Deus Ex

The Good
The biggest strength of Deus Ex is its implementation of choice & consequence in both gameplay and story. The game has an answer for many things you can do out of your own volition: your boss scolds you if you enter the women's bathroom, it recognizes when you choose to kill a friendly trooper for its advanced weapon, you get praised by your paranoid associate if you kill someone before you receive the quest - you can find dozens of examples. Of course most of it is just window dressing: the reactivity is mostly front-loaded into the first few levels and the only influence on the story are a few different dialogue lines and the choice between three endings directly before the finishing line. Overall the interactivity is not even close to later games like Alpha Protocol. But it does not matter, because the developers thought of exactly the right responses to awe almost every player during their first few playthroughs. In my opinion this is the very reason for the game's stellar reputation; Invisible War has objectively more relevant choices, but it still feels confined and on railroads.

Even more successful is the impact of choice & consequence on the level design. Hands down, I think Deus Ex still has the best level design out there - only surpassed by The Nameless Mod. You can approach almost every situation from multiple angles - maybe go in guns blazing? Take the enemies out non-lethally in stealth? Or maybe they just let you slip by if you were friendly to their mate in the previous level? You could also use a venting shaft, lockpick the exit and circumvent the situation altogether? Deus Ex supports all those possibilities - although not every one in every situation - and many more.

Deus Ex wouldn't work without its fantastic dystopian setting and its interesting characters. The plot explores the following idea: what if every conspiracy theory out there is true? Yes, the writing is not always stellar, some plot points could have been lent from a B-movie and some characters are flat, but it always worked for me. The game tries to leave out the antisemitic drivel, but it is not entirely successful.
Because I played this during the 2020/2021 pandemic, I noticed some eery parallels to the game's plot - it's as if the conspiracy mongers of 2020 took their inspiration directly from Deus Ex. Only the "the government implants surveillance chips through vaccines" idiocy is missing, but Human Revolution has that one covered...

The Bad
What bothered me the most is the presence of invincible NPCs. For example, you can kill a friendly NPC at some point of the game, which is rightfully considered one of the game's highlights. But the game does not tell you so (which would be a positive point) and the person was always invincible before - so how likely are you to notice without prior knowledge? I know it is almost impossible to write a branching script for every possible dead NPC, but it still works completely against the freedom Deus Ex offers everywhere else.

The second big flaw is that the game is too long. I can't point to a single bad level, but in the second half the game mostly iterates established ideas and feels a bit repetitive. Oh, and the voice acting sucks even for 2000 standards, but I don't even notice that anymore.

The Bottom Line
Much has been said and written about Deus Ex during the last 20 years. Many people praise it and even call it the "best game ever". I am not very original here, but this statement is obviously correct: this is my favorite game of all times and I don't think it will ever change. It has its flaws, but its strengths are so great they don't matter to me. If you have not played it and are not put off by old graphics - what are you waiting for?

A few words about Deus Ex: Revision
My latest playthrough prior to writing this review was made with the mod Deus Ex: Revision. Until now I only played Deus Ex vanilla, so I can't make a comparison with other popular mods like GMDX or Shifter. Revision does not make many gameplay changes (at least I did not notice them), but redesigns the levels. Some of them have only small changes (for example the first level on Liberty Island has more decoration elements and that's it) while others - especially the three hub areas - were completely revamped. Unfortunately some levels are clearly inferior to the original ones (especially the Hong Kong market area is awful). This is a shame, because some of them (the new Paris comes to mind) are really well made. I would recommend the mod for Deus Ex players who look for some variety, but newcomers should definitely play the original first.