You're going to need a patch to get this game running smoothly on a modern OS. There are a few choices, but I've tried two. Kentie's launcher was slow and crashed on me, but Deus Ex community update worked flawlessly.

Surprise surprise. It's amazing. I recently played this and found the way the open-ended gameplay worked with the story to highlight the topic of personal choice and freedom especially cool. The game lets you ultimately decide what the value of agency is to you/this reality and damn it's cool.

RATING: Fantastic

I can see why people love this one so much. The levels, for the most part, are pretty interestingly designed with plenty of routes to take to get where you need to be, and the game gives you a lot of useful options for dealing with enemies. All the levels are full of environmental details that flesh out the world, and the dialogue sequences are all quite nice, from simply chatting with strangers on the street to confronting corrupt special interests with your own nerves of steel. There's a lot of character and care in this janky old game.

Many a time has this game been played by me. Many a times has it made me just that little bit happier. From the large and expansive levels. To the immersive sim elements. To the world famous voice lines. The script for this game is both hilarious yet thought provoking. The performance of Jay Anthony Franke, a literal QA tester for ion storm during development, has an awkward and earnest charm that makes it fun.

Weird I open with the acting but I guess it expresses my feelings toward the game. Despite some awkward realities such as, even for its time, bad graphics and awkward acting it holds this distinct charm. And its not like its gameplay is much of a slouch either!

The gunplay despite the awkward aim mechanics really starts to shine midway through the game. The small eccentricities in laser mechanics, darts alerting enemies. And of course the big one, explosives opening doors making the GEP gun the most silent way to take down Manderley. It's the most famous immersive sim for a reason.

And the famed map design. It's really not just liberty island. Every map has been carefully built to have as many options as humanly possible for each playthrough. With the exception of swimming (Warren Spector why) your skill choices will provide you benefits somewhere in the games many maps. And you'll need them as every map is huge in scope. Its desire to make you scrounge encourages you to explore ion storms extremely detailed maps. Really helping you get to know its little details one discovery at a time.

Their will never ever be another game like Deus Ex, it's a legendary experience you deserve to sit down and play through.

Absolutely one of the best experiences in gaming. The mastery and expansion of the Immersive Sim genre's core tenants in this game are so satisfying and addictive. Often, games get reviews like "you will spend hours on this without realising" which may be true. But with Deus Ex, you --will-- spend HOURS playing without realising. This game is as addictive as crack.

The open levels, with all their secret passages, nooks, hovels, and buildings, are fascinating to explore, despite their small size when compared to contemporary games. The seemingly endless routes and solutions for problems, coupled with the extreme customizability of your skills and augmentations, create a new and refreshing playthrough, every time.

The plot, beat by beat, is a little cheesy, but if you embrace that cheesiness, you'll have lots of fun. You have a real sense of forging a path against the evil conspiracies of this world. In a time when Deus Ex and real-life are starting to merge in certain aspects, there is great catharsis in destroying the capitalist elite and conspirators who seek to control us. But greater than the plot is the world-building itself. Every location has factions and groups with certain ideals and outlooks. Often, you can overhear their conversations and compare their outlook with your own.

As a political person, the exploration of corporate dominance and small governments is as fascinating as it is scary. There's a bit in the Lucky Money bar where the player character and a bartender can debate about small governments, "big" governments, corporate dominance, and freedom in an inherently unjust system. Rarely before and rarely since has a video game thematically delved into societies, governments, and ideologies in such a fascinating way.

If you enjoy customisable player stats and a game where freedom of choice is a core gameplay tenant in every level, you MUST play this game. I can confidently say, without any doubt or fear of sounding like a cliché, that this is one of the best video games ever made.

I finally got around to playing this "legendary" game. Does it live up to the hype?

It some areas yes, and in others I was disappointed. This game shines the most in the open ended ways to get though situations. The game throws seemly impossible situations at you but most of the time there's another way if you look around. The story has a lot of layers. On the surface, you are stopping terrorists, fighting against a malevolent organization, saving the world from a virus, uncovering the illuminati. But, it gets deep, talking about not only real world issues but arguably the biggest ones that's shaping everything about our civilization and giving us a glimpse of how it works and where it's taking us. I haven't seen any other game come close to this in terms of a story that has so much real world content in it.

Sometimes things can get a bit overwhelming, though. You'll have 5 people calling you in a row talking about things while you are in the middle of fighting. A few areas of the game are complete BS. I had no clue how the game wanted me get past certain parts. So, I had to basically brute force my way through.

I loved all the different locations around the world you visit. Highlights for me were Hong Kong and the underwater base. Paris would have been cool to explore without worrying about being seen. I didn't get to explore it as much as I'd like.

Also, it's also worth mentioning, I played on realistic difficulty as I was told that was the best way to play the game. Now that I've finally finished the game. I would not recommend you play on realistic for your first playthrough. You really have to explore every nook and cranny for ammo because there's parts of the game if you don't have much ammo, you are basically screwed. I spent days on parts that only should have taken minutes.

With that being said, amazing game. I can see why so many regard this as the best game of all time.

a triumph for scenario design aficionados. hour after hour of slices of the real world perfectly aligned into a playground of roving militants and hapless civilians. rarely does a game ever make its missions feel properly explorable while keeping it taut and linear at the same time, and yet deus ex routinely weaves both together. for every point A to point B underground lair with traps laid out in sequence there is a completely open venue, such as the suffocating catacombs and their dimly lit hallways giving way to the Champs-Élysées avenue of paris, with a bakery to pilfer contraband drugs from, a hostel with full bar access, and an arms dealer's loaded apartment, all off the beaten path from your main objective. military bases and science labs retain the layout you'd expect had you ever toured one, and you'll find that locker rooms, rows of cubicles, and break rooms feature just as prominently in the dungeon crawling as warehouses with guards patrolling or tightly wound mazes of laser tripwires and turrets. the authenticity and legibility of these areas comes first, and yet more often than not the designers still manage to weave in appropriate challenges without violating each location's fidelity in the process.

and really, dungeon crawling is the name of the game here, more or less. at least half of the game takes place in some sort of complex with a destination and a set of non-linear gates along the way, all of which serve as hinge points for the player to choose which resources to expend. the "immsim" label comes from just how many resources have all gotten slammed together in your control: lockpicks and "multitools" for bypassing security, ammo for many different varieties of firearms, bio-energy for utilizing your augmented abilities, and a slew of consumable items meant for tanking bullets, running past enemies undetected, or breathing under water for long periods of time. at its most taut, the game generally puts some sort of barrier up in your way and then a way around it, with the direct option being something like combat or picking a lock and the indirect option being finding a vent or waterway to circumvent the barrier. with enough of these situations back to back, the game hopes that you'll avoid sticking to one gameplay style in order to preserve your resources in that area for later when they seem more necessary; you can't crack every door with lockpicks, so you'll probably have to get your hands dirty or crawl on your belly here and there if you want to keep your picks for when the alternative is, say, running through a irradiated area. the nice part of this is that it truly does work: I explored, snuck around, and fought off enemies all in equal measure throughout the game through entirely organic response to each of the situations. the downside is by endgame the resource economy has completely turned in your favor assuming you've been rotating all of your options, making decisions on resource expenditure past a certain point much more about cleaning out your inventory rather than rationing.

when the game is firing on all cylinders, you'll get something like bunker III from the aforementioned catacombs. the area is two large rooms with a camera and turret tracking you at the back of the first room right in front of a cell full of hostages, multiple floors connected by stairs with archways for cover in the second room, and a back hallway swarming with rocket-strapped operatives where the camera/turret controls and a key to the next reside; a waterway additionally connects the front of the first room with the back of the second room. here you have actual tradeoffs to deal with: just grabbing the key and skipping the whole area by going through the waterway, but the coverage in the back hallway can be intense depending on the AI's behavior, and your direct path to the key is blocked by strategically placed crates as soon as you leave the waterway. gunning for the security controls instead is feasible, and you can leverage the fact that hacking computers (sometimes?) pauses enemies for a bit to quickly run out, disable everything, and hop back in the waterway. you could also sneak in from the front and use an augmentation that hides you from cameras to avoid triggering the turret, and if you rescue the hostages with lockpicks instead of locating the cell key and leave the area early, you'll get the next area's key from their camp leader anyway. when the game constructs situations like these, they not only make the discrete tradeoffs impactful on the flow of a given level, they also weave it into the actual second-to-second movement, stealth, and combat as well.

at its worst it's the opposite: individual rooms with a guard or two and maybe a computer system or locked door stitched together by long hallways that inoculate each scenario from one another. in these sections the main appeal is exploration, either through finding nooks and crannies hidden from view or by reading the many "data cubes" with flavor text strewn around. it can still be exciting, especially earlier on when you don't have tools to detect enemies through walls and the suspense of moving around still persists. later in the game when one has more abilities at their disposal, breaking apart puzzles or barriers by jumping over them with enhanced height, moving large crates to use as stairs with enhanced strength, or shooting down doors with a mastered rifle ability can potentially make the monotony less apparent. some of the barriers don't fare quite as well due to a lackluster implementation: the hacking, for instance, is more or less free even with minimal upgrades, and for every camera you have to actually maneuver around there's at least four you'll disable without thinking just because the security terminals are easy to access. if the mission locations didn't adhere to the small details of real environments or didn't have cute little secrets in vents and lock-boxes, these issues would likely overcome the holistic experience and result in tedium.

the tiny details extend further than objects in the world as well. from early on when one of your augmented colleagues begins spontaneously complaining about getting the wrong can of soda from a vending machine, I had hoped that the scripting for the NPCs would stay high quality, and it absolutely persisted to the final moments of the game, when a civilian mechanic distraught by my actions pulled a gun on me behind my back. the tight pacing of the levels compared to a full open world experience allows for many of the individual NPCs to have unique dialogue, behavior, and even inventory when subdued. of these the most fascinating to me may have been a conversation with a chinese bartender in hong kong, who extolled the CCP's commitment to capitalist enterprise outside the purview of the new world order by emphasizing authoritarian nationalism against main character denton's idealized western democratic order. it's something you wouldn't see now in the xi jinping era and weirdly reflective of the game's almost non-ideological view of politics: people-facing organizations controlled by layers upon layers of shadowy organizations, each manipulating social behavior in a top-down way compared to the bottom-up class struggle and ideological superstructure of reality. not really a thought-provoking work unless you're particularly animated by vague gesturing towards "control" and "liberty," but at least you can tell the developers didn't take it too seriously either. there's roswell-style gray aliens running around for christ's sake.

Deus Ex is truly a product of its time. I know that term gets thrown around a lot these days but this time it’s actually the case. A game like this couldn’t be made today, it just isn’t possible.

To be blunt, Deus Ex’s storyline is essentially a cyberpunk hellscape where every single conspiracy theory about higher powers and government overreach on an unprecedented scale are actually true and actively happening. The game’s story goes through many twists and turns as more of the conspiracy is unraveled before you.

While I think this is objectively one of the best games ever made, I do think that really comes down to the dialogue and writing, along with the art design. As much as I love Deus Ex, I can see that it’s gameplay is a little outdated.

Let’s get that out of the way now. Most of the game is about walking around open hubs and talking to people. There are main objectives and small things you can do on the side for bonus equipment or money. This is the best part of the gameplay, as the world is detailed, fun to explore, and filled with tons of NPCs that either give you interesting information that helps flesh out the world, or say the most ridiculous, batshit stuff possible to keep you entertained.

Now it’s time to discuss combat and stealth, these are the aspects that I believe are the weakest. Deus Ex lacks a lot of modern tools that make stealth combat more satisfying and fun, this mostly comes down to responsiveness and a general lack of understanding as to how stealth even works. It’s hard to tell if you’re ever truly concealed sometimes, and enemies will just immediately agro if you are noticed. With practice the mechanics can be learned and understood but this takes time, and a gameplay style shouldn’t be this difficult to grasp.

Next is combat. Deus Ex has a massive array of weapons, both lethal and nonlethal. What I really love is that a lot of weapons are tools, not just for killing. The GEP gun for example is a rocket launcher that is honestly way more useful for things like opening doors over any actual combat. Combat itself is very simple, you aim your implements of destruction at the target and click until they die. Weapons work differently and have their own funny quirks to them, like the sniper rifle being completely accurate while noscoping, or being able to use LAMs to climb walls. Enemy variety is.. honestly pretty bad. The AI isn’t very good either, they will mostly just circle around you and fire until they die. There are a couple combat robots in the game as well, though they are ridiculously annoying to deal with, and also incredibly easy to disable so there’s really no reason to engage with them. My biggest issue with the combat is how stale it gets. Most enemies will die from a single headshot as long as you’re leveling skills. Many weapons also seem fairly redundant or awfully balanced, never pick up a shotgun in this game. A lot of the tool tips and in game descriptions are just flat out incorrect too, listing incorrect damage numbers or mechanics that literally do not actually work.

Deus Ex is very open ended, and characters will say different things to you depending on how you play. Most tasks can be completely stealthily or loudly, and never require you to actually kill anyone if you don’t want to. This makes the game very replayable, and a good player that knows what to do can really speed through the game.

Lastly let’s talk about the upgrade system. There are skills and augments. Skills can be upgraded with skill points you acquire by completing objectives, finding secrets, and generally exploring. They improve your ability to use objects and generally interact with the world. Some of these skills are useless, and I think the game drip feeds you skill points too much instead of giving the player more to work with. Skill levels can really decide your build and what items you choose to use, so I wish the game gave the points more constantly and in a higher amount. Things like Swimming and Environmental skills are absolutely useless while weapon skills and things that let you get more value out hacking devices are incredibly useful.

Now, augments. These are found in the world or given as rewards for completing certain objectives. They are not made equal and some are just outright complete garbage because of how situational they are. Augments have a feature where you can only have one assigned to an F key and every key has two augments to choose from. I get the idea behind this, it’s supposed to give the player the choice to build the character however they want. In reality this just makes it way more annoying because you will often see two good augments or two trash augments since they will usually be similar to each other, and picking one just locks you out of the other. This feature would be perfect if you could simply select augments and equip them to the F key of your choice, because some of the keys are pretty annoying press while you’re trying to move or shoot.

Lastly lastly this game starts to REALLY fall off near the end. It devolves into constant combat and little to no character exchanges. The hub worlds are much more linear and are moreso combat gauntlets with occasional puzzles or secrets. The storyline will keep you going, but it’s really a slog near the end.

Despite my complaints about the gameplay I really do love Deus Ex, the storyline is interesting, fun, and keeps a good pace. Gameplay can feel a tad stale especially near the end, but there are always fun mechanics thrown in you can abuse to make things a bit more interesting. The game is an absolute meme, and an absolute masterpiece.