot of places to go and things to do even if they don't necessarily pertain to a mission goal. One of the problems however, is -- like Quake 2's "brownness" -- everything seems "gray." Sure, the buildings are mostly cold metal and concrete, but Ion Storm could have spiced them up with a little more detail.
Characters, while decent below the neck, have very low-poly faces. It's as if everyone has pointy cheeks in this game. Ion Storm attempted to lip-sync the voice acting with more than just open-close mouth movements, in order to match the pronunciation of words, but it's very choppy and out-of-sync with the voices.
Lucky for me, the Ears are nowhere near as devastated as the Eyes are. The sound in Deus Ex is quite good, which is a relief because sound in Deus Ex is extremely important. With the right sound hardware, you'll be able to gauge how far away and in what the direction your enemy is in, if s/he's closing in on you or walking away. Audio enhancements via some kind of Environmental Audio technology (EAX for instance) are also quite a pleasure to listen to, with the sounds adjusting to their environments (echoes, muffled noises, etc). Voice acting, for the most part, is well done -- but J.C. changes emotions about as often as a brick. An emotional brick, but a brick nevertheless. Some NPCs are actually pretty badly done, with overdone accents or just drab acting, but for the most part Deus Ex's voice acting sounds convincing. The music is pretty sweet too, although it's nothing groundbreaking. It changes dynamically according to your combat situation, and its techno-feel and slick tunes pushed me to convert them into Winamp-playable files using the Unreal Editor (which I found somewhere in Unreal Tournament's Systems folder).
In the end, the thing that makes Deus Ex such a beautiful game is the almost (but not quite) open-ended nature of it all that lends to its true role-playing structure. While the mission progression is strictly linear, how you go about them is not. If it had just been a straight up mission based shooter, even with all of the fancy shmancy character tweaks, I wouldn't have enjoyed it as much as I do. The ability to just decide how you're going to do things instead of sticking to a protocol keeps me coming back for much, much more. It's deep and engrossing, yet it never gets to a point where you're so stuck that you never touch it again. In a game industry where lots of caca-ware is shoveled out by publishers week in and week out, Deus Ex truly is God from machine. (Warren Spector's machine.)
Now, give me some Splinter-Cell like abilities and fine-tune the AI... and you've got yourself a hermit!