Deus Ex, often cited as the pinnacle of the immersive sim genre, remains a marvellous milestone of game design; impeccably crafted levels, story and gameplay loop together with eerily relevant societal commentary are the reason why this game is still considered a true masterpiece all these years later.
9,5 / 10
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People often throw around the word "timeless" in reference to just about anything that'll hold up at least decently a few years after it came out. Especially in gaming, if a game so much as runs smoothly and has a few good reviews from back in the day, I can almost guarantee that said game will be considered a "timeless masterpiece" by some major outlet like IGN or Gamespot in given time.
More often than not, when trying out a few of these so-called classics, I find myself frustrated by extremely dated controls, washed out graphics, boring art styles and just pretty shoddy game design in general. Quests that go nowhere, missions that only exists to stretch out the run time, lifeless characters, uninspired levels that make you remember you're actually just playing a video game, etc.
Deus Ex feels like the first time for me where almost all the claims of it being a timeless masterpiece not only feel accurate, they often feel like they're still not really getting across how amazingly relevant Ion Storm's magnum opus still is today, both in terms of game design and story.
This game is OLD.
Of course with a game this old, you're gonna need some third party mods to make it work on a modern machine. It wasn't much though. Fixing the frame rate to a stable 60 and upscaling the vanilla textures to look crisp on 1440p. In a matter of 30 minutes or so, this game from 1999 ran like a charm on a modern PC. I didn't add anything in the way of actual gameplay changes or content that would otherwise compromise the 'vanilla' experience. As far as I'm concerned, I played the exact same game from back then with slightly better graphics.
Considering this, it is nothing short of amazing how fluid and responsive the controls feel here. While of course still subject to bugs and glitches like any other game in existence, it feels almost unreasonably polished. The aiming - although the strange decision of having players stand still during it does take some getting used to - is accurate, responsive and feels great when you hit something with it. The enemies, while of course limited in their intelligence due to technical reasons, are still interesting and varied enough to never get dull. The weapons feel distinctive and balanced around actually trying to get lethal shots in instead of emptying your clip at an opponent until they finally decide to fall over and die - that is, if you're playing this on 'Realistic' difficulty, which I HIGHLY recommend, as the game was clearly balanced around it. It's NOT "extra hard mode" or something like that. It is very clearly the intended experience.
Now, had this been the core of the gameplay it would've been good but nothing special. A decent shooter incentivising a more methodical approach. But it's not just a shooter. It is so much more than that.
This game is like Doom, Thief, Elder Scrolls and Goldeneye mixed together in a massive cauldron and somehow the end result is better than all of them. It truly is a game that's a lot greater than the sum of its part. There are certainly better shooters than this, even for the time. DOOM was more responsive, had better enemy design and more action. Or take other aspects: Thief had better, more thought out stealth. The original Fallout games had MUCH better role playing than this. But no game, neither then nor today, does this many things this good this consistently. And no other games manages to somehow combine all of these genres into a single, incredibly polished grand package that rewards player creativity and freedom like barely another title since.
As Warren Specter said himself: "If people compare our combat to Half-Life or our stealth to Thief or our role playing to Neverwinter Nights, we’re dead. But if they figure out they can do anything they want and play it however they desire and find their own fun, we were gonna rule the world’.
And they did! It became the face of the "immersive sim" genre for a very simple reason: It's still the best example of it, even after over 20 years. Don't feel like shooting anyone? You don't have to. You could knock them down with a crow bar. Or explode them from the other end of the room. You could pick up something and throw it against their head. You could just sneak past them. You don't even need to kill a single enemy to finish the game. [with maybe(?) the exception of the bosses.]
Every section of every level is deliberately designed with player freedom in mind. There are very few - if any - situations in which Deus Ex will force the player character down any specific way to play the game, or force a solution. On the flip side, it means that almost always your own creativity is the only thing gating your progress. But it's never simply about learning the optimal way for each scenario, as every action comes with its own consequence.
The level design underlines and works in favour of this concept. Let's take a very simple example:
You're trying to get into an enemy base. You're met with a locked door.
You're all out of lock picks and have no key. You COULD spend some time simply looking for those, possibly wasting precious time. You notice the base has a glass window next to the door. You can simply smash it and squeeze your way through it. Alternatively, if you have some explosives or a crowbar on you, you could simply blast down the door. Both of these actions will, however, produce loud noise that enemy troopers might hear. You could try and hack the door open at a nearby terminal. Hacking is an easy way of bypassing lots of security systems, but leaves you utterly vulnerable to patrolling soldiers or policemen running into you. Maybe there's another way in? Maybe an air shaft or a gully? Those may or may not be locked as well, however. Who knows, perhaps you may find an unlikely ally hiding somewhere on the map if you're dialling down your urge to splatter everyone's brains on the floor for a few seconds?
All of these possibilities for one door. And that was just one very simple example. It not only applies to singular game elements, but to the whole thing on a macro scale too.
You can push this to the absolute extreme by killing certain bosses before you ever talked to them. Nothing is stopping you from, say, finding a nice alcove or a roof and sniping the brains out of whatever story relevant NPC or antagonist you're technically "supposed to talk to" to progress the game. This extends to friendly NPCs too. No character is safe from the all devouring chasm of immersive sim game design.
And let's not sell the actual level design short either; it's honestly brilliant. Each level feels totally handcrafted from top to bottom. While, yes, obviously a bit dated at times the visuals and scenery being kind of ugly and blocky really helps with the feeling that this is a dark, gritty future. In this way, it actually adds a lot to it being "timeless." While these visuals previously looked good because they were top notch for the time, they keep their appeal due to shifting perspectives, and how the world itself feels really cold and uncaring.
From closed and confined places like the Paris catacombs, the Majestic 12 hideout and Area 51, the individual paths of which twist and turn around and back into each other with shortcuts to unlock, to wide, open areas like the various city scapes of New York, Paris, and Hong Kong to something in between, like the immensely fun to explore Vandenberg base - all of these levels have unique quirks and design elements that make them all feel very distinct, both from an aesthetic as well as a gameplay perspective.
While some levels, especially the cities, end up feeling a bit small in terms of believability, they're expertly designed video game levels in that: Getting around is not tedious. Finding quest elements, items, NPCs or anything else doesn't feel like finding a needle in a haystack. Every door, window or street, every nook and crevice was put here deliberately for you to play around with it.
The fantastic open-ness of these spaces teach you not to bang your head against the wall, but instead try and find a clever way around it. Sure you COULD just kill that group of soldiers, but that would be boring. How about climbing up to the top of the base, disengage the alarm system, turn the turrets against their masters and route in some poison gas from the bottom into the barracks instead?
Where games like The Elder Scrolls will often praise themselves for "letting the player do whatever they want" and will then proceed to handhold you towards one of two desired solutions, Deus Ex puts barely any restrictions on you what so ever. If you can think it up, and if the physics engine of the game allows it, you can do it.
This system is, of course, not without its flaws.
Some sections can become a bit frustrating if you don't happen to have a specific item or weapon with you. Maybe you could bypass one section with a few lock picks, but you don't have enough, and the (seemingly) only other path is unreasonably tough. Some enemies will sometimes spot or hear you for seemingly no reason. Stealth, as a whole, isn't that great. It's very obtuse to even figure out what exactly enemies can and can't notice. Sometimes the AI of the enemies flat out breaks. The boss fights are a bit crap, sadly, in that they barely feel like boss fights, which I'd put down to the developers having to program them around every possible combination of items the player might have at this point, which obviously severely limits the number of options the boss can have.
However, the biggest flaws - or rather, biggest missed opportunities - come with the games story and role playing system. That's not saying much, however, as these flaws are very minor in the grand picture.
Let's talk about the good first:
JC Denton is a pretty cool character. While people initially criticised his design as "overly stoic, uninteresting, completely blank with a deadpan delivery on every line" I think this peculiar choice of letting JC come across as THIS robotic and strange makes him all the more interesting and unconventional. I find it pretty unique and charming, even hilarious at times.
Especially nowadays where every named game protagonist seems to be created with the purpose of stuffing as much "personality" and "quirk" in there as the devs possibly can manage, it's nice to see a character with a backstory and personality still be a functioning avatar for the player.
As for the story itself; it's simultaneously the games biggest strength AND weakness. The idea is this:
What if every conspiracy theory was actually true?
What if there really were multiple different cabals of evil super geniuses that fought each other over the right to the world? What if planting chips into people's brains, and other types of trans-humanist modification were real? As you might imagine, it gets pretty fucking wild at times.
JC, at the start of the game introduced as a highly capable and highly idealistic UNATCO police officer, is not like your average cop; he has been augmented. His body parts have been altered by various nano machines to enhance or add completely new abilities to his repertoire. When his brother, and fellow agent, Paul suddenly experiences a massive change of heart JC starts to become disillusioned with what he thought he knew about the world.
He becomes a globe trotting, gun blazing and shadow sneaking quadruple agent who will stop at nothing to uncover who is really running the show.
That is pretty much all there is to JC when it comes to only his side of the story; your input as the player is obviously what REALLY counts..
...is what I would say if it were true. Unfortunately, the hitherto absolute and unbridled player freedom doesn't fully extend to the game's actual story. While, yes, there are many moments where you can do things out of order, or the fact you can kill literally every NPC without restrictions whatsoever, and mostly freely choose what JC says to people, these choices are often not very important for the story as a whole. You never go anywhere you wouldn't have gone anyway, you don't get to skip anything else, you never truly change the story in any meaningful way.
There are definitely some instances where you DO have influence over major things happening or not. Some of your friends can and WILL die if you don't save them, and it noticeably makes the game harder if you don't. On the flipside, there's almost no character that can't be somehow saved, no matter how absurd and impossible it might seem.
Sadly, the only time where the player truly gets to influence the outcome of the story is pretty much right at the end, where you'll get the choice between three very distinct and different endings. While this is nice, and it's better than nothing, it's very obviously a byproduct of having to majorly cut down on features quite late into their development cycle. [The devs once openly talked about how they wanted the story to go off the rails way earlier than the final level, where you'd have gone to entirely different locations and the story would've taken a completely different direction.]
But all of that is just about the, for lack of a better word, "mechanical" aspects of the story, the plot related stuff.
What about the subtext? The vibes? This is where the term "timeless" really begins to shine.
Much like in Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil”, the terror and confusion of working in corporations or organisations so large you don’t even really know who exactly you are working for looms like a dark cloud over the characters. Companies like Page Industries have entire governments in their pockets and they’re not even trying to hide it - and that’s just the organisations that officially exist. Countless secret societies and organisations are all simultaneously planning their hostile takeover of world domination. Privately trained and owned mechs and super soldiers patrol the streets instead of a normal police force. This is a dystopia that could very well be our own. A nightmare of our own creation.
The game’s gritty and dark aesthetic lends itself perfectly to a vision of a not-too-far-off future; in which technological progress has been going at an exponential rate - only for the ruling class though. The wealthy can be kept alive indefinitely, hooked up to machines and tubes, with the ability to upload your consciousness in arm’s reach. The regular people of New York, Hong Kong and Paris struggle to find a roof over their heads, a fix for their drug issues and to not die of a global pandemic currently ravaging the planet.
You might have noticed it while reading, but the themes of Deus Ex have only gotten MORE relevant as time went on. It’s a deeply radical story about power, class struggle and humanity’s relationship with both technology and society. The dark and cold setting, together with the sometimes strangely humorous and high octane moments the game throws at you from time to time, give this work a very idiosyncratic atmosphere.
It’s equal parts “Total Recall / Blade / Terminator” flashy techno-action romp, as well as Philip K. Dick / Isaac Asimov / William Gibson-style cyberpunk/sci-fi dystopian novel. It’s also very easy to see the influence this game had on countless other pieces of cyberpunk / transhumanism-inspired media, and immersive-sim style video games in general.
No Deus Ex means no (Bethesda) Fallout, no Prey, no Dishonored, no Hitman - and of course no further Deus Ex titles, which I’ve deliberately NOT mentioned in this review. They are a whole thing in and out of themselves and as far as I’m concerned, this game works perfectly fine as a stand alone and definitely doesn’t need the other titles to feel like a complete story.
Before we end this overlong quasi-dissertation on a video game from 1999, some other things I want to talk about that didn’t really fit in the rest of the text:
The music is fantastic. I absolutely love the way that Alexander Brandon, Michiel van den Bos, and Dan Gardopee were able to mix various genres from classical to techno, electronica, synth wave and ambient together into a super recognisable and catchy sound. I find myself listening to songs like “The Synapse” on the regular. Also; they really didn’t need to create entirely unique songs for every stage, every conversation that took place on that AND every death screen. That amount of unhinged effort does deserve a special shoutout from me.
The voice acting isn’t as fantastic, sadly. There are some standout performances like Cliff Stephens as Bob Page for example. While not exactly Oscar-worthy or anything extreme, it still stands head and shoulders above the rest. As mentioned earlier, I do like JC’s deliberately emotionless and robotic delivery, especially for comedic effect, but it feels really weird in certain moments where you really feel like JC probably SHOULD react with a little more emotion in his voice. Finally, Walton Simmons’ extremely calm and vicious tone of voice is great, but the direction here is very lacking with some very obvious mistakes left in his voice lines. Over all, the voice acting isn’t the worst I’ve ever heard but it’s pretty damn far from good most of the time. The balancing on the augmentations could’ve used some more work too, maybe. As things stand now there are only 3 out of 18 augmentations I’d consider absolutely essential to beat the game, where the other 15 feel like wastes of inventory space.
But really, most criticism I have for this game truly is very minor compared to the sheer amount of incredibly forward thinking ideas and mechanics this game has that seriously were - and in some cases still are - way ahead of its time. Deus Ex is an amazing video game experience that has successfully stood the test of time and will continue to do so for many more years.
9,5 / 10
9,5 / 10
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People often throw around the word "timeless" in reference to just about anything that'll hold up at least decently a few years after it came out. Especially in gaming, if a game so much as runs smoothly and has a few good reviews from back in the day, I can almost guarantee that said game will be considered a "timeless masterpiece" by some major outlet like IGN or Gamespot in given time.
More often than not, when trying out a few of these so-called classics, I find myself frustrated by extremely dated controls, washed out graphics, boring art styles and just pretty shoddy game design in general. Quests that go nowhere, missions that only exists to stretch out the run time, lifeless characters, uninspired levels that make you remember you're actually just playing a video game, etc.
Deus Ex feels like the first time for me where almost all the claims of it being a timeless masterpiece not only feel accurate, they often feel like they're still not really getting across how amazingly relevant Ion Storm's magnum opus still is today, both in terms of game design and story.
This game is OLD.
Of course with a game this old, you're gonna need some third party mods to make it work on a modern machine. It wasn't much though. Fixing the frame rate to a stable 60 and upscaling the vanilla textures to look crisp on 1440p. In a matter of 30 minutes or so, this game from 1999 ran like a charm on a modern PC. I didn't add anything in the way of actual gameplay changes or content that would otherwise compromise the 'vanilla' experience. As far as I'm concerned, I played the exact same game from back then with slightly better graphics.
Considering this, it is nothing short of amazing how fluid and responsive the controls feel here. While of course still subject to bugs and glitches like any other game in existence, it feels almost unreasonably polished. The aiming - although the strange decision of having players stand still during it does take some getting used to - is accurate, responsive and feels great when you hit something with it. The enemies, while of course limited in their intelligence due to technical reasons, are still interesting and varied enough to never get dull. The weapons feel distinctive and balanced around actually trying to get lethal shots in instead of emptying your clip at an opponent until they finally decide to fall over and die - that is, if you're playing this on 'Realistic' difficulty, which I HIGHLY recommend, as the game was clearly balanced around it. It's NOT "extra hard mode" or something like that. It is very clearly the intended experience.
Now, had this been the core of the gameplay it would've been good but nothing special. A decent shooter incentivising a more methodical approach. But it's not just a shooter. It is so much more than that.
This game is like Doom, Thief, Elder Scrolls and Goldeneye mixed together in a massive cauldron and somehow the end result is better than all of them. It truly is a game that's a lot greater than the sum of its part. There are certainly better shooters than this, even for the time. DOOM was more responsive, had better enemy design and more action. Or take other aspects: Thief had better, more thought out stealth. The original Fallout games had MUCH better role playing than this. But no game, neither then nor today, does this many things this good this consistently. And no other games manages to somehow combine all of these genres into a single, incredibly polished grand package that rewards player creativity and freedom like barely another title since.
As Warren Specter said himself: "If people compare our combat to Half-Life or our stealth to Thief or our role playing to Neverwinter Nights, we’re dead. But if they figure out they can do anything they want and play it however they desire and find their own fun, we were gonna rule the world’.
And they did! It became the face of the "immersive sim" genre for a very simple reason: It's still the best example of it, even after over 20 years. Don't feel like shooting anyone? You don't have to. You could knock them down with a crow bar. Or explode them from the other end of the room. You could pick up something and throw it against their head. You could just sneak past them. You don't even need to kill a single enemy to finish the game. [with maybe(?) the exception of the bosses.]
Every section of every level is deliberately designed with player freedom in mind. There are very few - if any - situations in which Deus Ex will force the player character down any specific way to play the game, or force a solution. On the flip side, it means that almost always your own creativity is the only thing gating your progress. But it's never simply about learning the optimal way for each scenario, as every action comes with its own consequence.
The level design underlines and works in favour of this concept. Let's take a very simple example:
You're trying to get into an enemy base. You're met with a locked door.
You're all out of lock picks and have no key. You COULD spend some time simply looking for those, possibly wasting precious time. You notice the base has a glass window next to the door. You can simply smash it and squeeze your way through it. Alternatively, if you have some explosives or a crowbar on you, you could simply blast down the door. Both of these actions will, however, produce loud noise that enemy troopers might hear. You could try and hack the door open at a nearby terminal. Hacking is an easy way of bypassing lots of security systems, but leaves you utterly vulnerable to patrolling soldiers or policemen running into you. Maybe there's another way in? Maybe an air shaft or a gully? Those may or may not be locked as well, however. Who knows, perhaps you may find an unlikely ally hiding somewhere on the map if you're dialling down your urge to splatter everyone's brains on the floor for a few seconds?
All of these possibilities for one door. And that was just one very simple example. It not only applies to singular game elements, but to the whole thing on a macro scale too.
You can push this to the absolute extreme by killing certain bosses before you ever talked to them. Nothing is stopping you from, say, finding a nice alcove or a roof and sniping the brains out of whatever story relevant NPC or antagonist you're technically "supposed to talk to" to progress the game. This extends to friendly NPCs too. No character is safe from the all devouring chasm of immersive sim game design.
And let's not sell the actual level design short either; it's honestly brilliant. Each level feels totally handcrafted from top to bottom. While, yes, obviously a bit dated at times the visuals and scenery being kind of ugly and blocky really helps with the feeling that this is a dark, gritty future. In this way, it actually adds a lot to it being "timeless." While these visuals previously looked good because they were top notch for the time, they keep their appeal due to shifting perspectives, and how the world itself feels really cold and uncaring.
From closed and confined places like the Paris catacombs, the Majestic 12 hideout and Area 51, the individual paths of which twist and turn around and back into each other with shortcuts to unlock, to wide, open areas like the various city scapes of New York, Paris, and Hong Kong to something in between, like the immensely fun to explore Vandenberg base - all of these levels have unique quirks and design elements that make them all feel very distinct, both from an aesthetic as well as a gameplay perspective.
While some levels, especially the cities, end up feeling a bit small in terms of believability, they're expertly designed video game levels in that: Getting around is not tedious. Finding quest elements, items, NPCs or anything else doesn't feel like finding a needle in a haystack. Every door, window or street, every nook and crevice was put here deliberately for you to play around with it.
The fantastic open-ness of these spaces teach you not to bang your head against the wall, but instead try and find a clever way around it. Sure you COULD just kill that group of soldiers, but that would be boring. How about climbing up to the top of the base, disengage the alarm system, turn the turrets against their masters and route in some poison gas from the bottom into the barracks instead?
Where games like The Elder Scrolls will often praise themselves for "letting the player do whatever they want" and will then proceed to handhold you towards one of two desired solutions, Deus Ex puts barely any restrictions on you what so ever. If you can think it up, and if the physics engine of the game allows it, you can do it.
This system is, of course, not without its flaws.
Some sections can become a bit frustrating if you don't happen to have a specific item or weapon with you. Maybe you could bypass one section with a few lock picks, but you don't have enough, and the (seemingly) only other path is unreasonably tough. Some enemies will sometimes spot or hear you for seemingly no reason. Stealth, as a whole, isn't that great. It's very obtuse to even figure out what exactly enemies can and can't notice. Sometimes the AI of the enemies flat out breaks. The boss fights are a bit crap, sadly, in that they barely feel like boss fights, which I'd put down to the developers having to program them around every possible combination of items the player might have at this point, which obviously severely limits the number of options the boss can have.
However, the biggest flaws - or rather, biggest missed opportunities - come with the games story and role playing system. That's not saying much, however, as these flaws are very minor in the grand picture.
Let's talk about the good first:
JC Denton is a pretty cool character. While people initially criticised his design as "overly stoic, uninteresting, completely blank with a deadpan delivery on every line" I think this peculiar choice of letting JC come across as THIS robotic and strange makes him all the more interesting and unconventional. I find it pretty unique and charming, even hilarious at times.
Especially nowadays where every named game protagonist seems to be created with the purpose of stuffing as much "personality" and "quirk" in there as the devs possibly can manage, it's nice to see a character with a backstory and personality still be a functioning avatar for the player.
As for the story itself; it's simultaneously the games biggest strength AND weakness. The idea is this:
What if every conspiracy theory was actually true?
What if there really were multiple different cabals of evil super geniuses that fought each other over the right to the world? What if planting chips into people's brains, and other types of trans-humanist modification were real? As you might imagine, it gets pretty fucking wild at times.
JC, at the start of the game introduced as a highly capable and highly idealistic UNATCO police officer, is not like your average cop; he has been augmented. His body parts have been altered by various nano machines to enhance or add completely new abilities to his repertoire. When his brother, and fellow agent, Paul suddenly experiences a massive change of heart JC starts to become disillusioned with what he thought he knew about the world.
He becomes a globe trotting, gun blazing and shadow sneaking quadruple agent who will stop at nothing to uncover who is really running the show.
That is pretty much all there is to JC when it comes to only his side of the story; your input as the player is obviously what REALLY counts..
...is what I would say if it were true. Unfortunately, the hitherto absolute and unbridled player freedom doesn't fully extend to the game's actual story. While, yes, there are many moments where you can do things out of order, or the fact you can kill literally every NPC without restrictions whatsoever, and mostly freely choose what JC says to people, these choices are often not very important for the story as a whole. You never go anywhere you wouldn't have gone anyway, you don't get to skip anything else, you never truly change the story in any meaningful way.
There are definitely some instances where you DO have influence over major things happening or not. Some of your friends can and WILL die if you don't save them, and it noticeably makes the game harder if you don't. On the flipside, there's almost no character that can't be somehow saved, no matter how absurd and impossible it might seem.
Sadly, the only time where the player truly gets to influence the outcome of the story is pretty much right at the end, where you'll get the choice between three very distinct and different endings. While this is nice, and it's better than nothing, it's very obviously a byproduct of having to majorly cut down on features quite late into their development cycle. [The devs once openly talked about how they wanted the story to go off the rails way earlier than the final level, where you'd have gone to entirely different locations and the story would've taken a completely different direction.]
But all of that is just about the, for lack of a better word, "mechanical" aspects of the story, the plot related stuff.
What about the subtext? The vibes? This is where the term "timeless" really begins to shine.
Much like in Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil”, the terror and confusion of working in corporations or organisations so large you don’t even really know who exactly you are working for looms like a dark cloud over the characters. Companies like Page Industries have entire governments in their pockets and they’re not even trying to hide it - and that’s just the organisations that officially exist. Countless secret societies and organisations are all simultaneously planning their hostile takeover of world domination. Privately trained and owned mechs and super soldiers patrol the streets instead of a normal police force. This is a dystopia that could very well be our own. A nightmare of our own creation.
The game’s gritty and dark aesthetic lends itself perfectly to a vision of a not-too-far-off future; in which technological progress has been going at an exponential rate - only for the ruling class though. The wealthy can be kept alive indefinitely, hooked up to machines and tubes, with the ability to upload your consciousness in arm’s reach. The regular people of New York, Hong Kong and Paris struggle to find a roof over their heads, a fix for their drug issues and to not die of a global pandemic currently ravaging the planet.
You might have noticed it while reading, but the themes of Deus Ex have only gotten MORE relevant as time went on. It’s a deeply radical story about power, class struggle and humanity’s relationship with both technology and society. The dark and cold setting, together with the sometimes strangely humorous and high octane moments the game throws at you from time to time, give this work a very idiosyncratic atmosphere.
It’s equal parts “Total Recall / Blade / Terminator” flashy techno-action romp, as well as Philip K. Dick / Isaac Asimov / William Gibson-style cyberpunk/sci-fi dystopian novel. It’s also very easy to see the influence this game had on countless other pieces of cyberpunk / transhumanism-inspired media, and immersive-sim style video games in general.
No Deus Ex means no (Bethesda) Fallout, no Prey, no Dishonored, no Hitman - and of course no further Deus Ex titles, which I’ve deliberately NOT mentioned in this review. They are a whole thing in and out of themselves and as far as I’m concerned, this game works perfectly fine as a stand alone and definitely doesn’t need the other titles to feel like a complete story.
Before we end this overlong quasi-dissertation on a video game from 1999, some other things I want to talk about that didn’t really fit in the rest of the text:
The music is fantastic. I absolutely love the way that Alexander Brandon, Michiel van den Bos, and Dan Gardopee were able to mix various genres from classical to techno, electronica, synth wave and ambient together into a super recognisable and catchy sound. I find myself listening to songs like “The Synapse” on the regular. Also; they really didn’t need to create entirely unique songs for every stage, every conversation that took place on that AND every death screen. That amount of unhinged effort does deserve a special shoutout from me.
The voice acting isn’t as fantastic, sadly. There are some standout performances like Cliff Stephens as Bob Page for example. While not exactly Oscar-worthy or anything extreme, it still stands head and shoulders above the rest. As mentioned earlier, I do like JC’s deliberately emotionless and robotic delivery, especially for comedic effect, but it feels really weird in certain moments where you really feel like JC probably SHOULD react with a little more emotion in his voice. Finally, Walton Simmons’ extremely calm and vicious tone of voice is great, but the direction here is very lacking with some very obvious mistakes left in his voice lines. Over all, the voice acting isn’t the worst I’ve ever heard but it’s pretty damn far from good most of the time. The balancing on the augmentations could’ve used some more work too, maybe. As things stand now there are only 3 out of 18 augmentations I’d consider absolutely essential to beat the game, where the other 15 feel like wastes of inventory space.
But really, most criticism I have for this game truly is very minor compared to the sheer amount of incredibly forward thinking ideas and mechanics this game has that seriously were - and in some cases still are - way ahead of its time. Deus Ex is an amazing video game experience that has successfully stood the test of time and will continue to do so for many more years.
9,5 / 10