Deus Ex: Invisible War

The Good
This game is pretty wicked. Having not played the original and listening to others speak about it I was prepared for a game which gave you choices. By choices I took to mean the fact that beauty of the game would be in delivering a different story for each person playing it depending on the choices you made. Wrong. The choice you are given is which playing style you wish to adopt to complete a quite linear story line. The objectives can vary depending on which factions orders you wish to follow. Achieving these objectives could take the form of basically shooting the enemies, talking your way out of situations or stealth. The beauty of the game lies within the range of methods to play the game the way you want. For instance, you may choose to sneak past a camera using your thermal masking bio-modification, or disabling it with an EMP grenade, or shooting at it with an EMP modified weapon, or destroying it with your 1st person controlled Spy Drone modification or maybe just finding an air vent and seeking an alternative route.

The Bad
The expectancy it created, although to some part by word of mouth. It isn't what I expected as I said because I thought that choosing to do certain objectives and saying certain things would effect the story line of the game but it doesn't, it affects the path you take to the final and only real interactive choice in the game, the end. I found it hard not to do all the objectives I could in my goals list, which meant following multiple factions wishes, which seems to be against what the game is trying to achieve, I think. Also I thought the story was overcomplicated. Many people will probably love this, but I couldn't be bothered to take in all the long winded, long words that some of the characters spout.

The Bottom Line
A unique 1st person game which expands the genre nicely.

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
Note: I played this game with the 1.2 patch installed. I highly recommend patching it before playing the game.

As a big fan of the original, I am unable to review it without comparing the 2 products.
The graphics are a major delight. While not photo-realistic as compared to Max Payne, the NPCs look more realistic. You can even see the garish eye shadow on some of the games female characters.

The detailed architecture of the levels shows that the developers did create an atmosphere using stagecraft. The levels unwind themselves in ways that are both realistic and immersive. I found myself almost smelling the tainted air in the Cairo level. The eye candy is everywhere.

The music is greatly improved. Its more atmospheric, less distracting and certainly more fitting than the original. The minimalist themes worked well, slightly reminiscent of themes you’d hear in Anachronox. (Not surprising, they’re both from Ion Storm.)

The game play is very similar to the original. If you played Deus Ex, you can leap in to sequel with little or no training. The non-linear nature is here as well. For each level, you have primary and secondary tasks. The primary tasks often are issued by opposing forces, so you can align yourself with either party by choosing one task over another. You gain knowledge, products or credits by performing secondary tasks. The Secondary tasks are not essential to the game, but they add to the fun and can make other parts of the game easier.

The voice acting is pretty good too. Nothing extraordinary, but well with the nature of the game.

The characters are actually very well written. The interaction is pretty cool and fairly deep in discussing real world politics and policies. You find that all the leading parties have similar intentions but very different ways of accomplishing their goals.

Some of the dialogue choices can get you benefits or in to a firefight. So you can at least play diplomat or gunner, depending on how you want to play.

The rag-doll physics did add a nice touch to game play. More intriguing were the environmental physics. You could bump items out of the way, uncovering vents and doorways.

You can also choose genders and skin colors. The choices do not seem to affect the game play very much, with the exception of a randy helicopter pilot.

The playing style can still be varied, and is improved by using biomods of your choice. You can become a killing machine or someone who sneaks around. The biomods let you build a character of specific strengths and weaknesses. Contrary to what reviewers have said, I find the choices do offer a very subtle element of RPG.

The weapons mods can add a little more fun as well. You can install 2 mods per weapon, changing its usefulness and nature of destruction. A machine gun with an EMP damage can pretty much trash anything. And the ammo is universal, so locking and loading is fairly easy.

The choices of endings are pretty cool. They tend to range from easy to impossible.


The Bad
The audio quality was less than stellar. At times, it was worse than the original. The compression used unequally throughout the game. It was not unusual for a dialogue to lose and gain fidelity due to a change in recording/compression quality.

The long load times. Gahh….

The overuse of the same stock body motion captures. It was actually funny to watch women conversing and derisively rocking their upper torso in tandem. The men still look like they have no flexibility in their spinal columns. When the men talk, they actively wave their arms around, looking like the robot from Lost in Space.

The overuse of the same models. With the exception of the main characters, All the NPCs look the same. You’d killed a NPC in one level, and run in to her identical twin in another level. And you keep running in to identical twins, everywhere. And the twins would wear the same identical clothes with the same identical stains. I realize that its standard practice to recycle, but it’s messes up the immersive perspective a bit.

The targeting of items you want to pick up is erratic. You can pick ammo and supplies from the recently dead. But you have to move them first. And then, you have to move the unwanted items away before you can convince the targeting site to point the item you want.

Unlike the last game, your reputation is consistently neutral. You can kill goons and have their leader plead for your assistance in another level. The game becomes more indulgent and less fun because you can do what you want and still have a relatively clean slate with everyone.

The wish is for more RPG elements in actual Role-playing. It would be extremely cool if your choices were reflected in more depth in your NPC interactions. But then again, I wasn’t expecting Fallout, so I’m ok with this part.

And unlike this ghastly long review, IT’S TOO SHORT!

The Bottom Line
Fun, pretty, and with snarky bits of political education. But not as fun as the original.