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FPS for SF fans!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 13 / 13
Date: August 12, 2000
Author: Amazon User

A friend, who clearly knows me pretty well, sent me a copy of this game. I've already returned the favor for a great friend of mine - it's the game we've been waiting for.

The plot is futuristic and 'cyber' - you're a near-future supersoldier, a first-generation nano-bio-augmented replacement for the U.N.'s squad of mechanically augmented black op "robocops." Think Robocop meets Gibson meets X-files, with shades of Heinlein and Delany (there's a reference to 'Ashton Clark') thrown in in the beautifully crafted world that is your context.

The complicated plot unfolds in real time as you progess through the game, and there is a bit of role-playing - choices you make affect how your game is going to go, to some extent at least. You can certainly affect how your character develops - is he going to be a LAW-toting grenade throwing gun thug a la Duke Nukem, or a slip-through-the-shadows backdoor hardware hacker? Choose your own adventure.

Gameplay is based on the Unreal engine, as noted. It's fair to mention that you need a bit of hardware to make this puppy run well. For the scenic parts (i.e. briefings at HQ), I use high detail on textures and objects, but for combat I have to turn the detail down to medium, or else aiming is jerky and the baddies blast me in between frames. I'm running a B&W G3 with the stock Rage 128 card and 128MB of RAM - the game requires disk VM turned on so that its partition can be 160 MB. I run it with most extensions off (it needs RAVE) and it's only hard-crashed me once, although it tends to leak memory at about the 8-hour mark, requiring a civilized reboot.

What else to say? Music is great and the game experience is totally immersive and great fun. The authors have the feel of the genre down perfectly. And having been on the NYC subway system too much lately, I had a bit of a thrill when (in-game) some young punk drug dealer mouthed off, then drew a pistol on me in the Battery Park station.

BLAM.

5 stars. Buy it now. Then set aside a little free time and break up with your significant other. You can always buy him/her a bunch of flowers, after you've solved it.

An excellent FPS/Role Playing game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 12 / 13
Date: June 18, 2000
Author: Amazon User

As a friend of mine put it, "this game will beat you up and take your lunch money." It's based on the Unreal engine (think UnrealTournament) and the graphics are just as smooth. It has a fairly intuitive interface and a nice plot line. But the real strength of this game is the role-playing slant that it has. By making certain choices in the game you customize your character to be what you want him to be. For example, if you feel like going in guns-a-blazing, grab the huge weapon. Like the Thief approach? Grab the silent crossbow and the lock picks. In addition, you can also augment certain skills such as strength, weapons skills, swimming, lock picking, computer skill, electronics, etc that help you along. Become better at shooting rifles and the sniper rifle won't kick as badly every time you shoot. Get better as bypassing computer security and you'll be able to do it faster and stay undetected longer. Bottom line? Get this game. It's worth it.

Might be my game of the year

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: August 01, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Deus Ex might be my game of the year. It's an adventure RPG that actually allows you to role-play to some extent. It looks great and plays great. Its closest predecessors are System Shock 2 and Thief, two games the Macintosh community missed.

The missions are open-ended and large. You can explore huge detailed maps, finding the approach to your goals that suits your playing style. Want to sneak and use your silent crossbow loaded with tranq darts? Want to snipe from the rooftops? Or want to go in with assault rifle blazing? You can do all that and more. You can pick locks or blow doors off their hinges with bombs. Your choices affect how the NPCs react to you later in the game. Really!

I liked the NPCs in this game very much. There are a lot of them, moving around, and they often have a lot to say to you. Or you can listen in on their conversations with each other. Some aren't so relevant to the game's plot, but are fun anyway. Listen for two homeless men talking about sculpture...

How good is the Macintosh port? It's good. And what's more, the Macintosh version lagged the PC version by less than a month. Deus Ex is based on the Unreal Tournament engine, which helped make the port fast. Performance is great on my G4 with its Voodoo3 card, and should be acceptable on the ATI Rage cards that come standard in recent Macs. Anything with a G3 processor or better should be able to handle it.

Make sure you check Inside Mac Games or Aspyr's web site for game updates. There's one update already at the time I write this review.

What a great game!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 5
Date: December 29, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Deus Ex is a very difficult game to classify, judging by the shoot-em-up feel of the first mission (which takes place on a destroyed Statue of Liberty, very poignant after 9/11) you would think its an FPS, but the game is much deeper and includes areas where puzle-solving, free exploration and stealth are key.

The graphics are perhaps the weakest point of Deus Ex, the game relies on the somewhat dated Unreal engine, so many of the huge scenes seem a bit pixelated. However, the developers do their best to make the scenery look real, as a former resident of New York I recognized Battery Park, Castle Clinton, Liberty Island etc. and they seemed remarkably accurate. The building scenes (UNATCO HQ, the MJ12 secret lab, etc.) are also very well done and realistic.

The plot of this game is simply the best written and most enthralling of any videogame I have ever played. I won't describe it in detail except to say that after a couple of days I had the following epipheny: "Deus Ex" was not pronounced "dooze ex" but "day oos ex" and was short for the literary term Deus Ex Machina, Latin for "God from the Machine" Also note that the main character's initials are JC and his brothers name is Paul. The plot is very deep, takes many twists and turns and despite its improbabillity it has a way of suspending your disbelief.

In conclusion Deus Ex is simply awesome, but only play it if you have a couple of weeks to blow on a videogame, 'cause this one is seriously addictive.

Finally, a game that isn't afraid to be smarter than you are

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 6
Date: August 13, 2004
Author: Amazon User

This is one of the best computer games ever, and the best single-character role playing game.

After the first few hours of playing Deus Ex, I was impressed the complexity of the combat system. The tactical maps reward exploration, the hit point system is body-location specific instead of general (so a critical blow against a head is much different from one against a leg), and there are so many ways to approach a probem that it makes the "multisolution" system of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic look like Tic Tac Toe. The options of long-range sniping, getting up close and personal with melee weapons or unleashing with automatic weapons and grenades also contribute to a great first person shooter experience.

After the first day, I was impressed with how the game went out of its way to set the mood of another world, the fact that if you wander into the women's restroom an NPC will make a sarcastic comment, and how almost every non-player character has something to say. I was particularly blown away by how experience is awarded not for killing things, but for "exploration bonuses", "progress awards" and "achieved objective awards". Too many games reward the entirely unrealistic activity of looking for danger, while in Deus Ex there is little point to looking for an unnecessary fight.

I moved the game from the "really good" to the "ridiculously good" column after it passed the 'toilet' and 'Asian languages' tests. Have you ever noticed that people in computer games almost never have to go the bathroom, and that even large buildings don't have any toilets? And also that games that have a lot of toilets, such as the Fallout series, tend to be really good role playing games? Deus Ex has a lot of restrooms, with toilets that you can flush. The second test is one that I've never actually seen in a game - the use of an actual Asian language rather than a bunch of scribbles. Having spent about 6 years of my life studying Japanese, the fact that most games don't even try to use a real writing system for signs supposedly set somewhere in Asia is really annoying. Deus Ex does in the chapter set in Hong Kong, and it is so well done that I was able to tell stalls in the market apart by their Chinese-language signs. Major respect due to the designers for their attention to this detail that everyone else ignores!

Finally, when NPCs began to give in-depth speeches on the nature of the relationships among society, the individual and government I decided that this game was off the charts. It is the rarest of computer games - a first-person shooter role playing game that builds its foundation on ideas. The graphics are a bit dated, but the graphics are not the reason to play this game. Unless you need your games to be non-stop explosions and gunfire, you need to get this game.

Awsome!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: June 18, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Deus Ex is the best first/third person shooter available. Along with almost total freedom, this game takes technology to the next level bye using smooth 3-D graphics. The weapons are based on futuristic ideas and blue-prints. Everybody looks for a game that doesn't stop you when you reach the perimeter of the level. Deus Ex is the game. You can go almost any where. ...

Hours of Fun

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: February 23, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Well, this is the second game I've gotten since my girlfriend let me play on her computer, I'm just gonna have to say that I'm having trouble getting to bed at night. The storyline is great, the Game gives you that Bladerunner, Terminator feeling. On the other hand I feel like my opinion is a little biased, because I'm just an infant with these games. I mean the last time I played a first person shooter, it was Quake. There are minor flaws with the game.They don't actually take away from the game play, but they can get pretty annoying after a while. Like mentioned before by others, the AI. They have got to be some of the most retarded guys I've ever shot with a 10mm. A few times it really got on my nerves to run around in circles trying to shoot them. Other than that, there's really not too much to complain about. I'm probably only about a 10th of the way through the game, but I know i'm gonna finish it through the end. For anyone pondering on getting the game, go ahead and get it. You'll have a good time. but what always make me wonder is that I never had anything to really complain about with Doom and Quake, they were basically perfect games, and even though I enjoy Deus Ex, I shouldn't even notice things I don't enjoy about the game, I should just be plain enjoying it.

Great Game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 19
Date: June 26, 2000
Author: Amazon User

This is gonna be one great game for Mac

My Favorite Game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: September 24, 2004
Author: Amazon User

This is my favorite video game. I've had it for a couple years now, and I can still go back and play it again. There's always something I missed before, something I didn't explore, a different approach to a problem. The only real issue I have with the game is that the plot gets really stupid about two thirds of the way through the game. The levels are all brilliantly designed and laid out. The missions are all fun and chalenging, except the very last level which suffers from sucktion. There is a lot of character interaction with poor at best voice acting. Still this is my favorite game.

"Use za LAM" ~ Gunther Hermann.

Through the LookingGlass Darkly

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: September 09, 2001
Author: Amazon User

One does not play "Deus Ex"--one plays in the dark world of off-kilter chaos, oppression, and secrets. No one will have the same game experience as UNATCO agent J.C.Denton--one can play to take every enemy out--with extreme prejuidice--or one can play the way I play--combining stealth with sniper tacrics (and an occasional GEP rocket launched or LAM hurled for good measure.) Winding one's way through these graphics--from the sewers of Hell's Kitchen to the reflective floors of UNATCO HQ and VersaLife--will dazzzle one's eyes--feels like the silver age "Detective Comics" have come to life on my flat panel. The only game that will be better will be "Deus Ex 2"!

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