Game Reviews

Mention the name Deus Ex around most that played it and you'll see their eyes pop wide and face flush with a rush of nostalgia. It was a first-person genre hybrid released back in 2000 that powerfully conveyed the feeling that your decisions mattered. As agent JC Denton, you hopped across the globe unraveling a conspiracy and expanding your skill set in an experience that wove role-playing game, skill building, plenty of character interaction, and thrilling action scenarios all into the same package. From infiltrating buildings to hacking into security systems, the game let you feel as though progression was a direct result of your decisions instead of an assembly line of scripted events. While the reception of the eventual sequel, Deus Ex: Invisible War, was less enthusiastic, Deus Ex remained a touchstone of the gaming world, and regularly appears on lists like our Top 25 PC Games of All Time and Top 100 Games of All Time here at IGN.

A decade later, the name may not be as recognizable to a new generation of gamers. Considering the original developer Ion Storm is no longer in operation, the Deus Ex name is being carried on by the recently formed Eidos Montreal studio, where development started in 2007. This third game in the series is being built as a prequel, so if you have no idea what Deus Ex is or why it's exciting, then you don't need to worry about playing catch-up to understand what's going on in this world. To get a sense of how it's all going to work, I had a chance to check out a live gameplay demo as well as talk to members of the team currently working to get the game finished and out the door by Spring 2011. JC Denton, the protagonist from the original, isn't around this time. In the upcoming game, called Human Revolution, you play as Adam Jensen. He's a security specialist working for a major corporation, Detroit-based Sarif Industries, that specializes in cybernetic modification. The year is 2027, a quarter century before the events of the first game, and the nanotechnology from the original still hasn't been fully developed. Instead, people affix mechanical augmentations to themselves to enhance perception and combat abilities. Surrounding this issue of transhumanism is an element of civil unrest as citizens swarm the streets of Detroit to protest the practice of modification. Like Deus Ex, it's a world of conspiracy where you'll never be sure who to trust, something you'll run into quite a bit while engaging in the game's conversation system and while pressuring in-game characters for information.