Deus Ex

Deus Ex, however, was the final revolution in perhaps the most stale genre of computer gaming. They took something that was completely mindless and gave it substance. The plot is deep and engaging, the dialogue scenes are excellent, the soundtrack is heavily addictive, and of course the gameplay was greatly changed from Doom/Wolfenstein style.

For one thing, ammo is actually somewhat scarce, especially for larger weapons. While your character can carry far more than anyone could ever fit under a trench coat, his inventory is limited. It is difficult to go through the game doing nothing but running into crowded rooms and firing plasma everywhere as the pitiful guards fight back with their pellet guns. The assault rifle, for example, runs through a clip very quickly and it takes awhile to reload. Even if you do manage to gun down two guys at close range before you run out, you will have taken plenty of damage before you're finished with them. Not too bad, right, but OOPS! the bad guys forgot to leave a dozen healing potions in the middle of the hall for your convenient consumption and because of all that racket the alarm was rung and reinforcements are on the way. In fact, you could have avoided the whole situation if you had gone into the air shafts, opened that grating on the cieling, and took care of them nice and easy with tranquilizer darts. That's right. You actually have to THINK in this game. There's often an easier way out that will allow you to save your resources and health for the next mission.

Deus Ex easily ranks among the best games I've ever played. I've had few more engaging gaming experiences. You can even choose how the game will end! In the routine shooter, there are no choices, only trigger pulling.

Multiplayer was aadded by a great developer team for free
Game is super fun to play overall

CONS:
Voice acting can get cheesy at times
looks wierd in Direct3d/ and openGL mode is substandard
AI is not as smart as newer games and the enemies are easily fooled into thinking that you no longer exist
You will often think about this game when not even playing it
You may feel obligated to wear black glasses and a trenchcoat
When you first hear ICARUS say, "I now have full control of all of your systems" you may lose bladder control.

First and most importantly, there is almost never a single "right" way to accomplish a mission. It is usually possible to use brute force, stealth, high-tech skills, or some combination to accomplish your goals. The levels are very detailed, with lots of different characters, objects, alternate routes, and secret passages. In many cases, characters will respond to you differently and even provide you with different tools or information depending on the means that you use to accomplish a task. Even after re-playing this game from start to finish at least 10 times, I still stumble on new ways to accomplish missions, new character dialogues, and new areas or features that I had never discovered before.

Second, you have an remarkable degree of flexibility in the way that you customize your character as the game progresses. There are about a dozen different skills, including different weapons skills (pistols, rifles, explosives, heavy weapons), technical skills (lockpicking, electronics, computers), and miscellaneous skills (swimming, medicine). As the game progresses, you accumulate skill points, which you use to increase your proficiencies in whichever skills you want. The different skills give you different ways to accomplish missions, and they have a profound effect on the way you play the game. This is a game that requires some thinking; many of the missions require some initial reconaissance and the development of a good tactical plan, rather than simply rushing in with guns blazing. This is especially true on the game's higher difficulty levels. Often the first or most obvious solution is not necesarily the best.

There are, naturally, a couple of problems. First, I have tried this game out on several computers, including a brand new computer that is well beyond the recommended specs, and it is often somewhat choppy, even with the graphic details turned all the way down. There are quite a few on-line guides on ways to optimize the game's performance; you will probably need to consult these and do some fine-tuning to get it running at its best.

Second, although a minor point, the voice acting is so bad that it is actually funny, and some of the foreign accents (in Hong Kong and Paris, for example) are really a hoot.

Overall, this game goes so far beyond most of what is out there that you might find that it raises the bar for what you expect from games in the future. For example, I could never play half-life again after playing Deus Ex, because it just seemed so two-dimensional.