For a long time I remember this being heralded as "the greatest game of all time" in a lot of places. Crazy, honestly.

Anyway yeah so this is probably one of the great games of all time, it's really really good. It's really weird to think that this game was separated by levels because the overall structure of the game feels so open and I think that's a lot of what lends to how good it is. One of the things I often lament about how the passage of time affects gaming is that there's this industry push for better and better graphics and higher fidelity etc. etc. and like yeah, obviously graphics aren't everything but I feel like the biggest problem with this mindset is that it makes it difficult for game developers to be clever.

Like if you ever wonder why so many games hold your hand or don't give you a certain amount of basic freedom in some instances, it's because they literally can't. It's because it would be more to allow you to explore an area than to see part of it and be pulled through, and there are deadlines that have to be met and Ted the Senior Game Designer hasn't seen his wife in three whole months. Games are way more expensive to make now for big companies and they require more people and more time. Granted, limiting X for the sake of not having to go overboard on Y is a challenge every game faces. Every single one. But AAA games do the most, and especially as time goes on. So how the heck does this relate to Deus Ex?

I believe Deus Ex is so good because it's a game about choice. There's no one singular way to do...just about anything in this game, and I mean this in a general sense. The way some missions progress will literally change based on how you handle them or characters you interact with or kill. Later levels can be affected by how you handle previous ones. The game is designed to both present options for you that are obvious or allow you to get creative and there are even several endings.

This isn't new. A lot of games do or have been based around the idea of having a very open approach to mission design. And honestly? I'm not going to explain how this one's different, like it's Deus Ex c'mon. What I will say however is perceiving that difference and realizing what we've lost in that specific area is a lot of why this game in particular will never be unmoved in terms of how good it is.

And I hope, at the end of whatever we're facing right now, major developers will find a way to release a high quality product in a way that's costly and efficient so when an idea is presented at the board table it won't be scrapped instantly because of the added months it would add to the release date that they overpromised for.

I'm not sure what I can add almost 25 years later to one of the most praised video games of all time. It's a masterwork in my favorite genre that gives you so many ways to approach and tackle each problem that every time I play it, I am impressed by how much flexibility the designers baked into the mechanics and level design.

Even with the meme-worthy dialogue and performances, the story here is so thoughtful and philosophical that it holds up to this day. If you somehow haven't played this game before, you need to try it. If you have played it, you know you need to play it again.

My favorite game
And the best game ever made, in my opinion.

(Review without spoilers!)
The dream game of Warren Spector, creator of System Shock. The project was rejected by multiple developers and publishers such as EA and Origin because it was considered "impossible", and was only accepted by John Romero at Ion Storm who believed more in ambitious projects (Yes, thanks to the legendary creator of DOOM, this game exists).

GAMEPLAY
It's a game of the Immersive Sim genre, "Immersive Simulator", revolutionary for the time, which mixes FPS, Stealth and RPG mechanics, with a variety of skill and upgrade mechanics, allowing you to practically create your own class, made up of generally linear stages designed to be approached in any way you like, as if they were "mini-sandboxes", you can hack or break into the building to enter, use the ducts, go around and sneak in through the stairs, etc. It's designed in such a way that you don't need to kill anyone, you don't even need to use weapons or items to fulfill the objective. You can play it as a tactical FPS, killing everyone like a psychopath, but with precision since your recoil is high. Your freedom is so great that you can purposely kill all the hostages at the train station in Battery Park, or simply ignore the mission completely and sneak onto the train and the game still won't give you "Mission Failed", the characters will just give you a scolding for the mess you've made. There is no right or wrong way to play this game, you play it however you want. There's no "Game Over" screen here.
There are so many ways to play and replay this game that it's because of this that the meme "Every time you mention Deus Ex, someone will reinstall it" exists
Don't go into this game expecting an FPS, Stealth or RPG because Deus Ex is none of the 3 but a creative blend of all 3, so be TOTALLY open-minded to a style of game that you've most likely never experienced before.
The combat is deliberately bad so that it's not just an FPS.

SOUNDTRACK
The soundtrack is a real gaming masterpiece, composed by Alexander Brandon, the same composer of the soundtracks for Unreal Gold and Unreal Tournament, great classics from the 90s and 2000s.
It has an atmospheric, industrial vibe that only a game from the 2000s could have.
The soundtrack is also dynamic, with music for various stages of the map:
Environment (No combat), Combat, Conversation and Death
As there are several maps, the game has a total of 117 tracks, one better than the other.
My favorite track in the game is "Return to New York", which incorporates the whole atmospheric, industrial and cyberpunk vibe of the game into the same song. It's such an excellent track for defining the atmosphere of the stage, that even if you've visited the map before, it feels like a whole new map with this music.

STORY
The story is one of the best I've ever seen in a video game, it's prophetic. I won't give away too many details as the plot twists and so on are too good for me to spoil here, but basically:
The year is 2052, society is poor but technologically advanced at the same time, the threat of terrorists is so great that you have martial law in the cities, total government control over the population, where people can't leave their homes, or travel. Terrorists have destroyed the Statue of Liberty, the world is infected with the Gray Death virus, which originated in China, the same country that produces the vaccine (Any similarities with the real world?). There are addicts and beggars everywhere, a really fucked-up world. A truly cyberpunk universe with X-Files-level conspiracies.
And you take on the role of a Robocop-style super-agent: JC Denton, to save the world from separatist terrorists who are in a civil war with the government, using innocent people as hostages and stealing vaccines for the virus. The game will offer you philosophical and political questions and ask you if what you're doing to protect the world from terrorism is really right.

The title Deus Ex comes from the term "Deus ex machina", in which a supernatural force solves impossible problems, and the story is exactly that, where you save the world in literally 2 days, being the "Deus ex machina".

The writer of the story, Sheldon Pacotti, doesn't just want you to be entertained by the story, he also wants you to reflect philosophical and political questions to yourself.

Not only is the story excellent, it's also highly interactive, especially for the time, certain dialogues will be triggered depending on what you've done, such as how many people you've killed, you can avoid conversations with certain characters at the start of the game, "meet" them later, and they'll introduce themselves accordingly. Certain people can die or live depending on your decisions

I'm not going to go any further here, as it's an unspeakable crime to spoil the incredible story of this game, so if you want to know more, you'd better play the game and have your own experience.

Why is it the best game ever made?
Deus Ex is the prime example of a video game in my opinion, games like TLOU and RDR2, also acclaimed as "the best game ever made", which although I think you're entitled to think they are, are highly scripted, with pre-planned paths, often the only thing you'll do is press W and listen to the dialog, without being able to interact with anything. And if you do, the game will give you a game over or kill you via some script for "over-exploring" the scenery. You are forced to play within this pre-planned way, being forced into a gameplay style, Stealth OR Aggressive, forced to kill certain characters and so on. If you try to play creatively, the game punishes you with a game over screen.
When I play a video game, I want to explore every inch of the world, interact with it and play the way I want, I don't want the game to load me up with tutorials every 5 minutes, I want to decide if in combat I'm going to play stealthily, aggressively or with some mixture of the two, I want to decide if I'm going to skip this quest or do it. And Deus Ex gives me that, lots of little sandboxes for me to play with as I please and build my sandcastles the way I want, with a linear and creative gameplay without neglecting an exceptional story and an outstanding soundtrack.
Even with its bad points, such as its dated AI, graphics, interface and dubbing, its good parts more than make up for and exceed the bad parts, such as the alchemy in the bite of a hamburger.
Because of this, Deus Ex is my favorite game, and in my opinion, the best game ever made.
All this in a mere 700mb (enough to fit on a CD) and over 30 hours of gameplay.

READ THIS BEFORE YOU PLAY!
The normal game on Steam comes with very strange keybindings, and in general, very poor standards for today.
If you're playing for the first time, I highly recommend using this mod:
Deus Ex Transcended
This mod adds quality of life to Deus Ex, such as autosave, 3 quicksave slots, better keybinds by default and fewer bugs, completely preserving the original game, unlike other mods such as Deus Ex Revision or GMDX.

Another good option is to play Deus Ex Revision, but with the original soundtrack and mapset options activated, the gameplay style set to "Revision" which will give you the same autosaves as Transcended and will also give you the option to play as a female if you prefer.