Deus Ex is by no means bad, but I honestly don't understand why it has this godlike reputation among gamers.
The stealth has no margin for error, resulting in problematic firefights or lots of quickloading.
Firefights are a pain in the ass if you put your meager amount of skillpoints into utilities more than the gun skills; and honestly, gun skills themselves always make for a terrible shooter - behind-the-scenes-stats just shouldn't determine whether I hit anything or not.
So, by wasting half the incredibly rare skillpoints on more-or-less mandatory skills, the RPG aspect falls completely flat as well.
If you say the character building comes less through the skills and more through the augmentations, I can only laugh weakly. The augs are a great idea, completely borked by the tiniest energy-pool since the invention of the lightbulb. Wielding all these truly awesome enhancements would be a great asset to overcome all the other glaring gameplay flaws, but not if one of them lasts a grand total of 20 seconds - god forbid you want to combine them. If you counter that by "knowing when to use them" I'm gonna slap you in the face, as I'm not playing this more than once, and that one time was, surprisingly, my first time - commonly known as the time you don't know what the fuck is going on.
Admittedly, a hybrid of a shoddy maybe-stealth-shooter and a mediocre half-RPG does make for an interesting game once you reach Hong Kong and break into that office building for the first time, but before that it's brutal work and afterwards it just goes on and on - Paris offers nothing new. For a game that offers "freedom" to approach things in different ways, I seem to pick all the wrong ones.
I do not know who this game was made for, as I can't imagine why shooter fans, stealth fans or RPG fans would like it. I like stealth games, I even like mandatory stealth sections in non-stealth games, but I did not like Deus Ex. I love shooters, played them my whole life and boycott the modern ones because they ruined the genre, but I did not like Deus Ex. I never liked RPGs much, but have found a few that did it right, which were great fun, but Deus Ex wasn't one of them. If it is none of those things, what is it? And if nobody knows what kind of game it even is, why is it The Holy frikkin Grail of All That is Great in Gaming?
Cuz if you told me of an amazing shooter-where-you-don't-shoot-much with amazing powers and a glowing sword in the 4th level, I'd think you meant Jedi Outcast.