Deus Ex™ GOTY Edition

Deus Ex is arguably the best game EVER. In all of history. Why? Choice. In Deus Ex you can choose to be good or evil, you can choose to be stealthy or aggressive, you can choose to be snarky or sincere. These choices impact the game in two ways. Firstly they totally transform how your gameplay will be. Choose heavy weapons and you will be kicking in the front door and looking for the guards, but choose the tranq darts and you will be taking totally different routes through the same buildings to reach your goal and different routes again to if you go the sniper route. Secondly they will change the reactions other characters have towards you in ways which really make you feel it. The genius of DX is the supporting cast who are subtly fleshed out so you feel their praise or disappointment in a big way, and you care about if they make it or not through the plot. Now I could tell you the plot is incredible, or that the dialogue is quotable as hell, but that isn't the point. The game design, how it rewards you and shapes your experience of the game is what matters, and in this department Deus Ex has never been bettered. The replay value is huge, the designers thoughts of every way you could try and break it and you will delight in seeing some of the pre-recorded dialogue which greets your attempts to subvert them. For $10 this is the greatest bargain for years, snap it up now!

Having been a gamer for decades; calling something "The best game of all time" is a huge claim, and that title goes to Deus Ex.

If not, it's in the top 5.

Deus Ex was a game made in the year 2000, and boy does it feel like it. It's not just in some of the political commentary feeling a bit quaint; the game is very buggy on modern systems . Had to mess around with renderers quite a bit to actually be able to see things, and even then, I had vanishing textures everywhere. As for the game itself, it's somewhat lacking in focus due to the developers not knowing how to properly balance things. The game isn't as open ended as it appears; there are often multiple ways to complete an objective, but in practice there is only one way available to you because of the way you've built J.C. This extends to the weapon balance, where all nonlethal options other than the stun prod are generally nonviable (and pointless, as there is a human enemy type that explodes on defeat, not to mention certain story events that canonically make J.C. a killer) and meanwhile you would be a fool not to carry around a GEP gun. The game may have stealth, but it's often much more trouble than it's worth (sometimes it's barely even possible), and explosives are your friend. Other gameplay foibles include the enemy patrol being seemingly random and ladders being a complete pain. Where the game really shines is its atmosphere. The modeled textures, the cyborgs and robots, the synthwave soundtrack, the bums huddling around fire barrels all the same, the beep boop sound effects, it knows how to do cyberpunk well. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that a lot of the soundtrack was compressed in such a way that it could have come straight out of an SNES Final Fantasy game. Guess that's Square Enix for you. I won't comment on the story so much other than to say that it probably will railroad you more than you might want and it does have the Endingtron 5000 problem, if a bit less pronounced. Solid espionage thriller stuff otherwise. It's a good thing this game is more than the sum of its parts. Some of those parts are showing age.

Just perfect