Deus Ex Review

Liberty Island teaches the whole game in ten minutes: there is a front door, a sewer, a crane, a rooftop, and a guard who hands you a keypad code if you talk to him first. Almost nothing else in 2000 respected a player that much. Skill points and nano augmentations pull against each other, so a lockpicking build and a hacking build genuinely see different rooms, and the datacubes scattered through every level reward reading over shooting.

The conspiracy plot swallows Area 51, the Illuminati, and an artificial intelligence that wants to be a government, and it keeps its footing because the endings ask a real question rather than a moral one. What it does not have is a face. Character models are slabs, animation is stiff, the voice acting swerves between menace and camp, and the engine flattens every interior into the same brown light. The simulation carries all of it, and the simulation still works.