Deus Ex: Invisible War

The Good
If you forget all about Deus Ex one game (which I consider to be the best FPS I played) and judge Deus Ex 2 for what it is, you might say that it has a good graphics engine. It's not your regular FPS because adds some elements from RPGs and even has a decent story.

The Bad
Where do I start? The GUI is to large and annoying. The universal ammo is a terrible idea that ruins the fun of having different weapons.

The story does a great job burning up everything the previous game strive to set. You pile up missions in one level up to a point you can't decide what to do next. Without the patch I has problems running in most machines. I guess I can go on and on forever.

The Bottom Line
If you Liked Deus Ex then stay the hell away from this abomination I mean it. It is painful to see what a misguided story and destructive set of ideas can make to a classic.

And to think they even wanted to make a film from the franchise. That's one movie that I regret you wont see anytime soon.

The Good
After the global Collapse, the WTO established safe enclaves for the best and brightest citizens of the world. In these enclaves commercialism flourishes. WTO troops and private sector security forces guard commercial and housing districts, while corporations have free reign to raise and educate their future employees. But all is not well. The Order Church have stepped up their anti-WTO activities. Chicago is decimated by a nanotech bomb, an Arcologist compound in Cairo is under siege, and the Panzerwerks factories are crippled by saboteurs. And lurking in the background is the revitalized Knights Templar, whose neo-luddite rhetoric has taken on religious fervor.

Deus Ex: The Invisible War begins with an Order raid on a Tarsus Academy in Seattle. The player’s character, Alex D—a Tarsus student, finds him- or herself under fire and unable to trust the WTO structure he’s been raised in. While the Order is clearly in the wrong, events suggest that Tarsus had ulterior motives regarding his education. Alex finds himself pulled between the WTO and the Order, with both sides recruiting his friends and attempting to sway his opinion. Starting in Upper Seattle, the player is quickly immersed in the gray morality that is the world of Deus Ex.

Invisible War is an action RPG presented from an FPS perspective. The game presents the player with a series of choices in terms of quests and goals. The choices are often conflicting and usually weigh a stack of credits against Alex’s code of ethics. The owner of a nightclub will want someone killed but the mark could double your money. Killing a fighting greasel might improve your gambling luck. Small choices lack the larger repercussions found in the original game, but you can cater to the several factions vying for your favor.

While much of the game can be played over the barrel of the gun, stealthy players can complete the game with few, if any, kills. Like its predecessor, Invisible War is customizable. Through the use of legal and black market biomods, players can upgrade their character, concentrating on creating a covert ops hacker or a killing machine. Basic upgrades allow for health regeneration, increased strength, and increased speed. Illegal modifications let players hack ATMs, take control of security turrets, and drain life from unconscious enemies.

Invisible War doesn’t have to be combat intensive, but there is a decent amount of weaponry to be found. Ranged weapons include the typical lethal pistols, sniper rifles, and rocket launchers. A poisoned dart boltcaster can knock out opponents from a distance. You can get up close and personal with a combat knife, energy sword, or various baton types. There is also a wide array of explosives for various user needs.

Of note, all projectile weapons draw from the same ammunition pool, but at a different rate. So you might not be able to send any more rockets flying at a Templar in full armor, but you can switch over to the pistol and fire off a few more rounds. Weapons can also be modified, but can only take two upgrades and can’t be downgraded if you change your mind.

The world of Deus Ex is still populated with interesting characters, some of whom return from the original game. The world is littered with books and datacubes, coming nowhere near Morrowind’s word count, but still filling in the gaps and explaining things like why all guns take the same ammunition. This entry has fewer locations than the original (and smaller levels), but there is still a bit of globetrotting to be done.


The Bad
Invisible War, aside from its weaknesses as a Deus Ex game, is a fun, largely open-ended excursion. Its ten hour playtime doesn’t provide enough time to develop characters or explore the storyline and players just coming to the franchise might prefer if characters just shut up rather than droning on about myriad conspiracies and organizations. Still there’s a lot to like here.

Most of what I didn’t like involved design choices. The HUD is clunky and crowded. Resembling an iris, good chunks of Alex’s peripheral vision are taken up with inventory and biomod information. You still have to enter an inventory screen to manage inventory, so it really isn’t time saving—especially since you can use the scroll wheel to move through active inventory items.

Levels look similar regardless of where they are geographically. I guess the proliferation of WTO technology is part of the problem, but I was really dying for something organic towards the game’s end.

Finally, aside from a rendered opening and four rendered endings, nothing happens outside of a game level—i.e., taking a helicopter from Cairo to Trier means clicking on a helicopter in Cairo and then magically showing up in Trier. A few transitional scenes would have been nice.

The Bottom Line
There’s an interesting conspiracy theory that Invisible War is smaller, simpler, and shorter than the original in an effort to make it more console-friendly. I’m not sure I buy it, but you have to wonder: in an age when sequels are bigger and better, why is Invisible War so scaled-down?

Let me step back, when I first played Deus Ex I was singularly unimpressed. As a first-person shooter, it was just average and lacked any sort of robust AI. As a first-person sneaker, I much preferred the Thief series. What I liked on my first play through, was the amount of character customization and the conversation options. And the fact that I had choices to make. Choices that seemed to matter.

The second time I played Deus Ex, I realized how brilliant the game was. Based on the choices your character makes, killing Anna early on or saving Paul, the game feels completely different. There’s an incredible level of branching, which I missed the first time out.

Back to Invisible War, I’m not sure that anything I did, up until the last half hour of gameplay, had any real effect. It’s that last half hour that determines which of the four endings you’ll get. Unfortunately, the previous 9-1/2 hours haven’t directed you towards any particular outcome. Are the Illuminati better than the Templars? Is the WTO’s vision of utopia more convincing than ApostleCorps’? Does any of it really matter?

The Good
20 years after the events of the original Deus Ex, most of the world is under direct control of two organizations: The commercial and governmental WTO and "The Order", who reject materialism and genetic augmentation. You play a young trainee at the shady "Tarsus" military academy, who finds himself between the fronts of an "invisible war" after a devastating terrorist attack wiped out Chicago. You travel various locations such as Seattle, Cairo and Antarctica. As the game progresses you can choose your allies, find out more about the main organizations, the mysterious cyborg race of the Omar, virtual holographic pop-stars... or the fierce competition between two rivaling coffee chains. There is no distinction between "good and evil", just choices - and consequences.

Yes, you can feel the talent of the original DX team in "Invisible War". The strong backstory can hold its ground and gives the gameplay some purpose. A variety of side quests and places to explore keeps you interested in a science fiction world which happens to be eerily plausible, once you look behind a surface tailored towards FPS gameplay. The action/stealth/diplomacy/hacking mix is still there, once again mixing FPS action with various RPG elements.

Music and voice acting is pretty solid. And the state of the art physics engine makes objects in the game world move a little more smoothly and realistically.

The Bad
But something is missing. And the more you look at it, the more you realize that about 2/3 of the game mechanics of the legendary predecessor have simply been cut without replacement - to make the game work on an Xbox.

That isn't just blind and paranoid jealousy towards a new platform. No, the developers were quite frank about how the memory restrictions of the console caused significant limitations which show in the ridiculously small level size, for example. While the first Deus Ex sent you on a mission on a life-scale rendition of Liberty Island, most of the levels in DX:IW consist of (literally!) 3 rooms and a connecting corridor. It just feels cramped, linear (yet you still get lost all the time!), claustrophobic and... unimmersive. Plus the prospect of seeing a loading screen every 25 meters gets annoying quickly.

Then there is the horrible interface. Let me try to explain it in pain inducing detail:

It starts with the HUD taking up 40% of the screen in a most annoying, circle-style layout. Text is in 24pt headline-size, so even small paragraphs of text which pop up frequently throughout the game go over multiple pages in tiny windows with huge, circle-shaped decorations on the side when they could as easily be of a smaller, more comfortable size appropriate for reading on PC monitors. Then there is the complete ignorance towards the possibilities of mouse input. No scroll-bars, no buttons to click for even the most obvious of tasks. Sometimes, the intro screen doesn't recognize mouse clicks and you have to navigate using Arrow Keys, Enter and Esc (that would be the 2 button + joypad controls the interface has clearly been designed for).

There are no quick save/load keys. Apparently, you cannot even change binds for items and augs for both of which only 6 slots are available anymore. The inventory has been reduced to 12 (maximally 15) indiscriminately-sized slots which individually do not distinguish between, say, a flame thrower and a soda can. Clicking stuff in the inventory and clicking another item makes the positions in the inventory switch instead selecting the next item. Drag and drop? A foreign concept to DX:IW. Annoying, to say the least. To bring up weapon modifications, you have to press the tab key(?!?) while having selected a weapon. Otherwise the tab key just throws stuff away. Because of the ridiculously big text and window-decorations, information for each item is reduced to a single sentence and ugly icons planted thoughtlessly into the middle of the screen. The rest of the space is used for permanent key-mapping info (because honestly, who would think of pressing the tab key to install weapon mods?). Every icon looks a slight bit too low res on every resolution above 800x600. Did I mention that I hate the "Neuropol" font? Normally, I wouldn't even bring that up, but it simply fits the whole story of one aimless and over-styled interface that singlehandedly manages to destroy a large part of the game's look and feel.

It doesn't stop there, however. DX:IW does not support wide-screen monitors, among other graphics-related bugs. The field of view is reduced to a smallish 68°, yet another thing to make perspective look more natural on far-away television screens - and bloated on PC monitors. Occasionally auto-aim switches on for no reason. Huge, white sparks fill the screen when punching a wood crate with a baton, adding to the Street Fighter style of graphics FX. I could go on.

To be fair, various of these issues have been addressed with a patch, but the list simply goes on and on and there is a philosophy to the game's design that simply cannot be fixed: This is a game built exclusively for the Xbox... and then ported to PC.

In order to make the gameplay more streamlined, everything but the most vital game mechanics were cut. Skill points? No more. Just genetic nano augmentations, most of which are identical to DX1's. The concept of settling for specific augmentations being a tough, one-time choice has also been removed by making them replaceable. Weapon mods are still available but now a pistol cannot shoot further than 20 meters without a "range modification"? And did I mention that there is only ONE TYPE OF AMMO FOR EVERY WEAPON?

What is really unfortunate is that they weren't even able to truly improve on the graphical issues that already plagued the first Deus Ex. DX:IW might indeed have been the first game to support real-time stencil shadows, yet the game makes no aesthetic use of it. The walls look as bland and gray as in IW's predecessor. And thanks to the unnaturally sharp shadows and emotionless faces, characters still look as if they were made out of plastic.

The Bottom Line
I remember the shock from playing the DX:IW demo for the first time. This was supposed to be the sequel to one of the best games of its generation?

I only picked up the full version for a bargain bin price, years later. Admittedly, like the first one, the game becomes better after playing for a few hours, yet it still feels disappointingly small compared to its predecessor. So many gameplay options were simply cut without any new, innovative features to replace them. It's a game designed around limitations instead of pushing the limits. It feels like a game so afraid to overexert players, it decided to rather bore them instead.

Worth getting if you keep your expectations low - but certainly not a game worth the Deus Ex title.