All of the hullabaloo around Cyberpunk 2077 put me in the mood for some lowercase-C cyberpunk content so I booted up the original Deus Ex. If you aren’t familiar with Deus Ex, it’s a game from 2000 about world governments using the vaccine for a deadly virus to control the population. You play as a nano-augmented special agent from the UN that fights “terrorists” who previously decapitated the Statue of Liberty. So… yeah. “Terrorists” in quotes here because, from what I’ve played, I have a feeling they’re more justified in their vaccine-stealing behavior than your UN bosses let on. At any rate, they call you “pig” and “fascist” while you shoot at them, so that’s very realistic. On one hand, I want to finish this game so that I can properly have a think about what all it’s trying to convey - I don’t want to do a bunch of bad takes in this blogpost because I massively misinterpreted this game’s politics from the first two missions. But on the other hand, real life fascists ransacked the capitol less than a week ago and it all feels a bit too close to home, so I think I’ll take a break.
Things that impressed me:
- Physics: I was amazed that I could just pick up a flower pot and chuck it across the room in the tutorial. Absolutely wonderful. Lots of verisimilitude despite the low polygon count.
- Level design: it’s very cool how much content the devs were able to pack into these (by modern standards) small levels. It really invites you to explore and find creative strategies to reach the mission objective despite each mission being its own discrete thing.
- Characters: My favorite character dialogue so far is when your coworkers make fun of your badass Matrix ninja trenchcoat. JC Denton is somewhat of a stereotypical stoic sci-fi badass sort of a guy, but everyone else isn’t, and this makes a lot of conversations really really funny to me, because someone will mock JC for wearing sunglasses at night, and he’ll just be like “my vision is augmented”. I also really enjoy that you have a brother. The brotherly interactions humanize your character and provide a nice counterpoint to the straight-to-business nature of most other conversations.
Things I didn’t like:
- Combat gameplay is just not up to a modern standard.
- Resource management feels super unforgiving. As far as I can tell, there’s no reliable way to replenish the mana you need to power your augmentations and I never felt like I had enough ammo/tools to do what I wanted. Lots of reloaded saves were spent just figuring out how to use my tools in an efficient way.
- It’s so dark! I installed GMDX, so maybe that’s my whole problem, but I swear to god you should not have to burn so much bioenergy or whatever to turn your flashlight on just to see normally. My hunch is it’s something to do with using a newer lighting engine but not actually adding more light sources to the environment. But between streetlamps and light pollution it should not be so impossible to see at night in NYC.