Well, it's been six weeks now since Deus Ex was unleashed on an unsuspecting UK public, and six weeks since I first went out and bought it. In those six weeks, except for the occasional surfacing for air, or for unavoidable duties (ECTS, sleep, food etc) I have played constantly, trying to complete the game. And guess what? I haven't yet. Although I suppose that's partly because I tend to replay certain sections several times. Why will become apparent.

At first glance Deus Ex looks a lot like a first person shooter. Certainly this is the family this game comes from, being built using the Unreal Tournament engine. It is just about here that the similarities between Deus Ex and what might be considered a traditional FPS like Unreal or Quake 3 ends. Deus Ex is very much a thinking game, and the sheer ambition shown makes itself evident within the first 5 minutes, when you look at something and suddenly notice that you can interact with it beyond blowing it up, pushing it or opening it. You can pick things up!

Obvious comparisons with System Shock 2 spring to mind, the interface being very similar. It's when you run into your first Non Player Character (NPC) that everything changes yet again. Prior art in this genre has always been exemplified by that in System Shock 2 (and not having played it's stable-mates Thief and Thief 2, I can't comment on whether or not those games take it any further), which was always a solitary world, you against everything else. Deus Ex instead incorporates you into a living world, with multiple storylines, multiple endings, and NPC's that work to their own agendas rather than purely reacting to your actions. And unlike just about every other game where you play the hero of the piece, in Deus Ex it very quickly becomes apparent that you are nothing more than a bit player, at least for the majority of the game.

The breadth of storyline and game play become very obvious when you realise that Sheldon Pacotti, the man responsible for the story itself, wrote almost 10,000 pages of dialogue. If you consider that an average two hour movie uses no more than about 750 pages of script, you can see the amount of work that has gone into creating a world that you can literally immerse yourself in. There are whole sections of dialogue that you may not come across no matter how many times you play the game. There are sections of dialogue that go on that have nothing at all to do with your character or the story - they're just conversations people are having. Whether you listen or move on is entirely up to the you.

The decision to use the Unreal Tournament engine would, at first glance appear to be an odd one, but the amount of additional work put into the engine has enabled the creation of a dynamic world, where you can interact with almost everything. The Unreal Tournament engine has been showing off it's versatility recently, with other titles such as Sanity: Aitken's Artifact using the engine in a top-down view, and Deep Space 9: The Fallen using a third-person viewpoint. The 'feel' of the engine is also very similar to Unreal Tournament itself, showing that the developers haven't tinkered too much with what is quite obviously a winning formula.

Deus Ex is not just a first person shooter though. There is also a rather large Role Playing element built in, based around your player character and the ability to augment certain areas of prowess, and to control your skills progression by training up certain areas based on the skill points you acquire along the way. Physical augmentations require the finding first of the augmentation canister containing the necessary nanites, then finding a medical bot to install the augmentation. Here is where hard decisions need to be made, based on the style of play you intend using, and on what you think will be coming up later in the game. Each augmentation slot can only be used once, and you generally have a choice of two types of augmentation to choose from.

Once you have chosen your augmentation path, other than the basic augmentations built in you can find and use augmentation upgrade canisters along the way. These increase the abilities that each augmentation gives you as a player. For example, the speed augmentation allows you to move faster than normal and jump higher than normal, with each successive upgrade increasing these abilities. Included in this package is a reduced damage from falling. The flipside to this augmentation is stealth. If you choose this option, you become silent when moving - and remember, enemies react to the sound of your footsteps. The choice is yours when you first come across this augmentation, and once made, you can't change.

The way this type of 'powerup' affects the game can be best summed up by the experiences of three people playing the same game. Myself, Speccy and Concrete have been playing the game over the last few weeks, and whilst we're all playing the same game, the experiences we've had, the augmentations we've chosen, and the way we've solved puzzles has been wildly different. For example, Concrete found an auto-heal augmentation that I didn't know existed, allowing him to heal damage on demand. I now how no free augmentation slots, so even if I do find this, I cannot use it. He's also chosen to follow the skills path of Heavy Weapons, allowing greater control over demolition devices coupled with the Strength augmentation, whilst I have taken the Hacking skills path, continually upgrading my computer and electronics skills (and lock picking of course) until I can bypass just about any device with ease, and can control remote turrets. Speccy, conversely, has opted for stealth, very quickly upgrading his sniper rifle to include a silencer and very much increased accuracy and range, although he's since switched from the 'softly softly' approach to one much closer to Concrete's 'Eat High-Ex Mofo!'.

On the whole, Deus Ex is a linear game, but only in that you have to get from point A to point B to complete the tasks you have been set. How you go about this is entirely up to you, and as a typical example, the first level (which is also the level available in the Deus Ex demo) has at least 4 different ways of completing that I have found, and I am sure that there are at least 4 more ways of going about it. There are entire sections of the game that I have not visited except by reloading old levels and trying something different, and despite playing the demo level (in the demo and in the full game) at least 12 times, I have not yet been down to the docks to see the Unacto plant - one of the options given you at the very beginning of the game.

Playing further, you will start to notice that whilst there are 'chapter' breaks, within each level there may be multiple level loads, and a small amount of exploration will show that each 'chapter' level is broken up into lots of smaller levels - presumably to reduce loading time. However, you are not limited in how you move about this larger level, with multiple entrances/exits to each 'load' area, along with the game engine tracking what items you have or haven't destroyed in each area, so there is a consistency when you move about. Unlike most other games, when you kill an NPC the body stays in full view, in the same place as you left it. And since NPC's react to corpses, you'd better hide anyone you kill if it's a public area!

One of the seriously amazing things about the way this game is structured, both with the map design, the storyline and the structure of the game as a whole, is that on replay, you are quite likely to find areas you didn't even consider existed within the game when you first played it. Sometimes, when nearly dead from wounds I would activate all my augmentations and just go for a random run around the area, dodging enemies as best I could and seeing what I could find. There are whole areas of the maps that you may not necessarily visit once you have chosen a path to reach your goal.

And it is the little thing you notice if you look hard enough. A lot of work has gone into the map design, but a lot of work has also obviously been put into the surrounding graphics such as textures, item models and enemy models. Each of the textures used fits perfectly in it's environment, and the item models are fitting. Lighting is used to great effect within the levels, often allowing you to hide in the shadows - literally - and not be observed. One thing I did notice is that almost the entirety of the game appears to be set at night, whether this is for plot purposes or otherwise I'm not sure. It does mean judicious use of your inbuilt torch and any night vision augmentations you may consider implementing.

It has taken me approximately 100 hours of game play to get to the last level, and the weapon/augmentation path I have chosen is almost halfway between sneaky and blow everything up, meaning I have to take my time about each section as I don't quite have the sneak ability to get past undetected, and I don't quite have the firepower to go in all guns blazing. Exploration, thinking about different possible ways of achieving my goal, and perhaps of bypassing certain areas are all options I must consider. And I must also make a moral judgement. What it is you'll have to discover for yourself.

So, the final analysis? Despite a number of annoying bugs, the sheer depth o story and attention to detail embedded within this game make it a sure fire winner for just about anyone who enjoys adventure games, whilst the presentation of the interface means that action or first-person shooter fans will be able to easily enter the game world. And once there you will not want to leave. Deus Ex is an absolute classic, and a must buy for anyone who likes involving computer games.