Game Review: Deus Ex (GMDX Mod)

Finally I return to Deus Ex, almost ten years after the time I reviewed The Nameless Mod in my second review ever.

I got Deus Ex as a university student, when I had plenty of free time to play it--I can look over and see the original CDs from where I'm writing this--and I played it through multiple times my sophomore year. I even spent a bunch of time in the multiplayer mode they released in patch 1.12, whose player base was small enough that I got used to seeing the same people over and over again, and where I still remember the time I jumped into a game, killed five people in quick succession, and then someone said in chat:

"Who is Dorchadas and why is he kicking my ass?"

Probably my proudest moment in any competitive FPS, to be honest.

I've been wanting to replay it for years and it's never left my computer--as the saying goes, every time you mention Deus Ex someone reinstalls it--and this year is the 20th anniversary so it seemed like a perfect time. I'm not sure I was considering just how perfect it really was, however. A pandemic? Protests? A government that seems content with both increasing its control over daily life while also not caring if the people live or die? I posted a quote from the game:

Walton Simons: "This plague... the rioting is intensifying to the point where we may not be able to contain it."
Bob Page: "Why contain it? Let it spill over into the schools and churches, let the bodies pile up in the streets. In the end, they'll beg us to save them."

...and people thought I was quoting a news article from that month. What a year 2020 has been.

Let's escape into the idyllic world of conspiracies and cybernetic superspies, shall we?

You can tell it's cyberpunk because of the Chinese characters and neon. Or maybe it's just Asia.

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