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Thursday 6 March, 2008
GAMEPLAY
The combat in Deus Ex is heavily reliant on the skills chosen at the beginning of the game, as they affect both weapon damage and accuracy. In other words, your twitch skills from Half-life won’t help you in Deus Ex if you put all your skill points toward swimming, if JC is a bad shot, you are a bad shot. I am quite certain that this will upset a great deal of people (those who play shooters) but I quite like it, I guess that owes a lot to my favoring of the RPG genre in general. In addition stealth seems to be favored over running and gunning, and this is impressed upon you with your choice of weapons in the early game. In addition to your pistol and riot prod you are offered a choice of a sniper rifle, a tranquilizer crossbow, and a GEP gun (rocket launcher). None of these offer a whole lot of room for gun slinging in that early stage. I mean, I guess you could blow a few baddies to giblets with your three rockets but that is hardly an appropriate use of force.
Deus Ex also structures its dialogues in an RPG fashion with its use of conversation trees multiple outcomes, some of which can only become available through the actions of the player. The game actually encourages and rewards exploring the environment with goodies such as ammo and experience points. An example of one of Deus Ex’s possibility for variable dialogue comes at the very beginning of the game on Liberty Island. JC is asked to find and capture a terrorist leader who has claimed the remnants of the Statue of Liberty for himself his merry little band of secessionists. Throughout the level the brass informs JC that he is to capture the leader alive so they can lock him up and perform enhanced interrogation techniques on him or something. In any case, if you ignore this advice and gun him down anyway you’ll return to HQ to find your boss is pissed and that you’ve moved down a pay grade. Not a novel concept, I admit, but it’s something not often seen in shooters, and sure beats Bioshock’s “intense moral dilemmas.”
DESIGN
Deus Ex is a game that revels in its atmosphere. Everything is grimey and the entire game takes place at night (not ‘a’ night, but ‘at’ night) which sets the tone quite well. From when you first step onto Liberty Island you get the idea that something is dreadfully wrong. The Statue of Liberty, the once pristine symbol of American freedom, lays in ruins, a testament to dark times. In fact, every aspect of the setting of Deus Ex is in some way run down. The only places that look colorful or mesmerizing are the lairs of the devious plutocrats who scheme to control the planet. They grow as the world dies, they are vampiric, they are parasites.
The game makes creative use of cutscenes in that it does so sparingly. There are only four cinematics in the game, one for the beginning and one for each of the games three endings. They represent the introduction of all of the problems and conversely the resolution. There is no need for them in the game’s middle, which is where the gameplay tells the story. In a way, it allows for a great deal of freedom that would not otherwise be allowed. At any given moment, the player is in control of JC Denton, and that creates a supremely immersive experience.
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