Deus Ex: Invisible War

The Good
Deus Ex (the original) is one of my top five games of all time. It's everything I want in a game: first person view, RPG elements, a great story, great characters, great weapons and large, well designed levels. Deus Ex: Invisible War still has some few good things left, like interesting weapons and a first person view. I liked that. Unfortunately there's not much else left to like about it, as I'll explain in the next paragraph.

The Bad
There's so many dumb decisions and failed motives baked into this game, I hardly know where to start. First of all: there are no RPG elements left in the game. They're all gone. Augmentations turned into biomods that are extremely easy to max out. Most players did it within the second level of the game. The levels are small, cramped, uninteresting and plain ugly. The loading times between levels (and there are a LOT of loading going on) are ridiculously long. The performance of the 3D engine is abysmal. Even a system with 9800 XT and 3000+ Mhz CPU can't make it run smoothly above 800x600.

The AI on the NPC:s is so unbelievably dumb it's not even funny. You can stand 2 feet away from them and throw barrels in their heads and they won't react. Another extremely stupid decision made by Ion Storm was the unified ammo. All weapons in the game uses the same ammo! How's that for strategic planning?

Healer bots now heal you automatically and they're everywhere. You get tons of money but no shops. The biomods are almost all automatic so you don't need to worry about them. The weapon are still modifiable (although you no longer have any skills so you're a master sniper from the start) but only by 2 different weapon mods. Both of which are useless.

The worst thing about this game, though, is that it was clearly made for the Xbox. It runs GREAT on that 733 Mhz Geforce 3 machine, but almost refuses to run on my 2800 Mhz Geforce 4 Ti 4600 PC. Nice optimizations, Ion Storm. Not only that, but most of the settings in the PC version of the game are still Xbox optimized! Even the ingame-UI was accidentally left in Xbox-mode. The dialogue text is optimized for TV-screens. Nowhere in the game do you need a mouse pointer anymore, to make it easy for the Xbox people.

The sad thing is I really wanted to love this game, I tried really hard to at least like it, but it's impossible. It's such a blatant sellout to the big Micro$oft machine I can't even stand to look at it any longer.

The Bottom Line
If you want an extremely simple, short game that can't decide if it wants to be a bad FPS or a bad adventure game, then this is what you want. But you got to love long loading times, stupefied gameplay, awful performance and lots of bugs to be able to enjoy this title fully.

The Good
Many of the great elements of the original game survive in the sequel - the strong story, real player choices, an interesting setting with a lot of intrigue which the PC must discover for her/himself. Like the original, you can approach the game in various ways - pure personal stealth, pure action combat, sneak and snipe, or various combinations between. Some of the changes for console compatibility, like the modified inventory system first used in the PS2 port of the original, work just fine.

The Bad
Sadly, the game does feel a little "dumbed down" for console compatibility. Removing the skill point system in particular bothered me, both because it seriously reduced the amount of character customization you could do and because it removed the ability to have small rewards for exploration; combined with the limited map size to fit in console memory, there are very few of the nifty little cubbyholes that were so fun to find in the original.

There are also terrible problems with PC graphics performance, resulting in jerky mouse response at any resolution and making resolutions above 800x600 look no better than 800x600 does. Finally, the choice to invoke the 20 second CD copy protection check on every level load, when the actual loading is only 5-10 seconds, was particularly stupid given the new small map size. It can take 2 map transitions to get back to a known repair or medical bot while you are conceptually on the same map (in the same building, etc.)

Finally, the game is a little too short. Even exploring every inch of every map and completing all possible side missions, I finished in about 20 hours of game time and perhaps 24 hours of total playing time. The original took at least twice as long to finish. By another metric, the original had about 14 mission locations (counting each visit to Hell's Kitchen separately because you have stuff to do and meaningful new encounters each time) while the sequel has only 8 (9 if you count the second visit to a particular city, where nothing much happens).

The Bottom Line
I was very disappointed in this game because I was expecting an improvement on the original. Since the original was so great, any net improvement at all would have made this one of the greatest games of all time. But setting that expectation aside and simply looking for a great game comparable to the original, I've really enjoyed it - and I did start playing through a second time immediately after finishing the first.

The Good
Ok, let's have it first. The graphics are incredible. This is a complicated statement (Read below) but I managed to get it to work smoothly at 1024 and wow. It's gorgeous. The lighting is good, although they frequently show off their engine. I constantly found myself walking just so that the world would go by slower. The sound likewise is great. I feel the music was better in the first game. That said, there's nothing wrong with this game's sound. The effects are great, though at times a touch odd (e.g. your gun "beeps" when you draw it). The audio is very immersive as well. As always, I recommend playing this game on a set of good headphones. The combined ammo is a nice touch, as is the design of the biomod system. It tends to prevent you creating as powerful character as you could make in the original. The plot is also great, although much shorter than the first. I was expecting 15 hours or so and I got 10. There is great replay to this game, however, since quests are often mutually exclusive and you can re-customize your biomods. The nods to the first game are also a cool feature. It is a slick, engaging, immersive, graphically incredible romp through a conspiracy theorist's dreams.

The Bad
It is marred by the same problems the original had, and one more major new problem. Much as in the original, the AI is stupid. Not only that, but strange events seem to happen sometimes that cause NPC's to switch allegiances. Nothing a re-load won't cure, but it's noisome. Also as in the original, the environments are somewhat drab. I don't hold as negative opinion as PC Gamer or gamespot do, I'd note the antarctica section as a good exception to this. That said, blue and gray tend to dominate the color palette in this game. A MAJOR flaw with this game is performance. Many users with HUGE systems have trouble running this game at 800x600 smoothly with all graphical options off. This is after a patch. I by some strange coincidence managed to get it to run at 1024 with a great framerate, even though my system is a year old or so. Clearly that's not how it's supposed to work.

The Bottom Line
Overall, the weaknesses are offset by the strengths, though not nearly so much as in the first game. This game has all the flaws of the first game as far as graphical listlessness and AI go, but non of great RPG elements that made the first so fun. I would recommend this game, but not with nearly the strength I do the first Deus Ex. It could have been so much better.