Deus Ex: Invisible War

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.

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
I consider the first Deus Ex one of the most important games ever made. Like many other fans of that Warren Spector masterpiece, I was impatiently waiting for the sequel; when I laid my hands on it, it made me shrug my shoulders more than once, until I decided it was not worth my time. However, I found myself coming back to the game in my thoughts; eventually, eight years later, my interest having been revived by Human Revolution, I gave it another chance.

All the annoying simplifications aside, the core gameplay still retains some of that special Deus Ex magic.The abundance of stuff to find brings back fond memories of a game that can become a giant scavenger hunt; even though they went over the top with that (thorough exploration rewards you with way more items than you'll ever need), it is still fun. I love collecting items, sometimes just for the sake of it, and Invisible War does satisfy that instinct somewhat.

Each level has branching paths accommodated to different styles of play. Don't want to spend multitools to disable laser beams? Maybe you could crawl through a nearby vent; but beware of spider bots. Any given area can be tackled by using different means - not necessarily by seeking out alternate routes. Tired of all this crawling? How about walking in gun-blazing, and dispatching of those giant robots with the EMP secondary fire of your mag rail? Be my guest. Think it would be too challenging? Activate a biomod that makes you invisible to robots, and quickly run past it. Every approach has its obvious advantages and disadvantages, but the bottom line is that the player can switch gears at any time, allowing for fluent gameplay. This cardinal aspect of the original Deus Ex was carried over to the sequel - though I must say that at times it felt like mechanical copying.

The world of Invisible War is fully interactive. Objects will physically react to your actions; you can move, knock down, throw, destroy, and interact with pretty much everything you see. Every single item, no matter how unimportant it is, can be picked up and put elsewhere. Moving items sometimes rewards you with a discovery of an alternate route, and throwing chairs and crates at enemies (with an appropriate biomod installed) is very cool.

The Bad
Why the hate? This is a sentence I've encountered on more than one website dedicated to the series. Many fans of the original Deus Ex loathe Invisible War; while I do not quite share this sentiment, I can certainly see where the hate comes from.

It's all been discussed many times before: removal of role-playing elements, unified ammo, dumbed-down interface, claustrophobic hubs. Side quests are always great, but the player needs to be rewarded for completing them. Without experience points, money would be the only reward; however, money is useless in the game. You cannot buy anything except food, and you don't need it. Even if you could buy other items, you wouldn't need to: everything is plentiful. Biomod canisters, in particular, are as common as bread loaves. I'm actually glad they removed shops because those would have made the game even easier. But of course it would have been better if they balanced all this without cutting out anything. And of course, there is the console habit of imposing limitations on everything.

Unified ammo - there is no way around it, it's not a good idea. Yes, I found myself rejoicing when I realized I will never run out of sniper rifle ammo. But that ruined the whole "you must survive with whatever little you have" aspect of the game; it went contrary to the concept of using different means to solve problems.

The interface bothered me enormously until I realized I could turn off the item display in the HUD by making it completely opaque. Wandering around in cities that consisted of a few narrow corridors was even less agreeable. Seriously: no city feels like one; in some places the cramped design borders on ridiculous, literally squeezing you into straight paths you can not deviate from. Add to that the painful loading times: minuscule locations are separated from each other by loading screens announced with an ironic "do you want to travel to..." greeting. Travel? You call opening a door and stepping through it traveling?

There was also something less tangible - a certain aspect of design and presentation that kept bothering me. A feeble, but constant unpleasant feeling relentlessly accompanied my playing sessions. I disliked the game's cold, calculated nature. It is as if somebody took some cool aspects from the first Deus Ex and carefully combined them together without infusing them with passion. I could never shake off the impression of artificial, deliberate planning.

Invisible War did nothing to correct the flaws of the original game. They bothered me more in the sequel than they did in the predecessor: three years have passed, and the second game lost a lot of what made the first one great, so I expected that they will at least address the weaker aspects of the original. Bad voice acting and moronic AI are still there. Hostile areas still tend to be monotonous and abstract.

The Bottom Line
Invisible War is a curious product. It's a terrible sequel, but I wouldn't call it a bad game. Even in its butchered, mutilated state, Deus Ex manages to elevate itself above the crowd.

Another reviewer passed the following verdict on Invisible War: "it's by far not as good as the first game, but it's still better than a lot of that crap out there". I think there is much truth in this statement.