50% FPS, 50% RPG, 100% Awesome
The story takes place in 2052. The world is alot worse for the wear. A virus known as the "Grey Death" is ravaging the world. Recently it has spread to the USA, and the UN quickly intervenes. You play as JC Denton, a UNATCO Agent, trained and modified with he sole purpose of fulfilling the UN's interest and killing terrorists. The game opens with you tracking these terrorists who have stolen a vial of Ambrosia, the virus's only cure, and you're sent in to take them out. It doesn't take long to see everyone's true motives; however, and JC eventually runs into many familiar conspiracy groups that help to spice up the story.
The story is extremely engaging and I can recommend the game on it alone. While most early choices fail to have a significant impact, the world does still feel like a real place. In the end you'll be emotionally invested as many of the story's elements are extremely political with the endings playing of extreme versions of real life ideologies.
Story aside the gameplay does a great job of continuing player choice. Level design is spectacular, and while generally linear, the environments are open enough to allow for multiple approaches. You could blaze your way in, swim in by sewer, climb through vent shafts. In addition what skills you pick affect your approach. A skilled hacker may hack the security system and turn turrets on their owners. A skilled lock picker can open previously inaccessible areas and bypass enemies entirely. Besides the main missions there are cities which act as a "Hub" if you will, where you'll run around taking quests, doing side quests, and just exploring. The Hubs are nicely done and look like genuine places.
I mentioned skills in the last paragraph. Similar to an RPG you gain skill points (like XP) for completing objectives, defeating quest obstacles, or even exploring. These skills can be spent in a host of various abilities such as Computers, Lockpicking, Pistols, Rifles, Medicine, and more. Each ability has four ranks, Untrained, Trained, Advanced, Master. While you don't have to level up any particular skill, as they can be used even without training, doing so makes them much more effective. For example low pistols skill means that you'll be highly inaccurate and do minor damage. Upgrading that skill further reduces your penalties and allows you to line up accurate shots more quickly. By the time that pistol skill is at Master you'll be headshotting people on the move.
You may of just read that and freaked out. The shooting is stat based! Yes but it's not that bad. Even at the lowest skill level you can still aim accurately, but you must crouch, stand still, and wait. This reinforce the stealth aspect of the game as for a good while you can't just mow down drones of enemies. It also doesn't take much to kill JC, so a conservative play style is a necessity.
Anyway, Biomodifications are another great feature that further enhance the RPG feel of the game. Throughout the game you'll find two types of canisters; Augmentation Canisters, and Upgrade Canisters. The former grants you new "powers" while the later raises those "powers" to a maximum level of four. Each canister contains 2 different Mods so you have to pick and choose, you can't have them all. There are some tough choices to be made. One has cloaking and thermal masking. Cloaking will hide you from organic enemies, while Thermal masking will hide you from mechs, cameras, and the like. While cloaking sounds more useful as the majority of the enemies in the game are humans, you can't undermine Thermal Masking as mechs are far more deadly, and cameras a bigger nuisance. Tough choices.
There is one major thing that Deus Ex doesn't do very well and that's AI. While the AI does fine in the less restrictive, civilian areas, once combat begins it tends to go to pot. Enemies run rather awkwardly and don't use any form of cover. They tend to kind of run at you as a blob which makes it easy to cut them down. Outside of combat they can erratic too. Sometimes shooting a guy with an unsilenced weapon will illicit no reaction. The next time it will bring the whole base down around your ears. Other times a guard would sit there and fire at me with no hope of winning, despite standing right next to an alarm. When it works it can be pretty clever, but don't count on it.
Overall though the solid shooting and fun RPG elements more than make up for the AI, and the superb level design ensures that you'll want to play through the game at least twice.
Of course Deus Ex isn't top of the line today, and it wasn't at release either.The character models are pretty ugly and things tend to be blocky. The game has a good art design, the environments especially looked run down. Not too far from the back streets of a big city today. There's also quite a bit of future stuff lying around, enough to make it evident that this is the future, but not so much to make you think that it's far fetched. If you want to beef the game up a bit you can get a DX9/10 render, download a texture pack, and add the ENB mod. If you want to run the game at a wide-screen resolution then you need to do some editing. The easiest way is to download this launcher: "http://kentie.net/article/dxguide/" Just chose your aspect ratio, your resolution, and the launcher will do everything for you.
The sound is pretty good. Voice work stood out as being good. Some of it was a bit too fast, but overall solid work. The soundtrack was a highlight with primarily electronic style music. There was enough organ in places to contribute to the Gothic feel. The Ambiance was rather lively and it always seemed like something was going on, which added to the immersion. All around good stuff.
Deus Ex is a classic. If you like RPGs or Shooters you owe it to yourself to try Deus Ex out. Be warned though, this is a "thinking-man's" shooter. Call of Duty fans need not apply. While the graphics are dated, and some things have been done better today, Deus Ex is still a suburb experience, one that more games today should emulate.