The reasons everyone should play Deus Ex.
Everyone should play Deus Ex. Not just because it is one of the most widely positively viewed games you can find around and not just because it is one of the "classics" that missing is like being a Cinema buff and not having seen Schindler's List. It should be played because it is the game that grabs half the crazy ideas you and your friends have ever had for a game and makes it work.
Do you remember when you just watched the Matrix and guys in long coats from the future that took on armies of dudes with assault rifles with pistols was cool? This game does that. Remember when you read about Nanotechnology and thought it was the coolest thing ever and how it would let you fix damaged organs in cancer patients? Well it doesn't do that, instead it lets you lift giant crates, regenerate from any wound and detonate anti-armour small arms as soon as they are fired at you
with your mind, which is almost as cool as the cancer thing. This is the game that took your young impressionable ideas of super megacorporations led by hypercompetent villains that buy out the government branches while forming the Illuminati come to life in a fully realised world. It is terribly melodramatic and plays it so straight that it is delightful. Topping it all off? The game is just damned fun to play.
Call me old fashioned but that is the main reason to play the game. Ignore all the hype for it and ignore the plot. You just have a game that is straight up fun to play. You have choices from the very start on how you want to shape your journey picking skills that will determine your approaches to your objectives. What is this swimming skill? I am a super secret agent man I won't need that! And you won't. Unless you choose to go that route! Then for a cheap investment you can effectively swim underwater for about 10 minutes. Even splashing into a few different areas is rewarding, there is no need to hyperfocus on one or two skills when being passignly competent at lockpicking, bypassing electronic security and computer hacking all will provide you a wide array of ways to approach your objectives. There is no need to be a perfect shot with a rifle if you can take that side door and have as long as you want to line up your shots.
Then of course there is simple choices that are not even effected by your choices of skills, do you roll out guns blazing or do you take a more tactically minded stealthy approach, both are just as viable as one another. One obviously trends more towards your skill choices being combat based clearly, but there is distinct variations to both paths that can be taken even still.
Most importantly however is that not only does the game give you all these tools to play with, it gives you sandboxes to use them in. Not a big vast open world to do as you will to your hearts content, but carefully crafted sequences of challenges for you to meet. Some paths may be more difficult than others given your skillset, but enough searching or persistencecan even see you through paths that are counter to your chosen skillset if you insist on proceeding. This isn't a case of sequence breaking, but rewarding self set goals, you are on the path you chose for yourself. Of course that is assuming you just stick to one path. For those slightly more obsessive players the world is so well populated that the more you search the more of the fully realised world you will experience. You can run around a part of Paris and find a drug dealer asking you to break into a nearby bakery to steal some drugs hidden in the oven overnight. You only run into encounters like this by exploration, both the dealer and the bakery are entirely optional areas of a larger section of a Paris city area. Don't let my description of it not being an open world mislead you. The game has its boundaries and limited areas, but these are big areas that you can easilly sink some time into.
It is a game of choice and consequences, not all of which are rewards, but never are an unexpected punishment. There are at times even rewards for pushing the game in directions that are counter to what people are telling to you do in game. It creates for a wholely unique gaming experience. A world with a refined plot that will swerve if the player pushes it and keep running, a shooter that is refined to the point where gunfire is something that can be largely ignored and if you desire lethal approaches even completely bypassed, in some cases it even being the safe route to disabling a target. There is boss fights and they can all be bypassed or completely ignored if desired. The largest criticism for the choices you will find is likely that some of the choices are fairly shallow or are presented and immediately resolved, however the game comes ahead with the sheer number of choices that you have all creating their own little minor permutations on what is still a largely carefully constructed story that someone wants to say. This is choice without "But thou must!" or same responses to alternate dialogues. This is a game where choice is something you make and you deal with the consequences of it and the game keeps going. Events are bigger than the player themself, but the player is still a central actor in the larger story.
So yes. You should play this game whoever you are that is reading this. Yes you Ralp. Andrew. Or Gregory. Whatever your name is. You there with the eye and maybe another one to the left or right of it. This is a fantastic game and one that you should have played already, but if you are still reading this then you are clearly not playing it or replaying it right now. Get to it. It costs a tenner. At the time of typing this you can get it for a $20 with one of the greatest examples of how to not learn anything from your predecessor and the follies of restricting all versions of a game because of one platforms weaknesses. There is even currently a Square Enix sale going on with this and a bunch of other stuff for $75 if you are so inclined (19/02/11 sale is about to end even).
The game is amazing. The game is available and it is old enough that it will run on almost anything you can get your hands on. There is bug fixes that should fix almost any issues you can see.
Once you are done playing it you should also watch the mind blowing speed run of it to watch a man Air Surf grenades off buildings to stop from dying or using them to teleport through walls.
Edit - On the off chance that anyone ever listens to a word I say when I tell you that this game that is awesome that you will play and go "Oh my gods that was awesome why did no one ever tell me about this game!??!?!?", there is a modded executable you can get that will let you play a the game a bit more consistently on newer systems.
http://kentie.net/article/dxguide/ Of great note is also this work that he has done
http://kentie.net/article/d3d10drv to enable DirectX 10 support to the game so you can do some fairly neat things to take some of the rough edges off the game graphically (specifically enable V-Sync which does just that).