Everyone loves a conspiracy...
Graphics:
Deus Ex has many good points and one must be its immensely stylized graphics. It uses the old Unreal engine about a year after it was outdated by the Quake III engine, but it looks better for it, as it portrays a grim, but realistic future life everything less than perfect and a lived in feel to it, call me sad but also it is a very gothic style as well, as it is very dark but looks brilliant the whole time, apart from the occasional frame rate drop and the feeling of 'why wont it just be daytime.'
Sound:
As with the stylized graphics it must have something else to keep the mood, and the soundtrack does this very well, its darker style goes with the industrial style of music, with electronic sythesized soundtrack and one real highlight is a Hong Kong Nightclub with about 2 minutes in game time spent there but with 3 whole songs on a loop. The voice acting is for the whole good with the occational flat-toned idiot doing some terrible voice acting. (Tracer Tong really standing out...maybe Manderly too) With a half robotic cast thought, maybe it can get away with the awful german accents on Anna Navarre and Guther Hermann...
Story:
Now, this cannot be rated enough, this game has a fantastic story. (FULL STOP) with betrayals, backstabbing and the occasional romance (no, not really) but the interactiveness with the story is quite impressive, where you can make life changing desicions for important characters. With multiple endings and many little subtle differences mid-game, it has good replay value
Gameplay :
This is the main point of most of this games selling points, where there is 2 ways through each level and most of the time a different way round something, well thats not entirely true, as this game does have stealth, just its not a core part of it, but at least there is no need for the classically annoying stealth level, you can use stealth and it does help but sometimes, unlike what the game says, you cannot avoid being spotted, which can be a problem, as this action element is slower than most shooting games, and requires thinking before 'each shot' and this can become clunky, maybe it could get away with it, if it had been more focused on stealth?...
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Scores:
*Gameplay 9/10
*Graphics 10/10
*Sound 8/10
*Story 10/10
Overall: 9/10