Ion Storm was a mess of a company but they did make a couple great games. Case in point: the stealth-action shooter Deus Ex. If you haven't tried it before, or you lost the old game CD, you'll get a chance to play it for free through the digital gaming platform GameTap starting next week.

It's currently available for players who pay the $9.95/month subscription fee, but on Monday it will be available for no charge - you'll just have to sit through a brief advertisement when you launch the game. So you'll get to play Deus Ex and find out how Red Bull gives you wings - sounds like a double win.

The game is about eight years old now and certainly shows some age given how graphics-driven the FPS genre. However, I think it's a must-play for any shooter fan. The game puts you in the shoes of a nanotechnology-enhanced counterterrorism agent in the near future who stumbles upon a vast global conspiracy. It's a very open-ended game that offers numerous paths for you to complete your objectives: stealth, gunfighting, dialogue with other characters, hacking, etc. Over the course of the game you also get opportunities to upgrade your character's skills, weapons and nanotech to fit your style of play.

The gameplay might sound like BioShock to you but, while BioShock's a great game and all, there's big differences. Deus Ex leaned more toward the RPG genre by giving you whole towns filled with living citizens to interact with. Also, the upgrades system in Deus Ex made you commit to your decisions - you couldn't just walk up to a vending machine and swap things around if you weren't happy with your choices. That seems inconvenient to some people but it also enhanced the strategy and replayability of the game. Also, the game actually encourages stealth - it seems like that aspect of gameplay has been phased out lately, even for games where it seems completely appropriate (Assassin's Creed, for example, reduced stealth to a matter of holding down a button and pretending to pray whenever you saw a guard). All of these aspects of the game were scaled back significantly in Deus Ex's sequel, which was a lot less stellar by comparison.

Another good reason to pick up the original is that you'll be able to familiarize yourself with the storyline before Deus Ex 3 arrives sometime in 2009 (hopefully).