The Deus Ex series may be dead and buried (until such time as some studio decides to revive the franchise again), but there’s no keeping the Sunglasses At Night crew down.
You might not have asked for it, but Deus Ex Revision might be just what you need for your immersive sim fix. An ambitious fan-made remastering of the original Deus Ex, officially publisher-endorsed and even praised by the original developers.
While Deus Ex offers a lot of freedom, stealth is wildely accepted as the way to play. Indulge your sneakier side here.
As you can see from the trailer above, Revision applies a generous lick of paint to the 17-year-old game, but the changes are far more than cosmetic. A lot of maps have been expanded to feel more like real-life spaces, allowing them to fit in a lot of extra combat encounters, secrets and areas to explore. Some rushed-feeling later areas such as Area 51 have been enormously expanded, making them feel almost entirely new.
There’s more room to sneak and hide, but also more opportunities to fight, if that’s your thing. Beyond that, there’s some neat little features such as achievements in the Steam version, offering hundreds of fun little things to do. My favourite of them all is Rules Of Nature, awarded to players who forget they’re not playing Metal Gear Rising and take down a heavy security mech using a melee weapon.
There’s some entirely new content as well, including a wave-survival minigame, allowing you to build up JC Denton into the ultimate combat cyborg, and test him on the field of battle. It’s impressive how different Deus Ex feels when you’re not speccing your character for evasion and espionage.
It’s been just over two years since the initial release of Deus Ex Revision, and developers Caustic Creative haven’t been resting on their laurels. To celebrate the second anniversary of their launch, they released a massive update, entitled Mystic, with a smaller update this week polishing it up even further.
Mystic was mostly minor tweaks and improvemnts, but also a slew of fun new alternate playmodes such as Ninja, where you start with both Leg augmentations, both cloaking systems, but are limited to only using low-tech weapons. There’s also Matrix Mode, where engaged NPCs transform into murderous men in black the moment they’re out of sight. Also a toggle to add a hidden collectible item to every map, rewarding diligent explorers with some minor bonuses and an achievement if you find all 75.
Pro tip: I highly recommend that before you start playing, go into the gameplay options menu and switch up to Biomod mode. The mod defaults to vanilla-ish gameplay, but Biomod brings things a lot closer to modern spec, adding random loot, unique weapons, better balanced and more intuitive cyberware and replacing the awful Swimming skill with the broadly useful Athletics specialization.
You can get Deus Ex Revision via Steam, GOG or ModDB. You’ll need a copy of the original Deus Ex to run it, but you probably already have that five times by now.