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Simply awesome

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: July 09, 2004
Author: Amazon User

One of the most intelligent and enjoyable games I've ever played.

Excellent Combat & Strategy Game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: February 19, 2002
Author: Amazon User

This game is a realistic combination of a first-person shooter and strategy game, quite deftly combined. Its gameplay requires patience and precision, but its attention to detail is incredible.
Example: when you start out you get skill points that allow you to truly customize your character's strengths. As one would expect, these can make a dramatic difference in how your character performs. Just as an amateur picking up a sniper rifle would have trouble scoring a headshot at any distance, so does your character. When untrained the crosshairs bounce around, making precision difficult. If you advance to master, however, it's rock-solid. If you prefer using pistols and pistol-type weapons (like the mini-crossbow they give you), you can focus on that. When using the crossbow it is interesting to watch what happens when you hit someone, especially when using the tranquilizer darts...when struck with even the most precise shot the target usually won't immediately go down. This is both realistic and a nuisance, since they often have enough presence of mind to either sound an alarm or otherwise alert other guards of your presence before falling. Likewise, if you are struck by a tranquilizer dart, your vision will temporarily blur and you will progressively take more damage in the spot of the impact.
When your character takes damage, it affects both his overall health and the specific health of the region that was hit. For example, the more damage the character takes in his legs, the more profound the associated loss of speed and maneuverability will become. Likewise, if the damage is to the arms his melee attacks will lose strength and his accuracy may be impaired.
In addition to your vast skill choices, you also have the ability to further customize your character by adding nanotech augmentations that enhance his abilities. As you advance in the game you will find these canisters that you can "install" into yourself, allowing you to choose between two or more different abilities each time. For example, the first "aug" you'll find will offer you the choice of having "combat strength" or "microfibral muscle" installed. Combat strength increases the damage that your character inflicts when attacking with melee weapons; microfibral muscle increases your character's strength, allowing him to lift heavier objects. If you are customizing your character to be a master of combat, you'd want to install the combat strength; if focusing on stealth you might want to consider the microfibral muscle, since it may allow you to completely avoid a combat situation by moving large objects around and discovering or creating alternate paths. In addition to these, you can upgrade almost all aspects of your character...everything from having ballistic protection (bullets do less to no damage) to targeting (increases accuracy and shows information about the identity and health of your target) to an aggressive defense system (prematurely detonates incoming explosives such as rockets and grenades, reducing or eliminating the injury to the player). Using all of these at once, a player would be near unstoppable...except that they essentially included a battery pack that all of these augs must run off. This means that you should really only implement your special abilities when you desperately need to, less you find yourself unable to do so later.
Those players who are used to the shoot-first-ask-questions-later mindset of Quake, Half-Life, and other such games may be in for a rude awakening when playing Deus Ex. Your character is not (fully) a super-hero who will walk away from a fight with a dozen enemy soldiers with only minor damage. Even on easy difficulty, it's very easy to get killed if you do not employ stealth and strategy in your actions.
In short, I'd highly recommend this game to anyone who is interested in both strategy and some serious action. I haven't had the opportunity to play the game in multiplayer, but I'm certain that it every bit is as incredible as the rest of the game.

The only "Shoot-anything-that-moves" game that I like

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: July 24, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I'm not a "Shoot to kill" kind of guy, and since "Wolfstein", that I had a personal interest in fighting nazies, I never really liked that kind of games., they bored me. And then I borrowed "Deus Ex" from a friend. The plot is fascinating, the graphics are good and gives a pretty realistic view, and the world, even though fantastic, is believeable (Which means that it is acceptable by logic that such a world can exist.).
"Deus Ex" is the only game that I found myself breathing faster, and focusing all my senses, before I passed a corner, knowing that something is waiting behind it.
Shortly: Great Story, amazing Graphics, cool weapons, BUY IT!

Amazing

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: September 29, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Comparable to Half-Life. This game has it all. Words can't hardly describe how fun this game is. High re-play value, decent graphics, awesome weapons, great storyline and so much more. Buy it and you will be hooked.

Simply the best!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: May 21, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I've racked my brain trying to think of a better game, finally I realized it can't be done. Fans of Metal Gear Solid(PC/PSone) will play this and never go back to Metal Gear. Good ol'Deus is based on "real" conspiricy theories...secret world government, Area 51 is the communications hub of the world, and world-wide plague in which the government has the cure, but tells no one. You play the game the way you want. Do you want to kill everyone or no one? Do you want to be the warrior with all guns blazing or maybe the stealthy S.E.A.L. type? Finally, are you willing to die for the cause...do you want to take control of the world yourself? [all] The choise's are yours and you will live or die by them. Are you ready?

Very impressive!!!!!!!!! Buy it.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: May 27, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I nerver thought this game was going to be like this. It is a mix between a futuristic James Bond (for the espionage involved and the multiple gadgets at your disposal like multi-tools, lockpicks, and the ability to be able to literaly hack into computers and security cameras)and a Gordon Freeman from Half-Life (for your constant having to run for your life). The graphics are excellent as well as the dialogs (you keep on clicking on the person being talked to and this one keeps on giving you valuable information about your game objective). If you are into suspense, action and stealth this game is for you.

There is a huge arsenal of weapons available (sniper rifles, stealth guns, prods, flamethrowers, knives, throwing knives, shotguns, laser sights, scopes, silencers, etc. The list is very long) as well as beer (forty), wine, liquor, soda, soy food and candy bars. The lack of gore in the game can pass unnoticed by the in-game suspense and intrigue. Two persons can play the game and not finish it the same way because the decisions you make during the game influence the way the game will run (when I played the game JC Denton's brother was killed by a group of MIB's but a friend of mine played it and managed to keep him alive and he appeared throughout the game elsewhere. There is plenty of in-game saves. I won't say any more. Buy it and then you tell me about it.

Best. Game. Ever.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: February 26, 2005
Author: Amazon User

"It all happened an hour ago--the barge docked and the NSF moved right in on it, offloading the cargo into speedboats. Our undercover man Harley Filban should be somewhere out on the docks now."

Liberty Island, New York City. The near future, 2055. A fatal wasting disease called the Gray Death is decimating the world. About an hour ago, terrorists highjacked a shipment of the only known treatment for the ailment, a substance known as Ambrosia. The terrorists are part of a group known as the National Secessionist Force, or simply NSF, a group who have long been rebelling against the U.S. government, a government that has begun to stray from the core of the U.S. Constitution, eliminating personal freedoms and reshaping society in the name of safety and security. Faced with a swelling tide of global terror, American President Phillip Mead supported a charter to create a worldwide police force to combat terrorism, a force that knows no geographical boundaries, that answers to no one but itself, a force called the United Nations Anti-Terrorist Coalition, or UNATCO. UNATCO's international headquarters is located on Liberty Island, on ground donated by the United States, fittingly situated in the shadow of a shattered monument to freedom: the headless, crumbling Statue of Liberty, victim of a previous terror strike. It is a time of widening arcs between classes, a time of ambiguity and of teetering on the brink of societal collapse, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is becoming unbreachable. Even as technological advancements and scientific breakthroughs make the wonders of far-flung science fiction a reality for the chosen few, the common man sinks lower and lower into poverty and obscurity as the middle classes are systematically eliminated. Six million American citizens are on an undesirable list and due to be rounded up and put into "reeducation" camps. Many more Americans are already there. Nonconformists and those who question the motives and actions of the government are summarily arrested and sometimes just disappear. Citizens are encouraged to spy on their neighbors and report any behavior that could possibly be deemed questionable or sympathetic to the terror cause, such as visiting national monuments, spending time on the internet, debating politics or speaking with a foreign accent. Big business--spearheaded by the likes of renown entrepreneur Bob Page and his Page Industries--has a stranglehold on the world, even inching its fingers onto the control pads of world government. There exists the worldwide mining and profiling of all communications. And behind it all, like omniscient, invisible puppetmasters pulling strings from dark alcoves, are the whispers of grandiose conspiracies and shadow organizations and ancient secret societies that are finally making a grab for world domination: Majestic 12, the Illuminati, the Templars. And combating these forces, aware or not of how deeply the strands run, is the NSF and its allies around the world, such as the Silhouette faction in France; dismissed as common terrorists by UNATCO, they see themselves as freedom fighters fighting governments grown corrupt and diseased on an incomprehensible scale.

You are a newly appointed, nano-augmented UNATCO agent named J.C. Denton. You arrive on the Liberty Island docks via a New York City Police boat, tasked with the removal of the NSF forces who have taken refuge inside the Statue of Liberty. Nano-augmentation is a new science--you are only the second augmented agent--and its implementation consists of the placement of microscopic machines inside the body that can enhance certain elements of an individual's natural senses--vision, strength, lung capacity, healing abilities--or create altogether unique, distinctively unnatural abilities far beyond what a non-augmented person could imagine. Nano-augmented individuals have a slightly altered appearance from regular people, with a telltale glowing of the eyes and strains of raised bluish-silver lines crosshatching parts of their skin. Previous UNATCO experiments with enhancing field agents before nano-augmentation evolved bore a more archaic signature: removing natural body parts--such as arms, legs, or even parts of the skull--and replacing them with purely mechanical, robotic, metallic pieces that enhanced abilities, yet sometimes were uncomfortable and rendered the subject something of an outcast by appearance.

Via InfoLink--a communications device implanted inside your head--your liaison inside UNATCO HQ, Alex Jacobson, informs you to hook up with your brother, Paul Denton, who happens to be the first UNATCO agent to have been nano-augmented. Paul is nearby on the dock. With him, you're able to ascertain the background and tactical situation of the terrorists at Liberty Island and the missing shipments of Ambrosia. You briefly sidestep into some detailed personal reminiscing about your parents and upbringing centering around the shared fact of the augmentations, then bid Paul a transient farewell as you begin to formulate a plan of action. The charcoal night sky is teeming with ominous, cold, grayish-white clouds in steady, unrelenting motion. The moon, the remote vault of stars, the wind, the fluttering seagulls--all are indifferent observers to the folly of men. Live or die, succeed or fail, it's all the same to them; the world will still roll on regardless of the outcome. Harbor waves lap at the dock moorings, a surprisingly delicate sound. Across the water, on either side, the distant brilliance of the New York City night skyline twinkles on the periphery. There are people there in those buildings, you know there are, real people going about real tasks in their real lives--working, eating, sleeping, loving, dying from the Gray Death, hoping for a better tomorrow--and even as they are unknowing of you and your current dilemma, you must carry on just the same. As a UNATCO agent, it's your job. To protect them from the forces of terror and evil in the world, to protect them from threats they don't even realize exist.

And this is just the beginning. Deus Ex launches from here into its prolongation of winding, protracted, expansive gameplay, a springboard into theretofore uncharted realms of the interactive medium; a living and breathing gaming universe that mirrors our own in so many ways, so compelling and immersing that the experience can become ingrained in your very psyche. You spend the rest of the game unraveling a complex and multifaceted storyline woven together with a deft conspirator's touch, globetrotting repeatedly to various world locations--New York, France, Hong Kong, the American southwest--in an effort to bring down the machines trying to twist and mold the world to their own purposes. At the top, in the end, sits billionaire Bob Page, yet he is representative of only one of three distinct factions vying for world control by the end of the game. And you must choose amongst them.

The game itself is a hybrid of genres: part first-person shooter, part role playing game, part adventure game. To that end, gameplay itself reflects a given player's personal choice of progression, anything from dawning the guise of a pitiless killing machine to morphing into an invisible shade on the wall who employs surreptitiousness and cunning and eradicates nobody--or anything in between. Level designs are ingenious and inspired, offering the player the illusion of nearly limitless strategic and tactical options to approach the completion of each objective. And they're calculated in such a way that they make you feel clever for discovering some new way of doing something; no betraying neon arrows are in place pointing you in any particular direction. Worlds turn within worlds in this game, large orbiting story arcs--as great as the world itself with Tracer Tong, Bob Page, Morgan Everett, Nicolette DuClare and Helios, the construct AI revealed late in the proceedings--supporting smaller and smaller story arcs turning within, as exemplified by the reoccurring minor characters of Harley Filban, Joe Greene, Sandra Renton, Maggie Chow, Max Chen, Juan Lebedev, Jock and Smuggler. Conversation trees appear during key NPC interactions, and in the choosing you're able to directly affect NPC loyalties and sometimes the chronological order of unfolding events. Through an expert implementation of in-game email messages, newspaper articles and computer terminal news outlets, an entire world springs to life around you. And no stagnant world at that, for as you advance through the story, so too do these outlets alter to reflect the changes that are happening. Few things can draw you into a game as absolutely as reading a news article about an event that you made happen earlier in the game.

I've played Deus Ex to completion at least six times over five years on two different platforms, and I've never gotten tired of the experience. Indeed, even today, I'm still discovering new things here and there I'd somehow missed all the times before. The graphics, state of the art in 2000, are understandably beginning to show their age now, five years later. But they're still darkly striking and engrossing at 1280x1024x32 and offer some of the longest view distances and largest wide open levels ever seen in gaming. Deus Ex continues to astonish and boggle me at every turn. I don't just play this game; I'm captivated by it.

Skill points are acquired at measured intervals as rewards for achieving certain objectives or discovering new areas. These skill points are used to enhance regions of a player's profile: a particular type of weapon (heavy weapons, melee weapons, rifles, explosives and so on), lockpicking skill, computer hacking skill, swimming ability, and much more. Each area of expertise can be upgraded through four tiers of enrichment. But there are only a limited amount of points distributed throughout the game, so the choosing of which area of performance to upgrade becomes a fundamental part of the experience, effectively conferring upon the player the ability to create their own strengths and weaknesses. Working hand-in-hand with these skill point upgrades are your nano-augmentations, physiologically altering enhancements to various portions of the body: Arms: Combat Strength or Microfibral Muscle, Legs: Speed Enhancement or Run Silent, Subdermal (1): EMP Shield or Ballistic Protection, Subdermal (2): Cloak or Radar Transparency, Torso (1): Aqualung or Environmental Resistance, Torso (2): Regeneration or Energy Resistance, Torso (3): Synthetic Heart or Power, Recirculator, Cranium: Aggressive Defense System or Spy Drone, Optics: Targeting or Vision Enhancement. Only one upgrade in each category can be chosen, and once upgraded the process is irreversible. Used in combination with skill point upgrading, you have complete control as to the nature of your character and--by extension--which particular pathways through the intricate webs of each mission scenario are best suited to your abilities. The audio potion is itself a further star; the ambient music behind the scenes alternatively bounces with irresistible futuristic techno rhythms or lays low and refracts the shadowy, mysterious atmospheric surroundings. Sometimes, as in the main Hong Kong market theme, the music itself is worth just stopping and listening to it. During conversation cut-scenes, the background music alters to appropriately intriguing themes that underscore the mood and implications of the dialogue.

Deus Ex was released by developer Ion Storm in the summer of 2000 for PC and later ported to the PlayStation 2 under the revised title of Deus Ex: The Conspiracy. The world prophesized by this game, evidenced before you, on the monitor right in front of you, didn't exist in 2000. Yet after 9/11/2001, it has begun to exist: the terror, the paranoia, the American government that chooses to lead its people with hollow slogans and the perpetuation of fear, that implores you to give up personal freedoms--the cornerstones the country was founded on--in the name of security in this, the bravest of new worlds. Throughout the game, you see it time and again; what were futuristic science fiction dream concepts in 2000 are hard realities in 2005, are indeed torn from the headlines of tomorrow's newspapers. And the game plays out in real-world locations, places that exist today, places with their own inherent sense of reality. It makes Deus Ex more than a game world, it makes it a real world, three dimensional, tangible, a place you can step into and become lost inside of. There has never been a game like it before, and there may never be one like it again. Without question, my favorite game experience ever, a place where I can go time and again, year after year, and become something more than I am, a real character created within the realms of real world, a place capable of supplanting other realities.

A great action and adventure hybrid, a must buy

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 5
Date: December 23, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Ok, I'll admit, the only reason I bought this game was because I played the sequel. But that doesn't change my feelings about this game, this game rocks, and it blew its sequel away. This game is an adventure/action game, and it goes together very well. And, since you die so easily in the game, you spend more time running through the areas and attacking at the same time, making it feel like a movie, the camera angles shift when someone talks, adding more to the cinematic experience. This game is almost unbeatable in the FPS genre, if you don't get it, you miss out on a bunch of great stuff games have ever done. (Oh and, if you read the review up above somewhere that gave this game two stars, pretend it never existed, because I think the person who did it is video game illiterate.)

Great Game!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 6
Date: February 01, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This is simpy one of the best games out there, ranking right up alongside Half-Life and other notable games. I found myself actually caring if an important NPC would make it or not, which is rare in many FPS. What makes this game great is the quality of gameplay and storyline, not the eye candy. The graphics are a dated (it's an old game) but the excellent and engrossing plot line overshadows that fact. This is hands down one of my favorite games, because it is strictly a PC game. Too many PC games today are also being made to run on the console, and so in my opinion the quality of these games goes down. Not in graphics but in gameplay overall; they make something that looks great but lacks soul. DE may look dated, but it has more soul than any other eye-candy game on the market will ever have.

Eeeexcelent

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 5 / 14
Date: March 16, 2005
Author: Amazon User

The style of this game is by far one of the best I think I have ever played. I am a big fan of Half-Life, and Half-Life 2, but they don't have the choices that you can make in this game. In HL you go through and shoot anybody and everybody. In HL2, you have to shoot most people, and only on occasion do you not. In Deus Ex, you pick and chose. If you don't like the way that guy is looking at you, how about just knock him out? If you were supposed to kill him, go back and say you did. You can chose to act and do whatever you want. I have only played the demo, and for 2005, the graphics are extremely out-dated, but that is okay, because the game style makes up for it. Should the graphics be shaped up some, and the AI finally figures out where it is going for most of the time, then this would be the perfect game, and I could literally play this, and only this game, forever.

PRO's:
Free Reign Over Actions.
Excelent Modification Form. (closes in on the D20 system)
Excelent Story Line.
Easy-To-Accept Premises.

CON's:
Graphics make it hard to tell what is happening always.
AI doesn't know what it is doing sometimes.
Long Wait for Shooting. (could be sped up just slightly)
* Apparently the ending is a letdown, but I don't know.

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