Deus Ex: Invisible War

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
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
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.