Its unwavering commitment to letting players do things their way is what makes it great; its meticulous level design that really forces players to look at their surroundings as if they were really there is what makes it one of the most fulfilling RPGs ever. Deus Ex is a long string of kept promises, from the story premise of taking down the world government, bolstered by great writing, a dynamic soundtrack, and horrible but somehow tonally appropriate graphics and voice acting, to the genius use of permanency in the upgrade system that really puts the 'immersive' in 'immersive sim.' If there's a complaint to be made here besides some pretty sizeable balance issues, it's that it does get weaker the longer it goes on- the final few missions feel like they bleed together and certain third-act plot elements could've been handled much better- but it's worth it when you realize it's all been a wonderful set up for perhaps the only good end-game player decision ever. Grandiose, mature, and dare I say thought-provoking, long before the movie games of the modern age began to convince the world that these things couldn't be achieved without sacrificing player control.

What makes Deus Ex so impressive isn't just the amount of choices you're given, it's the way that they're presented to you and how they entertain your curiosity. When the game responds to your decisions from such an early point, it sets the tone of the rest of the experience: if it'll call you out for something as inconspicuous as messing around with the bathrooms, what else is it going to track? What other actions can you get it to react to?

It's this relationship of your curiosity being encouraged and then rewarded that defines Deus Ex. Although there are extrinsic bonuses for exploration (upgrade points, weapon mods, etc.), most of my motivation was intrinsic. There was never a time where I stumbled upon an unlocked vent and didn't want to see where it lead. Deus Ex's story deserves its own review, but the gameplay is about you and the designers. It's about inspecting every painting in a building and trusting that one of them will have a secret vault behind it. It's about lockpicking your way into a building at the front door before stopping yourself and asking "Wait, I bet there's another way" and reloading your save to see how else you can break in.

Sometimes it's very unbalanced, occasionally frustrating, jarringly unintuitive (especially considering the extended tutorial sequence), many aspects that would normally hold it back. But it doesn't need to be perfect, because these issues ultimately become drowned out as you're constantly making new decisions, answering new questions, and testing how mechanics interact with each other. Your imagination keeps being sparked and once you reach a certain point these shortcomings will suddenly stop mattering--nothing can break that unstoppable desire to see what the game has to offer next as everything finally clicks together.

This is, again, not even beginning on the story, atmosphere, or especially the music (because holy shit the OST is phenomenal). The gameplay alone is fantastic but the experience as a whole is just as special and is absolutely worth your time if you can get past some initial frustrations. The payoff is worth it.

This is another one of those games that I've been putting off for 20 years. Friends, freaks and even my old high school IT teacher have been recommending Deus Ex to me for my entire life, but it's never felt like the time was right to play a game held in such reverent esteem by so many people I know. What better time, I suppose, than 2021?

You could spend days of paragraphs just discussing Warren Spector's vision of 2052 and the myriad ways it lines up with our present. In his GDC post-mortem of the game, Spector claims that Ion Storm chose the year 2052 because they needed a far-flung future that they could use to safely and somewhat-believably explore ideas like an international pandemic, trans-humanism, automation, meme wars, extreme inequality, globalisation, soy food and all the other concepts I found in the game's newspapers but didn't bother reading. I won't list every parallel with the present here - that would be a day of paragraphs alone - but it is indeed startling how much sooner the spectre of Spector's future came to pass than he originally predicted way back in the dark ages of the 1990s. In fact, scientists are saying that the future will be far more realistic than they originally predicted. I would recommend playing Deus Ex right here and right now in 2021 if you want to have a temporally-significant and spatially-specific gaming experience that you can tell your kids about in the FEMA global warming/COVID-52 refugee shelters.

There's a temptation here to make the leap from the 2021 parallels found in details of the game's 2052 setting to the grand conspiracies that drive JC's story forward, but it would all too easy to attribute our world's ills to a single organisation like the Majestic 12. No matter how many times our reality plays out stranger than fiction and we uncover another island of paedophiles, I still don't think that Paul Denton's theory about a globe-spanning cabal of bankers holds much synthetic water. It's fun to imagine and simplify the world in such ways, but the game, while trying its hardest to simulate meatspace, is still doing the real world a disservice. Reality is much more complicated and evil than all that you can squeeze onto a 150MB CD-ROM.

I think that's what ultimately stops me from hailing Deus Ex as the same masterpiece as those freaks told me it was - this is superficial complexity masquerading on top of something much simpler. I don't want to tear apart something from 20 years ago for not being as well-realised as the imsims of the present (this came out five years after Doom II! Jesus Christ, Denton!), but the game presents the player with the suggestion of infinite diversity in infinite combinations that more often than not boil down to turning yourself into a lightsaber-wielding Wolverine, gobbling down candy bars and 4loko in the corners of a bulk freighter in order to run full-force at three soldiers who have forgotten you were there just a few seconds ago and are now clip-clop running away and straight into the nearest wall.

It fucking rules, but it's not the "Million-Dollar James Bond Does Blade Runner" gameplay experience that everyone from 4chan to my dorm room told me it was going to be. Sure, you can bribe an overworked office worker into giving you his ID badge so that you can silently descend into a top-secret sealab, but why bother doing that when you can just unload your GEP gun into a lobby of bodyguards, close the door, then walk back in 5 seconds later like nothing happened? Again, let me be clear - it fucking rules to play Deus Ex as a murderous cyberpath in a world of automatons suffering from early-onset dementia, but I thought it was going to be something much more. Why bother doing anything more subtle than a cyberbrick through a holowindow when you can mercilessly cut down cops with your Hattori Hanzo Cattle Prod and laugh when they freak out about it for the duration of their walk to the coffee shop at the end of the street?

Try and play Deus Ex a different way and you will more likely than not spend most of your time with your finger on the quicksave button, hoping in vain that this time, the guard won't bug out and spot you while you're crouching silently in a shadow texture 50 clicks away. Maybe this time, your attempt at a hack won't go awry because a random guy on the street's pathfinding has caused him to permanently hover-sit in the Illuminati's top-secret doorframe. It's funny - often hysterical! But it's not exactly an immersive simulation. At least when you go on another LAMpage in an NYC nightclub because a guy pulled a gun on you for picking up his empty wine bottle, you know the game isn't gonna be too fussy about the specifics. Everyone just goes back to their drinks after a while, and Manderley will probably still pay UNATCO's finest a healthy bonus for being really good at his job. No big deal!

I loved my time with Deus Ex. It was so much fun, and I'll likely play it again soon because I want to see what else it can do. It's just that the things it can do are so wildly different from what my imagination thought it could do. I wanna see how many more ways the NPCs can wild out and make chaos for me on a night mission; I wanna see how many more lines of dialogue were run through an accent mangler and emotion flattener; I wanna see how many more ways I can hilariously die while trying to hoodwink a cybercommando by throwing a couch and some potted plants at him. Maybe I'll come back when or if the dust ever settles on Our Current Situation and These Unprecedented Times pass, because I dunno how many more times I can hear someone say something like "Zeez peepel arrr not abel to afford zee vaccine!" without feeling a strong tinge of guilt moments before I throw them out of a third-storey window in an attempt to distract a mech that's enforcing a national lockdown. What a shame.

Man, I was sort of expecting this thing to not hold up, having been overshadowed by the legacy of Immersive Sims that fell after it, and admittedly the Liberty Island intro is rough (put points into melee attacks, the knock-out point is at the base of the spine), but this game is a classic in all the best ways.

The level design just feels really really good. Although the levels feel a little barren by modern standards, making the available options and routes stick out by merit of... existing, and not being plain grey walls, the game still does a good job of having clever workarounds and secrets available to players who are attentive. Even back in '99, this game is still creating interesting puzzle boxes to play with that put some modern immersive sims to shame.

The story here, eh, it's fine. The cast of characters and the global conspiracy here feel a little flat, far surpassed by the reboot games in every regard. Special, uh, anti-credit goes to the Chinese accents which, wow, what the fuck is going on there, guys.

Has that beautiful immersive sim power curve, where at the start of the game you're skulking through every vent and tunnel scrounging for parts, and at the end you're kickflipping into combat with a goddamn laser sword just murdering mechs and supersoldiers left and right.

Ultimately, this game totally holds up 20 years later. Absolutely phenomenal.

Jogo topíssimo que tirando o layout de botão e UI, ainda tá bem competente, mas ele brilha mesmo no tanto de liberdade que ele dá pra resolver as coisas, um dos grandes do gênero Immersive sim.

Vai escolher rotas alternativas, escolher como abordar os inimigos, tem uma boa liberdade, bons upgrades q te obrigam a explorar, bom pra quem curte jogos como Dishonored, Bioshock, Prey, bom pra ver de onde veio boas inspirações.

*Tradução in english da análise pra quem é bilíngue

Play nice, very good recomended ...

Probably one of the few games to accurately capture the conspiracy theory mindset, and how that connects with people who feel powerless in the wake of massive systemic inequality - and how people grapple onto them even if they don't make a lick of sense under any sort of scrutiny. But then it also imagines a scenario where pretty much every single conspiracy theory is true - and expands that out into a globe-trotting, action-packed adventure, like a strange power-fantasy where you know what's going wrong in the world - and the disparities themselves absolutely become crystal clear. Gameplay is tight as hell but the story itself is just amazing, especially with the depth it goes into - as well as how it's heavily reflective of real-world fears and anxieties of the world turning into a corporate hellhole where all the power lies within the pockets of a few powerful people.

Also you can make the entire of UNATCO flip out and engage in an all out assault on an automatic vacuum cleaner. Good game.