Rant - Deus Ex: Invisible War

I never really cracked the original Deus Ex as I couldn’t get past the first level, and while this is just me making excuses for sucking at the game, I feel it failed on the same grounds as many action shooters. I’m asked to believe that I’m playing as some highly trained covert agent who’s also getting his badass kicked by random goons. This could be tagged ‘realism’ but it made it hard to find the game engaging, which is the point of the opening level. Fair enough I can choose what he is highly trained in but that just makes it stranger as he ends up either barely competent with one gun, clumsy with a handful, or completely useless with all firearms but pretty handy with computers. All this begs the question of what the fuck these guys were teaching him at government badass school. Apparently if I got over this hurdle the storyline is mind blowing but I find that hard to believe when the main character is the cyberpunk saviour of mankind named JC with his offsider, Paul, both of which are subtle as a bible in the face. I may get into this game one day and return to repent my sins, but in the meantime: Deus Ex 2.

The disembodied head of this first person shooter is Alex (if that’s a bible reference I didn’t pick up on it but I’m guessing it’s mostly just being versatile for the sake of the gender choice). Alex is a badass agent in training who is transplanted into a facility in a different city after his/her hometown was destroyed by an anonymous threat. This facility works well as the training grounds and has a good grasp of the player’s assumed knowledge, so it doesn’t waste too much time. As soon as I emerged from the ruins of this establishing mission I was asked to side with either a global corporation or religious extremists and clocked onto the moral of the story being ‘everyone is evil.’ However, while replaying, I discovered the game’s strongest storytelling element: the ability to kill anyone. If you blow a main character’s brains out as soon as they’re stupid enough to step out from behind bullet proof glass, the story will adjust itself to their absence. Suddenly instead of being a bitch to larger powers, Alex treated as a loose cannon with a “cavalier attitude towards human life”. While deciding which faction would ultimately save the day I even get a message from cyborg black marketers to the effect of “You hate them, Alex. You hate them. They are weak and made of flesh.”

Whichever extremist group you side with the ‘everyone is evil’ theory stays intact and there’s some solid dialogue in there, even if the flow of conversation makes any attempts at comedic timing clunky. The gameplay gives the player space and means to play either stealth or gung-ho and both are challenging and make good use of the biomods element. It’s a thought-provoking game that doesn’t slap me over the wrist if I decide to go clocktower on it, although I still can’t figure out why the box art went through three different episodes of Cyberpunk Makover.