To present all this Deus Ex uses the infamous Unreal engine with some of Ion Storm's own tweaks. The most important part of the game, the interface has been overhauled to include an inventory, mission objectives, skill development screen, conversations logs and an augmentation where you can mange your Nano enhancements. The interface is incredible easy to use, The game uses a lot of conversations and lots of important information is given through them it's good to have the conversation log to keep tack of everything, and Deus Ex is provided with a tutorial to guide you through.

The general look of the game is dark, moody and futuristic just like the X-Files, made so as to build upon the conspiracy theory type of story, the game is not the best of today's 3D engine usage but it includes everything one could need, good animations, reasonable frame rates and so on. One shining part of the modifications done by Ion Storm are the facial animations: characters blink, Always face you when talking, move their lips realistically when talking to you and their facial skins are very highly detailed. But Deus Ex's D3D support is shaky at it's best, even a TNT2 was brought to it's knees at 800*600 and only playable at 640*480, don't even try 1280*768. But on Voodoo Banshee card at 1280*768 the game worked smoothly, it's still surprising that Ion Storm has not fixed the D3D support of the unreal engine, even Unreal Tournament handles D3D much better now (after Epic Mega Games' patches), then it did back when it was released, surely Ion Storm could have done the same.

Deus Ex is very freeform, there might be only one story to get through, but there are a lot of puzzles and ways to solve them, for example you come across a door but it's locked, the game gives you tons of choices to overcome it. Locks pick it, go and look for a key, take air duct passage through to it or in the extreme cases blow it open. Of course puzzles are not always as easy and simple as getting a door open they vary a lot from mission to mission. Even in conversations you can take choices by exactly what you say, or what you find about the people you talk to. Not only does this relate to the overall story but also to other parts, there are many small "quests" for you to solve for other people; to find something, kill some one, or find evidence to get more weapons for yourself all rewarded usually by valuable information, keys or weapons. Along the way in the game you can enhance much of your skills and add Augmentations, Skills are basically specialization in different areas like low tech weapon handling to hacking into personal computers, a higher level rating for low tech weapons (eg pistols) will mean that with pistols you will be able to take out enemies with one shot, since areas of damage and precision are increased well over the beginning skill levels.

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