I only played the original. I didn’t really like it at first, thinking that the augmentation and mod stuff was needlessly complicated for this kind of game. Also the graphics weren’t all that great in comparison to other games using the same engine. There were a lot of attention to details in comparison to other games so I gave it a chance. The turning point came after completing the first part of the story and getting hooked. The story really carried the game and touches on some interesting topics.
A game with a similar feel would be Omikron: The Nomad Soul. It was released the year before Deus Ex, has worse controls and graphics, but the story and setting is somewhat similar.
That shirtless guy in Morrowwind was an asshole. Sending some kid into a basement to fight giant rats well knowing that it’d be their first battle and likely not surviving, while he stayed at home shirtless and well fit to remove those pestering rats, just pretending to be an alcoholic or something.
The RTS genre got drowned by cellphone apps doing the same thing.
The games don’t have high technical requirements, so it’s a perfect match for phone/tablet apps.
However they’re also quite easy to program, and easy to make graphics for, so the market is swamped with clones of clones of stock code and stock graphics, so no developer can approach it seriously anymore.
The best games in the genre are good because they have carefully balanced gameplay, but that takes time to discover for the players, so even if someone made the perfect game, it’d never be discovered amongst the shovel-ware.
The whole thing was poorly managed and there’s nothing they can say now to tell a different tale. I hope the people who put any effort into it gets paid somehow.
Poppy Playtime (2021) : controls the extendable arms separately and solve puzzles that way
Older games:
Psychonauts (2005) : some of the scenes toy around with gravity
Half-life 2 (2004): the gravity-gun was groundbreaking.
Serious Sam (2001) : just a shooter, but the quantity of enemies is so huge that you need to figure out different strategies. It’s sort of like geometry wars only in first person view and with gory graphics.
Glover (1998) : it’s a 3d platformer, where you control a glove, which needs to get ball through the level.
Head over heels (1987) : control the 2 characters Head or Heels separately or together to solve puzzles.( It was recently released on steam. I haven’t tried the remake, but the original can also be found on emulators or online)