This is a game as deep as the ocean is wide. Deus Ex is a game in the first person perspective, combining the genres of sci-fi shooter, adventure and stealth in one. Set around the year 2050, you are put in the shoes of JC Denton, a cybernetically-enhanced agent who slowly uncovers a global conspiracy involving governments, a United Nations special organisation, police, scientists, gangsters, artificial intelligence, aliens, hidden societies, an engineered super-virus and more. JC turns into a kind of detective/freedom fighter in his lengthy quest to discover the truth, although he could himself is given the option to turn into an abhorrent, selfish person buying into a regime purely to increase his own power.
Your immediate impression will be that the graphics are dated, the figures blocky and some backgrounds rather drab. After all, games have made many improvements since this game was released back in 2001. But keep playing further and you'll find a wealth of riches that are worth ignoring some disappointing visuals. The game's opening sections give us a message about America and possibly the world and where they could be headed in the future. The NSF, an organisation that the US Government have labelled "terrorists", have infiltrated the Statue of Liberty in New York. JC is called in to penetrate the statue in a mission to stop the NSF. A question a person asks with hindsight is what would these rebels and insurgents be doing in so obviously an important landmark of the US, and especially the head section? A captured "terrorist" leader sounds disturbingly rational when he explains they were trying to secure supplies of a cure for the "grey death" plague. These upstart idealists have symbolically entered the mind of America itself, offering a new vision of freedom. An important note about just who the NSF are seeking freedom from appears when JC returns shortly afterwards to his own organisation's headquarters: the first internal door in the UNATCO building is locked permanently and meaningfully shut.
The above illustration is also an example of the exhaustive details and effort that have gone into the making of this game. During the course of JC'S adventures, he is able to read newspapers, public information terminals, organisation manuals, and access secret email accounts, diaries and personal memos. JC is able to keep aware and see different viewpoints in the media throughout the game, and question what he is told. The private items like memos bring the characters in the game to life, speaking their own thoughts. Furthermore, the game itself contains readable chapters from a cryptic, apocalyptic novel. These details all highlight how much information has gone into the game's creation, probably more than an 800+ page novel I've reviewed elsewhere on this site.
There are other things that bring to mind what can be done in immersive games that a movie cannot do. When JC makes an inappropriate action at headquarters, a female character voices her objections. Pull a weapon on any scientists in the game, and they will visibly panic. The dialogue is often fascinating and well-written, so that this reviewer was actually glad to let his controller go for a while and merely be content to listen (unlike some other similar and overblown games, e.g. Metal Gear Solid 3). At times a friendly police officer will even stop just to talk to your character. JC encounters more than a few people who are sitting down and making a continuous conversation, which he can take part in. Barkeepers offer advice and can offer you supplies. An additional surprise is that the barkeep in Hong Kong unexpectedly reveals himself as the most political character in the whole game, when he starts talking of political theories and ultimate truths. These characters start speaking dialogue almost everywhere JC chooses to go and it is a strength of the game that you can listen to to them or not, just like people in the real world. It is also often painfully apparent how with one single line of dialogue or action, JC can instantly turn characters from those as apparently non-threatening as a mechanic or lethal as a squad of soldiers utterly hostile and face the consequences.
JC's mission in this complex, detailed game world is to put pieces of a puzzle together. He must fend for himself and survive any way that is possible. An original point of the game is the non-linear way a player could get through any particular level: there are often many strategies to get past obstacles and achieve the objective. JC has the choice of clearing zones of enemies with violence, neutralising them by stunning, or using stealth to simply get past them. Add to this mix a number of hidden or locked areas, security cameras linked to firing weapons, and a character that can employ special abilities, and a player gets the idea that there is more than one way to skin a cat. While controlling JC you must constantly think of what would be the best way to escape damage and preserve equipment and ammunition. It is almost always better to explore areas, i.e. adventure around first, before taking a definite action. JC can hack computers and security systems and do illegal things like break into bank accounts; an ethical issue of the game is whether JC is doing these things for selfish reasons or just to give himself the advantage for survival by subverting the oppressive system those in power have put in place.
Deus Ex is a "genre-busting" game (as one critic has put it). However, it is thoroughly a role playing game in its character stats system and allows the player an overwhelmingly satisfying amount of character customisation. There are a huge amount of skill and augmentation upgrades available for your character, which require a considerable amount of time to understand and judge which will the best use for the small amount of points you have earnt at the moment. The health system (a percentage) is much easier to understand the PC version's body-parts system. It is pleasing to earn RPG-style experience points by exploring new areas or using clever strategies rather than just killing enemies, a system most RPG-clones follow. That said, weapons are still a major part of the game: the sniper rifle is deadly and efficient; the machine gun (especially with a silencer), the riot prod and the dragon sword are also very useful.
One striking thing you'll notice about the atmosphere and settings in the game is that all the action happens in dim lighting, presumably at night under clouds. (Could this be due to decades of pollution? Or are we deliberately "kept in the dark".) Add to this the rat-infested, decayed, grey buildings and surroundings and you've got a grim vision of the future, often filled with zombie-like plague-carriers. The part of New York we see is a gritty inner city, with sections of neon garishness (the nightclub), sordid drug addiction (squatters' apartments) and desperate poverty (a free clinic wrecked by the rioting poor). Hong Kong has a vibrant marketplace and nightclub, and a sleazy wharf. In Paris there is the largest variety of settings including twisting catacombs, sewers, a graveyard, a monastery of the Knights Templar and an aristocrat's chateau filled with hidden secrets. JC gets to enter and explore a number of these odd, out of the way places in his travels, including ventilation shafts, dumb waiter tubes, secret laboratories and underwater specimen tanks. (One might ask how a man in a long trenchcoat and sunglasses can swim well in dark water at all.) He also ultimately gets to enter the forbidden zone of the US government's Area 51 complex. One of the negative aspects of the game that spring to mind about exploring areas is the torch JC uses goes flat too quickly - surely in the future they'll invent torches that last a very long time and use little power. At times also a player does not know where to go or if the character is doing the right thing; this is doubly frustrating when these areas are large and there are multiple loading times involved in crossing them. Some of the enemies encountered as well, especially the spiderbots and mutant reptiles, are very tough hurdles to exploration.
As JC passes through these different settings, the pieces of the puzzle emerge to him slowly. In time he encounters genetically modified monsters, earth-reared aliens and the esoteric society of the Illuminati. JC, whose name is one of a few with Biblical parallels in the game, discovers that he was really adopted and the truth about his birth concealed. He came to being through immaculate conception under a father figure named Joseph (Manderley), like Jesus himself. JC finds he and his brother, Paul, were created in a bio-tank by the secret organisation, Majestic 12. Paul is a likeable character, and discovers suspicions about UNATCO, the "terrorists" and the grey death which influence JC. Both of them are cybernetically-engineered super-humans, given a gothic, futuristic, Terminator-style appearance.
Paul is one of a number of characters in the game (at least if you play it one way) who join JC in his mission against the oppression of the inner top circle in power. Alex, a systems engineer and communications tech, and also a talented and helpful hacker, joins JC in his hunt for the truth. Dr Jaime Reyes, a man involved in cybernetic augmentations who harbours suspicions, and General Carter, a gruffly likeable veteran with much experience and integrity, also switch to JC's side. Beth DuClare, a member of Silhouette, the French shadow resistance group, provides some charmingly engaging dialogue while offering help in Paris. Tracer Tong and Gary Savage, two scientists, also help JC's cause. These characters who side with JC are the most well-rounded and interesting characters in the game. By contrast, Walton Simons, one of the villains, is a slippery, slimy character portrayed speaking always in a passionless monotone. We get to see his cruel and unscrupulous methods in the basement of UNATCO HQ, brutally "interrogating" prisoners. Morgan Everett, another member of the Illuminati, is a character of likewise dubious morality with a lust for power; JC is even given the final choice of joining him. (Everett is also black: so much for the conspiracist idea of a white supremacist world order.) Bob Page, the arch-leader of the Illuminati organisation, is an egocentric madman, bent on a quest to become transformed into a living God. He imagines himself a god on Earth: creating life (JC and Paul), controlling presidents, inflicting plagues on the population, feeding on "ambrosia" (or food of the gods, the plague cure) and soon even planning to have immortality. His many communications to JC are threatening, menacing, then increasingly desperate and even enticing. The overall sense throughout the game is that there is a malevolent, hidden conspiracy to fight. This invisible cabal is the main enemy of the book, and JC works with his accomplices to uncover and find a way past them one by one.
Deus Ex tells a story of science fiction and so some of the main characters are not, or not fully, human. Gunther and Anna Navarro both have bulky cybernetic implants from a previous generation: this is made deliberately noticeable in their appearance, which is machine-like and gives parts of their bodies the look of robots (red eyes) or sheets of circuits. They are also two of the most ruthless, determined enemies in the game, as shown when Anna confronts a terrorist leader on board a plane. She lacks any compassion or curiosity while being told to follow orders, and is ruthlessly efficient by commanding JC to kill him or she will do it herself. Gunther is in a relationship with Anna; when she is killed he becomes obsessed with pursuing JC in revenge. These formiddable, inhuman-looking, cold killers however pale in comparison to the real artificial characters of the story. Throughout the game a player will encounter many robots: military, security and spider-bots. These are very dangerous but unintelligent and avoidable opponents. At the other end of the scale, Icarus and Daedalus, two computer AI security systems, attain a measure of genuine self-awareness in the game. Both are given lucid characterisation despite being machine programs, and there is an intriguing scene where they merge into one AI organism, Helios. This super-program wants to control the world, believing it will be inherently more efficient than humans themselves at governing the human race. JC, being more than human himself, is given the final option of even merging with Helios in its quest for world domination.
When having finished this game, a player will be left with many impressions. One will possibly be a sense of regret that so much time is needed to spend playing the game and that its convoluted plot twists and turns like a pipe dream that is itself full of many interconnecting pipes. The graphics are also much surpassed now: there is a lack of detail in polygons and 3D modelling in the characters in general. There is a rather awful framerate slowdown during some battles, and terrible loading times between zones. But for a player will to overlook its flaws, the game is a uniquely political action-adventure, an escapist fantasy, but it also contains many worrying sci-fi predictions for the future. One thing that shines out above all is the spirit of the game: you are put in the role of an independent searcher for truth, a position of the highest moral elevation.
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