If you don't know, Deus Ex is one of my favourite games. It's a 2000 PC classic released at the peak of the Golden Age that combines shooting, roleplaying, and stealth to create an experience never seen before or since. Even it's inferior sequels/prequels/awful mobile games keep trying to scale things back down.
Obviously, being from 2000 and looking like it's from 1998, the game hasn't aged brilliantly. I still think it's one of the best games out there, but I'm always hesitant before reccomending it to anyone. If you don't turn play the tutorial and don't re-bind the autosave key then you're not going to make it past the first level. Whilst it's not nearly as unforgiving as System Shock 2, where you can die in the first ten mins if you didn't build your character correctly, you can still render the game infinitely more annoying by making the wrong decisions...and it's very easy to make them. 'Swimming' and 'Medicine' remains pointless, upgrading melee weapons is only useful if you're using the riot baton because you get a freaking lightsaber one quarter of the way through the game, tranquiliser darts are useless until fully-upgraded, and stealth-takedowns do the Thief thing where they sometimes just don't work.
So it's nice of the team behind Deus Ex: Revision to completely ignore these flaws when making their mod, which is now available on Steam for free.
No, that wasn't sarcasm. I always pair Deus Ex with System Shock 2 because these are both games with huge faults...yet if you remove these faults then you remove the game. Yes, Half Life has those platforming sections and Half Life 2 has those gimmicky physics puzzles - but take them away and what do you have? You just have a shoot-em-up.
Instead, 'Revision' opts to adress another reason why Deus Ex can put off new players: the level design.
Whilst you can make a valid arguement that the textures, 3D models, and character designs are all pretty bad because that's the best technology in 2000 could do - Thief (released two years prior) proved that the layout doesn't have to be so rectangular. Roads and pavements don't have to have 90 degree angle turns. Buildings can actually have slanted roofs. You can throw down skirting boards, carpets, handrails, panels - not everything has to be made out of a series of grey shoeboxes.
It's worth bearing in mind, however, that Deus Ex certainly may not have the prettiest design; but it's exceptionally functional. There were multiple routes to the objective, buildings were for the most part actual buildings with countless nooks and crannies. It war rectancular, but then again; think about how many buildings in the world are just rectangles. The majority of the buildings in the world of Deus Ex are pre-milennial, and this is supposed to be a dystopia. It's so odd that Human Revolution has shiny, modern designs when the whole idea behind the world of Deus Ex is that the development of the common man is being repressed by conspiracy. The enviroments are just old places with 'modern' technology slapped on them. It's like when an elderly person buys a new TV, and that enourmous monolith looks so out of place next to the net-curtains and green wallpaper.
Yes, some levels felt a bit smaller than they could have been. Apparently the global anti-terrorist defense force only employs about twenty people and the Hong Kong markets consist of about six stalls. However, this is because during the games development, originally the levels were so large that the game would frequently crash - so they had to be cut down otherwise only the most elite players would be able to play the game. Also, the game had problems with long load times and ridiculously large save-files. Thankfully, almost sixteen years later, these are nothing to worry about thanks to PC hardware improving so much.
And whilst the levels weren't as expansive as the developers wanted them to be, they're still impressive. Versalife looks, feels, and is laid out exactly like a set of offices. There are a ton of nooks and crannies left to explore. Hong Kong isn't as big as Hengsha in Deus Ex: Human Revolution - but I still love the feeling you get when you realise there's an entire foreign town that you've been left to explore at your own leisure.
I will say though that I like the increase in cover and flora. Whilst it's a tad unecessary in the later levels, it's a nice addition to the earlier stages where often you're forced to use stealth for the sake of ammo conservation. Of course, the hardcore players like me don't need the extra cover because we know where all the blind spots are. We know these maps better than we know our hometowns.
It's also great seeing the new lighting. In fact, this is one of the only Deus Ex mods that improves on this aspect. Both Hells Kitchen and Hong Kong really come to life as they're both bathed in this red, atmospheric glow. It perfectly compliments the fact that this game is always set at night. The narrative makes a playful jab at how protagonist JC Denton always wears sunglasses, but it never explains how Denton or any of the other character never need to sleep.
Aside from this, the new level layout is rarely drastic. There are more offices in UNACTCO, a couple of corridoors have been lengthened, walls have been added, props have been added, buildings have more decorations, the Hong Kong police station no longer consists of two rooms, the Paris catacombs are even more annoying to navigate, and Area 51 is even stranger. Perhaps the most noticable difference is that computers are freaking everywhere. Where there was one PC in the original game, there's about ten now. It's as though the modders thought it wasn't obvious enough that this is supposed to be set in 2050.
The game comes with two previous mods: 'Shifter' and 'BioMod.' 'Shifter' adds several new gameplay features, both new and stuff cut or incomplete from the original. It's often the 'go-to' mod for many, yet I personally dislike it. I just can't stand how loot is now randomised and you get xp points by killing people. It means you will never run out of ammo and will be able to upgrade every skill. The reason why the roleplaying works so well in Deus Ex is because you have to play a role. It's not as restrictive as System Shock 2, but you're going to have to skip over certain skills. You can't be an ace with both heavy weapons and rifles. You can't beef up both your combat abilities and your infiltration (lockpicking, hacking, etc) skills. In 'Shifter,' however, it's possible to have every skill upgraded to at least 'Advanced.'
For every step 'BioMod' takes forward, it seems to take two back. 'Swimming' is replaced with 'Athletics' - meaning that as well as swimming you can also improve your jump height and run speed. The problem here is that you're almost immobile until you upgrade this skill. You cannot actually progress through the third mission unless you level up enough to jump across a gap - meaning you have to waste your precious upgrade points just to be able to pass one section. Another alteration is that combat armor, rather than being on a timer, stays equipped until you recieve a certain amount of damage. But this means you can break the combat by going through entire levels wearing ballistic armor.
Thankfully you can turn these mods off and stick to 'Normal' - which still doesn't remove the alterations 'Revision' makes, but at least it attempts to stick to the original intent of the designers. However, this doesn't mean you can turn off the new music.
The music is good, but it's not Deus Ex. It's the sort of music you would hear in Deus Ex: Invisible War. It's minimalist, atmospheric, and nothing like the original. I'll admit that the Paris catacombs theme got old very quickly in the original. and I understand that with new enviroments added then the game needs more music to fill the extra space...but why replace the original soundtrack? There was nothing wrong with it!
It's that, or the music is just a reworked version of the original score. This is pointless since the original score was in MIDI - and if you know how MIDI works then you'll know that the sound quality of a MIDI track improves based on your hardware. And the original synth music has aged really well anyway.
The exception of this is the theme tune, which never really worked because it attempted to mimic an orchestra whilst the rest of the games music just did it's own thing. But rather than patch in the official orchestral remaster of the theme song, the modders decided to 'update' the theme with a new version that just sounds horrible. The developers of this mod have said they wanted to add new music because "they wanted to see if they could do better." Well, you haven't. Can we have the old music back now?
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| I...don't remember this room... |
I think this might be a glitch, but I've played this game many times before on 'Hard' (because I know Deus Ex so well, it's my default choice if I want any sort of challenge) and I've never lost my legs. Gunter's never stepped over my panting, bleeding body saying "I think you're OK to clear the next floor."
I can't aim with the pistol or tranquiliser, even when I upgrade my skill to 'Trained' and add a laser mod. Even when you wait for the reticle to shrink, the laser-sight shows how scattered your aiming is. I had no choice but, which again suffers from that whole 'it only has about a 70% chance of suceeding' thing. Yet it's even worse because hitting enemies straight on can't knock them out at all know. I must've played this game all the way through about fifteen times, and even when I once played through on the hardest difficulty, I wasn't struggling this much.
The rocket launcher also has more recoil and more penalties, meaning it's no where near as fun to use. I have a long list of things that Deus Ex could fix, but "make the game harder" isn't one of them. This is another reason why I dislike all the other mods that alter the gameplay, because they make the game difficult when it's already challenging enough. Yes, enemies can die in one headshot - but so can you. Deus Ex remains more forgiving than System Shock 2, but that's like saying Pol Pott wasn't as bad as Hitler. He still buried people alive, you know...
As a free mod, this is interesting but it doesn't do enough to call itself a full re-interpretation and it does too much to be considered an update. I still think that one of the best mods ever made is 'The System Shock Community Patch' for System Shock 2. Why? Because it's just System Shock 2 but with a nightmarishly large amount of bugfixes plus some graphical and gameplay tweaks to make the whole experience run better. It improves on the game whilst never losing what System Shock 2 is about.
If you want Deus Ex but with improved graphics then you can just download 'New Vision' and 'HDTP.' If you want a re-imagining of what Deus Ex could have been then there's 'GDX' - a mod that adds some really impressive graphical alterations whilst also shaking up the combat and completely re-balancing skills and enemy behavior. But until someone fuses 'New Vision, 'HDTP,' the graphical changes of 'GDX' and 'Shifter's bugfixes together then we'll never truly have a Deus Ex mod that works like 'The System Shock Community Patch.'
In fact, I could start a mod that changes some of the voice-acting and tries to add variety to NPC models. Give me a few moments....
