I love deus ex but theres a lot of revisionist history going on... Back then people made fun of the game for feeling outdated when it came out, and there was a huge, huge meme at the time going about on the forums about how everything could be fixed with crates. Everytime you get stuck in Deus EX, theres usually a convenient crate you can destroy or carry around to climb on or etc. At the time, there were tons of photoshops about this gameplay element..
The game was seen as some kind of niche, underground hit. The stealth aspect didn't really work all that well (admit it, its even more obvious today), the stats based shooting was dumb, the audio was subpar (except for the amazing soundtrack). The game got good reviews but it was kinda of a minor hit with gamers.
It's kind of funny to see how much of the fame and praise for the original game grew with time..
(the following might contain a few incorrect names and settings, last time I replayed the original was in 2005 or so)
I complete it several times, but the game has lots of problems. I remember the first time you get to Hell's Kitchen, I somehow ended up breaking the game by picklocking a door in a alley and I ended in a looooooonnng treck across rooftops and crates, getting random side-missions completed (without ever 'activating them', i was just getting random popups from the techguy going 'GOOD JOB JC!') until i somehow manage to unlock a door and arrived at the bottom floor of the power generator room (? its been a while). I destroyed it and pretty much ended up doing the mission in reverse order of what youre suposed to do because of that..
I mean, yeah the game has a lot of freedom, but the way I ended up doing that mission was wtf. It was like my 2314th replay of the game, but I can imagine that If I had experienced it the first time the way I had just done it, i would had been like 'wtf is this buggy piece of crap' ...
I'm going to rent this sequel, but I'm not expecting much sadly.. the gameplay vids were MEH at best. The game has a budget feel to it.