Deus Ex - Game of the Year Demo

The video games industry has seen its share of near-perfect releases which revolutionized their genre, raised the bar for the next generation and provided the players with new ways to enjoy their hobby. Hence, titles like Half-Life, Starcraft and Doom paved the way to modern video games, thanks to the developers who put their wild ideas into practice and came out winners on the other end.

Deus Ex is by far one of the best examples of this kind, since it is frequently mentioned as being one of the best games ever released and it somehow makes an appearance in two categories at the same time: FPS and RPG. Although a mix of this sort may not seem inappropriate today when basically every release tries to incorporate as many genres as possible at once, it truly was something inspiring at the time, especially since the blend was masterfully created by the geniuses at Ion Storm.

However, before the gameplay, one must mention the engaging universe in which the story takes place, because it definitely has a great impact on the overall atmosphere and the frequent plot twists certainly give you plenty of reasons to keep on playing. Thus, it all takes place in the sort of near future, around 2050 or so, when the world is riddled with crime, corruption and disease. The main storyline revolves around the latter, since a gruesome pandemic called “Gray Death” is spreading around the world and those who cannot afford the antidote die by the millions.

Your character is an agent by the name of JC Denton and he works for UNATCO, an organization created in order to preserve international peace and resolve conflicts, one way or another. Hence, your job includes quite the long list of requirements, including assassination and information theft. The interesting part, however, is that Denton is also an augmented human, meaning that parts of his body are actually replaced with superior nanotechnology, which acts as quite the ability booster.

Once you are sent on a mission, these augmentations can come in handy if you wish to relinquish the need for weapons and just take care of the job with your bare hands. The beauty of Deus Ex is the fact that you can basically approach the missions in any manner possible, whether it's through stealth and subterfuge, or brute force and big weapons. Depending on what you choose, the missions can yield different results and your skills increase accordingly, hence the role-playing part.

The large selection of body augmentations and weapons should provide you with basically countless ways of playing the game, since you can definitely replay the missions as many times as you want without going the same way twice. This freedom is still hard to believe even today, let alone at the time of its release. Naturally, there are a few things that can go wrong as well, such as bugs caused by the multitude of variables that must be taken into consideration, but almost all of them are fixed in the GOTY edition.

There aren't too many bad things one could say about Deus Ex, not even a decade and a half after its release and two sequels later. The original game truly mastered the concept of stealth and freedom of choice, while also engaging the players with a well-written story and a captivating universe filled with intrigue and gruesome conspiracies.

Moreover, the RPG elements that are present tremendously increase the game's replay value, since you can opt for different augmentations and skills every single time, in order to experience a different playthrough. Thus, you can get many hours of gameplay out of it and see the story from a wide array of different angles as well.