Taken as a whole game, the game was executed very well.

Nothing Deus Ex did was remarkable by itself, as they were done, in some form, in games before it.

Well...what did you expect? You're playing an UN special forces operative from the outset.

It was easier to attribute the lack of towers to a "terrorist" attack. And this was over a full year before 9/11.

Deus Ex wasn't a pure stealth game.

Beyond Good and Evil came out in 2003; and gaming in general changed quite a bit in the time between the release of Deus Ex and BGE.

Both games (HL and Thief) were in respective genres that rarely went outside of those genres.

The consequences of your actions throughout the game? You just got done saying having multiple choices detracts from a game!

Yes, the choices you make in Deus Ex really don't amount to a hill of beans in the end, especially right at the end when you're given a direct choice of a set number of endings. But comparing that shortcoming to what you can do in the first two Fallout games is simply ignoring the technical limitations of PC hardware of the time.

Um, which "Shock" game? System Shock 1 or 2, Bioshock? The same oblique arguments you're making against Deus Ex could be made against either of the SS games.

Taking the game as a whole, the story's structure and telling were very remarkable for an FPS-RPG coming out for the time.

There's very little to compare between the two. (Crysis and Deus Ex)

But if you look at the list of games he's (Ken Levine) had a hand in, several have either influenced, or been influenced by, Deus Ex.

but your reasons for bashing the game could be summarized to simply saying "I didn't like it. 'Nuff said."