Deus Ex: Invisible War

The Good
The story has a lot of twists, the graphics are very atmospheric, the biomod upgrade system adds a lot of strategy and depth to the game, the speech is great, the gameplay is non-linear.

The Bad
Most of the models have been heavily reused through the game, the story has more twists than required, You can't use more than 6 different upgrades at a time.

The Bottom Line
Deus Ex 2 is simply a breathtaking joyride through a dark world of corruption, lies, heroes and demons, with a lot of story twists. You start as Alex D. (either male or female depending on Your choice at the beginning of the game) and are about to uncover that the fate of the world is not decided by the people, but by 4 groups which have different interests and aims, and You are just a puppet in a big conspiracy game.... Since this is a mixture between roleplaying game, FPS, adventure, You have a lot of choices on what You will do and who You will work with. You meet a lot of friendly or neutral NPCs who will give You jobs, ask for or offer help, want to trade with You, like in any good RPG. The nice and immersive thing is that You can accept jobs from different parties resulting in changes of how the story evolves. Sometimes You are told to kill someone by one fraction and ordered to save him by another... There's also quite a nice variety of real-world weapons, like flamethrowers, missile launchers, knifes, swords etc. Besides that, there is the biomodification system, that offers You slots (body parts) to be "enhanced": You can modify the brains (to hack computer systems via a neural port), the eyes (better sight, remote control killer drones...), the body itself (becoming invisible...), the legs (faster, higher jumps, safe landing from high altitude, sneaking...), the arms (more strength, built-in bioweapons...).... In each slot, You can only have one modification, but the choice between three different ones (including mods called "illegal"). The best part is that You can play Deus Ex 2 the way You want.Each problem can be solved in different ways, You can infiltrate buildings via the ventilation system, by using "multitools" (a kind of digital lockpick key set), by using a weapon (missile launcher), by getting a code card....that code card could be obtained through a dialogue, by stealing it, by finding it in a chest....it happened to me to actually reload the game several times to try different approaches, and in almost any situation, You can find a non-violent way to solve a problem. There's always the option to fight Your enemies with bio-toxine which will render them unconscious, instead of having to kill them. Or, like in Splintercell, You can just try to sneak by (using Your biomods to become invisible for as long as the bio-battery holds...). Plus, there's multiple ways to combine Your bio-modifications, so at the end of the day, Deus Ex 2 offers a tremendous amount of non-linear ways to play the game and experience it YOUR way, and it has real lastability, because You would find new ways to play it even when playing it for the third or fourth time. Add to that the four different endings depending for which party You eventually finish the game, and You have another classic game made by the awesome folks at Ion Storm.

The Good
This game's gritty style and customization drew me in, and it's sidequests and civilians supply many chances for entertainment. Also, I have had many fun experiences with hunting down every last weapon, just cuz I'm a completion nut. The time it took to do that added a good 5+ hours to the game, and because of multiple pathways, Deus Ex: Invisible War has great replay value

The Bad
I found that I had to crank up my TV's brightness to see what was going on sometimes. However, this is a small price to pay for greatness.

The Bottom Line
This game is a sci-fi shooter's dream.

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.