Deus

"More death than a Venezuelan snuff film....."

Perhaps something like Deus happened when God created the universe. Even heaven and earth would've been a tidy achievement, without the complications of man, woman, love, sin and the information superhighway. Deus is an overcomplicated montage of good intentions and senseless results. Unlike our world however, Deus, with its banks of menu screens and frustrating control system, makes survival almost impossible.

It takes two hours to make progress in this 3D first-person adventure. Once you've stopped scrabbling with the manual as you're stabbed into mincemeat, you're into a whole new world of pain. Cause of death: suffocation. You look around for garrottes, then realise the vaguely undulating ground was a swamp. Cause of death: violent trauma. Damn, that was a cliff. Cause of death: drowning. Although everything seemed dandy, you were, in fact, underwater too long and you're now dead. Cause of death: venom. Not laughing, you were delirious.

Basically, Deus is SimWimp. You are the galaxy's weediest mercenary and the game's 21 fatal afflictions prove it. If only the sadists had stopped with a hormone pack or some aspirin, the medicine might have been fun. But Deus is Casualty without the nurses, or any hope of pulling through. You can lose your sight in one eye, go blind, you can amputate your own gangrenous leg and hop across the well-rendered countryside. Just like in real life, you can also interrupt a fight to the death to perform vital field surgery.

These details might have made this a great game if the essentials had been sorted out first. But a game including Hypotensive pills, yet missing a decent, customisable control system is fatally flawed. A game that is so realistic it forces you to sleep, but doesn't enable you to climb most hills, is dead on arrival.

Ironically, Deus was marketed as a survival sim. It's obvious, though, that Silmarils tried to do better than Doom and failed. But did Deus make the transition to an adventure game? No. You can't even talk to other characters. All you can do is fight, and you're not very good at that.

It could have been so different. With half as many weapons and diseases and more time spent on a decent combat or adventure game engine, Simlmarils' obvious enthusiasm might have been translated in to a classic game. But it didn't. Such a shame.

For:
In a sense it was ambitious.

Against:
Dated. Can't even compare to the classic Doom.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 02/27/02, Updated 02/27/02