Retrospective Review: Deus Ex (PC)

June 22nd, 2010 will mark the 10 year anniversary of a little title called Deus Ex.  Perhaps you remember it.  It was, after all, one of the first titles of its type (Shooter with a smattering of RPG elements).  But revisiting these old titles, as I learned the hard way with Hitman 2 can sometimes make it too clear that these titles were simply stepping stones, rather than independently good titles.  So what has the decade done to Deus Ex? By god, let's find out!

 Ion Storm's Shooter/RPG puts the player in the role of JC Denton, a cybernetically enhanced agent of UNATCO (the UN's global security force).  The year is 2050 and the world is being ravaged by a plague known as the Grey Death.  With supply of the cure limited, UNATCO maintains world order and distribution of Ambrosia (the cure for Grey Death) with meticulous and lethal precision, though Ambrosia supply is always scarce, leaving millions slowly dying.  On the other side of this conflict is the NSF (National Secessionist Forces), a group determined to free the world from UNATCO's iron grip, believing them to be a fascist front for a conspiracy to create a new world order.  What's a no-nonsense dude in a sick trench coat with apparently irremovable sunglasses to do in all of this chaos?

"I'm sorry, I didn't hear the question,

I was too busy looking RAD."

It turns out that the answer to this question is "just about anything".  I have some real problems with modern implementation of moral choice systems in video games in that they are just too goddamn obvious.  Whenever there is a crossroads that could affect the outcome of your game, it is not always made clear what the "good guy" and "bad guy" options are.  For example, when I was still working for UNATCO, I encountered an NSF commander who surrendered immediately and willingly gave up the information I needed.  When the discussion ended, the commander simply went back to milling around his hidey-hole leading me to think: "this was too easy.  What if this guy is going to bring reinforcements down on my ass as soon as I leave?  UNATCO is more than a little fishy, but are the alleged terrorists going to be any more forgiving in their view of me?"  After a long deliberation with myself, I opted to not take the chance and put two rounds in the back of his dome, netting me a key to a supply closet he was holding out on me, so there was a tangible benefit.  At the same time though, I just executed a man who surrendered in cold blood, and the experience left me feeling... weird.  Had I let him live though, I would have had constant misgivings about what could have been rained down on me as a result of my failure to obey orders and take down the commander.  Later, when I joined up with the NSF, they were less than thrilled to be working with the guy who went around executing their chain of command, and earning their trust back proved to be more of a trial than I imagine it would have been had I just been humane.

The game also has some of the best implementation of RPG elements in a shooter that I have seen, particularly considering that it came out 10 goddamn years ago.  Completing missions and side-tasks earns you skill points, which you can dump into various firearm proficiency skills (pistol, rifle, heavy), hacking, lock picking, first aid etc. (think Fallout for the types of skills you can level).  You can also find augmentation canisters that you can install to give you more specific abilities such as quieter movement, regenerative health, increased strength etc.  Unlike most modern implementations of such systems (think Fallout 3) that eventually allow you to become a god-like behemoth, Deus Ex does not reward dabblers, and you will quickly find that you need to pick 3 or 4 things that you want JC to excel at, and then adapt how you play the rest of the game accordingly.  I myself went with a lock-picking, rifle and pistol wielding hacker approach, which meant that I could gun my way through just about any area from a safe distance, but an untrained melee weapons skill mean that going for full on stealth was never an option.  This game does not coddle you and, that can be very refreshing.  As I stated in my Metro 2033 review, knowing that you have a set of skills for one situation but, not others (indoor areas were a real problem for me since I was so snipe-happy) keeps you from ever feeling TOO safe and keeps your head firmly in the realm of the game.

Every responsible agent must make sure that they

are properly equipped for as many eventualities

as possible.

There are some areas of this game, however, where it truly does show its age and lack of streamlining.  Having to bring up the notes screen and manually copy down the username and password that I found in an area is somewhat tiresome, and something we don't see much of anymore for precisely that reason.  The game relies solely on you to create your  save games, and while I am grateful to have a quicksave function again after Metro, every now and again I would get so in the zone that I would forget to save for easily a half hour, only to get gunned down as the result of a stupid mistake, then realize that the last time I saved was right at the start of the mission.  Also, while it is nice to have a compendium of notes about the world around you and your mission objectives, they are not organized in the slightest, so instead of a nice codex system like you see in the Mass Effect games, you literally just have a scrolling list of every note you read or collected in the order you found them, rather than sorted by relevance (ie "background info" vs. "mission info" vs. "miscellanity" such as bank account codes or secondary objective details).  It makes the game feel very bloated, and at times served as a disincentive for me to explore, as I knew it would result in making my data/notes screen that much more chaotic.  The more I played, though, the less it annoyed me, and I adapted to the chaos and found a pseudo-system therein that was semi-navigable.

This is the menu screen.  Aren't you glad we're pretty much

done with this kind of crap?

There are also the usual issues with dated enemy AI's (they display almost no sense of self preservation except for briefly running away, giving you the opportunity to shoot them in the spine as they flee) but that's just something that I can't really criticize that harshly because, come on, this game came out 10 goddamn years ago.  Does it make certain parts a little easier than they should be? You bet.  Did I find myself particularly bothered by this fact though? Not really.  Like I said, it makes certain parts a little easier, but in no way gives you free reign to simply barrel through an area, guns blazing.

All in all though, this game has stood the test of time remarkably.  Its issues mostly lie in the UI, rather than in the actual gameplay.  You adapt to the play-mechanisms fairly quickly (though the learning curve at first can be a little steep) and all in all, the plot still maintains salience as it deals with the issue of corporate control of governments, the delineation between terrorists and peacekeepers, and UN inability to properly deal with global crises.  It's actually a little too salient at times, such as when the UNATCO head gets deposed and scapegoated by the director of FEMA (I am not kidding.  And this was 5 years BEFORE the Hurricane Katrina fiasco), who does not seem to care about helping the obviously ailing masses living in squalor all around him, but rather on towing the line of his shady superiors.  The bottom line though, is that if you missed this game while it was on the cutting edge, you have not missed the opportunity for a genuinely fun and surprisingly immersive experience.  And hell, since it's only $9.99 on the steam store, what could you possibly have to lose?

It's bound to happen by the laws of nature anyway.