Why I Dropped Deus Ex

I am going to be completely honest when I say that I thought that Deus Ex was mediocre at best.  I understand that a lot of people speak highly of the game, but I just have trouble getting myself to enjoy the game.  For as many things that the game seems to do right, there are a lot of things where I think the game has problems.

 

Deus Ex was groundbreaking material at the time, that much I can understand.  It has a great sense of atmosphere, being able to nail down the cyberpunk setting really well.  The story and the dialogue is really well done, and I found myself picking up random newspapers and books just to find out more about the world.  The soundtrack was also really well done, with the main theme that plays on the title screen coming to mind.

 

It should have been enough to make me play the game, correct?  Well, the gameplay did not live up to my expectations.  Sure, the game gives you a lot of different ways of letting you proceed through the game in just about every way possible, but I always felt like there had to be some best possible way to get through a mission.  For example, I had to make sure that I had the right number of keys and that I brought along a chocolate bar for this one mission.  I tried to let myself go of that and just play through the game without constantly checking up on what to do, but I just didn’t seem able to do that.

 

The controls didn’t make things much better.  Trying to be stealthy felt like an exercise in trial and error, so I found myself constantly reloading just to get it right.  I also didn’t like how clunky the combat felt.  I constantly found myself short on ammo, close range combat to be relatively useless, and often getting myself badly damaged in a lot of cases.  I felt like I was punished for not putting my skill points in the right places like I should have.

 

All of this lead me to taking forever to get through the few missions that I played through.  It makes me less motivated to complete the rest of the game.  I’m probably not going to finish this game, and I don’t see myself playing Invisible War if I didn’t like the first game all that much.  I’ll wait and see if Human Revolution is good enough to warrant a go, because the first game disappointed me.

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