Stumpokapow
listen to the mad man
Deus Ex: Invisible War is the sequel to the original Deus Ex, which was a very widely acclaimed cyberpunk RPG released in 2000 on PC (and later ported, poorly from what I understand, to the PS2). Deus Ex was a long, involving game that executed a number of fantastic ideas very well. Invisible War was released in 2003 for the PC and OG XBOX. It is not acclaimed, it's not really cyberpunk, and it's not an RPG. It's not long or involving and it doesn't have many ideas and those that it does have aren't executed well.
Premise
The basic premise is that the Earth has undergone an event called the Collapse. Twenty years after this event, a terrorist attack annihilates the city of Chicago. You play as Alex D (you choose the gender of your character), a student at Tarsus Academy, which is an organization that nominally trains gifted students and places them in companies and other powerful organizations at the end. Alex studies in Chicago and is evacuated to Seattle as the Chicago is destroyed. Very quickly after arriving in Seattle, things go to shit there as a religious cult called the "Order" attacks the Tarsus Academy.
The Order, you see, are protesting against biomechanical implants that are given to Tarsus students. After escaping the Tarsus Academy in Seattle, Alex is contacted by his former schoolmate Billie (female--I have no idea if she's male if you play a female) who reveals that she sympathizes with the order. Alex is also contacted by the WTO, who are like a sinister version of the actual World Trade Organization. The story launches from here, as Alex navigates the various factions of the game to figure out what the real motivations behind the attack and the various groups were.
My review is directed towards people who have played Deus Ex (the original). If you haven't, let me recommend that you play it and very quick answer your next question:
Should I play this game if I haven't played Deus Ex?
No. It's not a particularly interesting game from a gameplay point of view--all of its best ideas were used earlier in Deus Ex--and the story is a complete and utter mess, the back half of which only makes sense if you've played Deus Ex. The game has also aged very poorly. I'll make a note of many of the technical problems later, but the short version is that it doesn't play very well by modern standards, the technical performance is horrible, the game is in locked 4:3, it has a horrible UI (really it's an example of making an awful UI for consoles, and then porting that UI wholesale to PC and it being ten times as horrible there).
Deus Ex (the original) is a really excellent game. It was ugly even at release and it's hideous now, but setting that aside it's really something special. Both games cost $9.99 on Steam, but they've been on sale for $4.99 before. Go play Deus Ex. Skip this game.
For everyone else... Gameplay
The original Deus Ex was an open-ended FPS-RPG. Your character could level up--experience was earned through missions, incentivizing you to check out side missions and explore nooks and crannies. You could modify your weapons. You could learn abilities. You could buy items. You could modify your body. You could play stealthy, hacker, melee, run-and-gun, smooth talker. You could do no kill runs. Dialog frequently materially impacted the way missions unfolded and was pretty well written from a game point of view. I won't say that the balance between all these gameplay styles was perfect, but it worked enough that you never felt like putting nails in your eyes. Damage was location-based, so enough damage to your legs and you'd have to drag yourself to safety.
Deus Ex Invisible War ditches almost all of these things. There's no more experience. There's still money but you need very little and there are only a handful of stores in the game. You can still modify your weapons, but the system has been streamlined significantly and for the worse--although I put upgrades in both slots of every weapon, I never felt like they did anything besides the silencer, which was so essential that it went in pretty much every weapon. Location based damage is gone.
Ammo has been made universal--every weapon uses the same ammo, although the larger the weapon the more ammo it uses. Because ammo is universal, you generally end up picking one or two weapons and using them 100% of the game. The shotgun and SMG and pistol are useless. In the end you get a rocket launcher that is drastically more powerful than anything else and has an unlimited distance user steerable rocket so you can clear out an entire level without walking through it at all.
Enemies at the end of the game are largely either explosive or emit poison gas when killed, and almost exclusively fire rocket launchers or flamethrowers. This is annoying because it basically means that the only viable build in the end game is to use the guided rocket launcher or headshot with the sniper rifle, since anything else either gets you killed from their rockets or their death actions. The game suffers from uneven difficulty and clear chokepoints, expect to easily defeat "bosses" and die every so often to ill-placed grunts.
There's no reason to try a no kill run--the stealth system is busted as hell (enemies hear from across the map) and non-lethal weapons are just weaker versions of the lethal weapons you already have. There is absolutely no plot or mission reason to ever use a non-lethal takedown.
Dialog still impacts missions, but only in the most base and robotic of ways. "Do you want to ally with me? 1) YES I LOVE YOU 2) PREPARE TO DIE". There's no subtlety at all, and there are virtually no conversations where you have more than two options. Even the game is binary--you start out taking missions from the WTO and the Order Church, and literally every mission is "Do the opposite of what the other guys ask you to do!" One sidequest involves you getting in the middle of a turf war between two coffee shops, and every mission you can do for them is basically "Do you choose shop A or shop B?". This is not choice. Any video game that allows choice probably boils down to this in the end, but that's what this game is--a purely boiled down version of choice. It's almost like a Madlib. You just pick the faction you side with and their name gets filled in to the story.
The modifications you can give yourself are pretty boring. You get five slots--each slot gets one of three upgrades (two "legal", one "illegal"). The upgrades are almost all boring. Hacking, healing, healing by killing enemies, silent running, fast running, super strength, stealth against robots, stealth against humans, remote controlled drone with guns, remote controlled drone that defends against rockets... uh... I can't remember the rest, but they're pretty dull. Three of my five skills ended up being passive, only health regeneration and fast running ended up being active usable skills.
There are no consequences to choosing illegal upgrades. There's nothing about the concept of the illegal upgrades that makes them seem more illegal. The problem is that they replaced a complex, elaborate system of modification from the first game with this stupid binary one. And like every other binary gameplay system in Invisible War, there's no distinction between the two sides. Ugh.
Like Deus Ex, the game has multiple endings, but the ending is chosen in the last 10 minutes of the game and differs only by providing you a different final mission (kill the groups you don't like on the tiny little map that isn't different depending on the faction you choose) and a different end FMV.
Mission Design
Deus Ex allowed you to approach any mission from dozens of ways. Break in, hack in, socially engineer, go in guns blazing. In Invisible War, most mission objectives have at least two entrances. But the entrance you choose rarely matters. Fight dudes and go in through the basement or fight dudes and go in through the roof? See, hacking, lockpicking, disabling security cameras, etc all boil down to pressing a button and waiting 2 seconds, so ultimately even when you are given a choice between different styles, it boils down to "Press right mouse to use <item x> to manipulate <widget y> to finish the mission".
This is the first point I'd like to call out reviewers. Reviewers generally praised that the game preserved Deus Ex's heritage of letting you do things in different ways. One review used as an example a mission where you can choose to break into a guy's apartment through the skylight, pick the front door lock, or socially engineer him into giving you the key. This occurs about 15 minutes into a 10 hour game and it's about the most varied quest in the entire game. I have no idea if the reviewer only played 15 minutes or was just trying to avoid spoilers, but it doesn't represent the game. This is not a diverse or varied game the way Deus Ex was.
I'd also at this point note that virtually every novel piece of level design is also used in the first hour of the game (the "Seattle" level). There were a few segments that made me say "Woah, neat". It goes downhill from there.
There are very few levels: Seattle, Cairo, Trier Germany, Antarctica, Cairo again, and then a frozen version of
. Each level will generally have one or two main buildings consisting of a few floors of walkways, and one "dungeon". Seattle has an elevator between the upper and lower halves, Cairo has a few airplane hangers and a farm, Trier has a sort of tower thing and a lab, Antarctica is basically a series of corridors and then a temple, and the final mission is a tiny, watered down version of a level from the first Deus Ex.
The real-world settings are nice, but the game is set so far in the future that none of them feel like the cities they are, in a contrast to Deus Ex, where everything feels like a noir modern version of itself. I'd have no idea that Cairo was Cairo if it weren't for indoor palm trees and the fact that the church is called a Mosque.
Writing, Voice Acting, and Characters
Deus Ex had a pretty colourful cast of characters. I won't pretend they were interesting or deep since each basically filled out the role of a one-dimensional stereotype representing a given faction.
Deus Ex: Invisible War does not have a colourful cast of characters. Virtually every living character from Deus Ex returns as a hollow cardboard cutout of themselves, asked to spout two or three lines of dialog and obnoxiously call out fans of the original game. The exception is maybe the hero of the first game, JC Denton, who has a pretty substantial role and has some good lines.
The new characters are feeble. "Cartoonish" would be an understated adjective to use to describe the new people.
The single new standout character is an AI pop singer you can interact with in most levels. When you first meet her in Seattle, she chats you up a bit and asks you to give her some information. As you continue to give her info about corruption and ne'er-do-goods in the city, you get more rewards and begin to realize that she doubles as some sort of police informant AI. In each subsequent level you run in to her again. Near the end of the game,
It's a pretty witty scam.
This is a typical example of Invisible War's dialog, voice acting, and characters.
Plot
So, the original Deus Ex is a bit silly. Betrayal after betrayal, increasingly less plausible intersections of boogeymen and secret societies. I'd basically put it on par with "National Treasure" meets "The Matrix". Deus Ex: Invisible War... yikes.
One thing that's exceptionally dumb about the story is that no one gives a shit. Fuck over the Order Church and seriously damage their infrastructure and research? You get a voiceover that says "HOW DARE YOU... but you are forgiven if you do the next mission for us". Hell, the fucking Knights Templar VO told me that I was worthless and subhuman, but that they'd still like me to help them. Err, okay. Apparently I should go to a tent to receive further instructions. Then ten feet later a bunch of Knights Templar tried to kill me, because of course that's their objective. Wait, how can I get my further instructions that are necessary to help the Knights Templar achieve their objective if some grunt rocket launchers me into oblivion? This persists to the very end of the game. If you make 200 choices in a row favouring one side, all the opposing sides will still ask you to pick them up until about 5 minutes before the ending.
Making matters worse, your characters automatic response to each party until the very end is "I'll think about it". Even if you've screwed over that faction 100 times and called their leader a terrible person and vowed to bring them to justice, you'll still end up saying "I'll think about it" until you choose which ending you want. As a result, your character never seems to have an inquisitive or astute mind. JC Denton, in Deus Ex, seemed like he was genuinely learning things about the world and applying critical thinking to make the choices he made. Alex D just says "I'll think about it" and eventually pushes a button to make a decision. Occasionally he offers the token resistance ("Wouldn't you agree that enslaving the entire world sounds like a dictatorship? Well, I'll think about it.")
In an effort to make "shades of grey", every faction end up being insufferable assholes. The WTO asks you to destroy a family farm because the family doesn't have the right permits. Destroy, really? I can't just write them a ticket? The Order asks you to publicly assassinate research scientists supporting the WTO. Err... I can't just shut down the research? The Illuminati openly want you to turn the world over to them. The Knights Templar call you subhuman from the first time you talk to them and still ask you to help them.
Technical Issues
As I mentioned, the game runs in 4:3 on PC. I found a guide online to hack it into 16:9 or 16:10. This requires a few changes to INI files and the use of a hex editor. Once you get the game running in 16:9/16:10, prepare to run into a wide array of technical issues.
First, Steam does not properly record your playtime on this game. This is because the game uses a launcher app which launches the main game as a separate process. Every single time you move between levels, the main process dies and the launcher process launches a new main process. I have no idea if this is universal, but for me what would happen was that the game window would disappear (leaving me on my desktop) and then about 1.5 seconds later, the load screen would come up.
The load times are long. Probably 10-15 seconds on my triple-core system with 4 gigs of ram. The maps in this game are tiny. I have never seen a video game with smaller maps. Expect to move between maps constantly. You might get a quest in lower Seattle which will require you to go through 4-5 map transitions to fetch a widget in upper Seattle and then 4-5 to bring it back to get some credits. Expect to spend a lot of time watching load screens.
The game's last level takes place on
, a location from Deus Ex. In Deus Ex, the map is huge, open, and seamless. In Invisible War, it's cut up into three or four tiny segments and each is tiny and bland. Totally totally embarrassing.
Another great aspect of this is that if you die, you're instantly returned to the main menu. Load your save game, and you've got to sit through another load screen. In a few particularly tricky parts I died five or six times in a row. Losing minutes to loadtime when it's the same 100 square foot area I just died in is obnoxious.
I also ran into a few bugs. One mission involved me having to listen to a holo-recording in an office. Apparently I must have saved at the wrong time, because when I loaded my save, the holo-recording had spawned but wouldn't play. Since it wouldn't play, I couldn't complete the mission, and since it was spawned, I couldn't spawn it again. I ended up modifying some files to enable a debug mode and forcing the game to delete the holo-recording object, and then triggered it again.
Grabbing items is kind of buggy. When you kill a character, they drop items. First, they normally drop items under themselves, so you pretty categorically have to pick up the dead body, throw it somewhere, and then pick up the item. If multiple items are near each other, it's easy to pick the wrong one. Because your inventory is tiny (another console limitation?), you spend most of the game with a full inventory and it's annoying to be told "Inventory full, can't pick up noise making grenade" when you actually want the ammo clip next to the grenade.
Items don't stack properly and you can't merge them. I frequently had cases where I'd have 5 health kits and get another one; the health kit would take up a second slot in my inventory (you only have 12 slots). Then the next health kit I'd get would stack on top of the first 5. This also happened with energy packs (which recharge your biotics) and omnitools (which pick locks and other devices).
The game crashed four times in the ~8-10 hours I played it. These were instantaneous hard crashes to the desktop.
It was one of the first games to use Havok to give objects their own physics models. At the very beginning of the game, you get a basketball, and it's kinda neat that you can actually throw it. The problem is that nothing in the game has weight; either it's too heavy for you to lift and you can't, or it's light as a feather and you can throw it across the room. Corpses are a joke. Bang into an object and it'll go flying. Half-baked.
The thing is that the levels are so small, the load times so long, the interface so poor, the physics so half-implemented that it just feels like a much more modest, smaller game than Deus Ex, which makes it feel older. Say you want to read a book on the shelf? You go to do so and discover that the book consists of three or four lines of flavour text... three or four lines in a game contemporary to Morrowind where there were hundreds of mini-essays and novellas? Really? Every time I go to interact with anything in the game, I keep thinking either "This is a worse Deus Ex", "This is a worse System Shock 2", or "This is a worse Morrowind". It feels really old. I can't describe it. I think the last game I played that aged this poorly was Red Faction, and Invisible War feels about as old as that game despite being three years newer and looking much nicer.
Conclusion
I'm sure someone is going to quote this and say "That's a lot of words for a game that everyone knew sucked"). Feel free. But the case I want to make here is that the game sucks as a sequel to Deus Ex, it aged terribly, it's a technical mess, it has no novel gameplay ideas, and the gameplay ideas it does have were all implemented elsewhere. It's not a good RPG, it's not a good FPS, it's not a good game.
The storyline is silly, the characters forgettable except when they're so stupid that you'd remember them, the plot milquetoast and so "small" feeling compared to the original game. What a disaster.
In the words of Harvey Smith, the key designer on the title:
Despite all of this, the game is made by talented individuals. I have no doubt that the team could have made a worthy sequel to Deus Ex, and I have no doubt that both Warren Spector and Harvey Smith are still able today to make game-of-the-generation quality games. But this is absolutely, positively not one of them.
Premise
The basic premise is that the Earth has undergone an event called the Collapse. Twenty years after this event, a terrorist attack annihilates the city of Chicago. You play as Alex D (you choose the gender of your character), a student at Tarsus Academy, which is an organization that nominally trains gifted students and places them in companies and other powerful organizations at the end. Alex studies in Chicago and is evacuated to Seattle as the Chicago is destroyed. Very quickly after arriving in Seattle, things go to shit there as a religious cult called the "Order" attacks the Tarsus Academy.
The Order, you see, are protesting against biomechanical implants that are given to Tarsus students. After escaping the Tarsus Academy in Seattle, Alex is contacted by his former schoolmate Billie (female--I have no idea if she's male if you play a female) who reveals that she sympathizes with the order. Alex is also contacted by the WTO, who are like a sinister version of the actual World Trade Organization. The story launches from here, as Alex navigates the various factions of the game to figure out what the real motivations behind the attack and the various groups were.
My review is directed towards people who have played Deus Ex (the original). If you haven't, let me recommend that you play it and very quick answer your next question:
Should I play this game if I haven't played Deus Ex?
No. It's not a particularly interesting game from a gameplay point of view--all of its best ideas were used earlier in Deus Ex--and the story is a complete and utter mess, the back half of which only makes sense if you've played Deus Ex. The game has also aged very poorly. I'll make a note of many of the technical problems later, but the short version is that it doesn't play very well by modern standards, the technical performance is horrible, the game is in locked 4:3, it has a horrible UI (really it's an example of making an awful UI for consoles, and then porting that UI wholesale to PC and it being ten times as horrible there).
Deus Ex (the original) is a really excellent game. It was ugly even at release and it's hideous now, but setting that aside it's really something special. Both games cost $9.99 on Steam, but they've been on sale for $4.99 before. Go play Deus Ex. Skip this game.
For everyone else... Gameplay
The original Deus Ex was an open-ended FPS-RPG. Your character could level up--experience was earned through missions, incentivizing you to check out side missions and explore nooks and crannies. You could modify your weapons. You could learn abilities. You could buy items. You could modify your body. You could play stealthy, hacker, melee, run-and-gun, smooth talker. You could do no kill runs. Dialog frequently materially impacted the way missions unfolded and was pretty well written from a game point of view. I won't say that the balance between all these gameplay styles was perfect, but it worked enough that you never felt like putting nails in your eyes. Damage was location-based, so enough damage to your legs and you'd have to drag yourself to safety.
Deus Ex Invisible War ditches almost all of these things. There's no more experience. There's still money but you need very little and there are only a handful of stores in the game. You can still modify your weapons, but the system has been streamlined significantly and for the worse--although I put upgrades in both slots of every weapon, I never felt like they did anything besides the silencer, which was so essential that it went in pretty much every weapon. Location based damage is gone.
Ammo has been made universal--every weapon uses the same ammo, although the larger the weapon the more ammo it uses. Because ammo is universal, you generally end up picking one or two weapons and using them 100% of the game. The shotgun and SMG and pistol are useless. In the end you get a rocket launcher that is drastically more powerful than anything else and has an unlimited distance user steerable rocket so you can clear out an entire level without walking through it at all.
Enemies at the end of the game are largely either explosive or emit poison gas when killed, and almost exclusively fire rocket launchers or flamethrowers. This is annoying because it basically means that the only viable build in the end game is to use the guided rocket launcher or headshot with the sniper rifle, since anything else either gets you killed from their rockets or their death actions. The game suffers from uneven difficulty and clear chokepoints, expect to easily defeat "bosses" and die every so often to ill-placed grunts.
There's no reason to try a no kill run--the stealth system is busted as hell (enemies hear from across the map) and non-lethal weapons are just weaker versions of the lethal weapons you already have. There is absolutely no plot or mission reason to ever use a non-lethal takedown.
Dialog still impacts missions, but only in the most base and robotic of ways. "Do you want to ally with me? 1) YES I LOVE YOU 2) PREPARE TO DIE". There's no subtlety at all, and there are virtually no conversations where you have more than two options. Even the game is binary--you start out taking missions from the WTO and the Order Church, and literally every mission is "Do the opposite of what the other guys ask you to do!" One sidequest involves you getting in the middle of a turf war between two coffee shops, and every mission you can do for them is basically "Do you choose shop A or shop B?". This is not choice. Any video game that allows choice probably boils down to this in the end, but that's what this game is--a purely boiled down version of choice. It's almost like a Madlib. You just pick the faction you side with and their name gets filled in to the story.
In the end, you find out that the WTO and the Order Church are both part of the Illuminati! Oh, and the two coffee shops are part of the same company as well! Joke's on you!
The modifications you can give yourself are pretty boring. You get five slots--each slot gets one of three upgrades (two "legal", one "illegal"). The upgrades are almost all boring. Hacking, healing, healing by killing enemies, silent running, fast running, super strength, stealth against robots, stealth against humans, remote controlled drone with guns, remote controlled drone that defends against rockets... uh... I can't remember the rest, but they're pretty dull. Three of my five skills ended up being passive, only health regeneration and fast running ended up being active usable skills.
There are no consequences to choosing illegal upgrades. There's nothing about the concept of the illegal upgrades that makes them seem more illegal. The problem is that they replaced a complex, elaborate system of modification from the first game with this stupid binary one. And like every other binary gameplay system in Invisible War, there's no distinction between the two sides. Ugh.
Like Deus Ex, the game has multiple endings, but the ending is chosen in the last 10 minutes of the game and differs only by providing you a different final mission (kill the groups you don't like on the tiny little map that isn't different depending on the faction you choose) and a different end FMV.
Mission Design
Deus Ex allowed you to approach any mission from dozens of ways. Break in, hack in, socially engineer, go in guns blazing. In Invisible War, most mission objectives have at least two entrances. But the entrance you choose rarely matters. Fight dudes and go in through the basement or fight dudes and go in through the roof? See, hacking, lockpicking, disabling security cameras, etc all boil down to pressing a button and waiting 2 seconds, so ultimately even when you are given a choice between different styles, it boils down to "Press right mouse to use <item x> to manipulate <widget y> to finish the mission".
This is the first point I'd like to call out reviewers. Reviewers generally praised that the game preserved Deus Ex's heritage of letting you do things in different ways. One review used as an example a mission where you can choose to break into a guy's apartment through the skylight, pick the front door lock, or socially engineer him into giving you the key. This occurs about 15 minutes into a 10 hour game and it's about the most varied quest in the entire game. I have no idea if the reviewer only played 15 minutes or was just trying to avoid spoilers, but it doesn't represent the game. This is not a diverse or varied game the way Deus Ex was.
I'd also at this point note that virtually every novel piece of level design is also used in the first hour of the game (the "Seattle" level). There were a few segments that made me say "Woah, neat". It goes downhill from there.
There are very few levels: Seattle, Cairo, Trier Germany, Antarctica, Cairo again, and then a frozen version of
Liberty Island
The real-world settings are nice, but the game is set so far in the future that none of them feel like the cities they are, in a contrast to Deus Ex, where everything feels like a noir modern version of itself. I'd have no idea that Cairo was Cairo if it weren't for indoor palm trees and the fact that the church is called a Mosque.
Writing, Voice Acting, and Characters
Deus Ex had a pretty colourful cast of characters. I won't pretend they were interesting or deep since each basically filled out the role of a one-dimensional stereotype representing a given faction.
Deus Ex: Invisible War does not have a colourful cast of characters. Virtually every living character from Deus Ex returns as a hollow cardboard cutout of themselves, asked to spout two or three lines of dialog and obnoxiously call out fans of the original game. The exception is maybe the hero of the first game, JC Denton, who has a pretty substantial role and has some good lines.
The new characters are feeble. "Cartoonish" would be an understated adjective to use to describe the new people.
The single new standout character is an AI pop singer you can interact with in most levels. When you first meet her in Seattle, she chats you up a bit and asks you to give her some information. As you continue to give her info about corruption and ne'er-do-goods in the city, you get more rewards and begin to realize that she doubles as some sort of police informant AI. In each subsequent level you run in to her again. Near the end of the game,
You find out that her real corporeal version is holed up and needs to be rescued. When you go to meet her, you find the real version is a bratty whiny elitist pop star with no connection to the AI.
This is a typical example of Invisible War's dialog, voice acting, and characters.
Plot
So, the original Deus Ex is a bit silly. Betrayal after betrayal, increasingly less plausible intersections of boogeymen and secret societies. I'd basically put it on par with "National Treasure" meets "The Matrix". Deus Ex: Invisible War... yikes.
In Seattle you learn from doing missions that the former director of your Tarsus Academy is involved in research on a weapon called the Mag Rail. You fly to Cairo to find her. There, you get or destroy the Mag Rail (depending on if you take the WTO or the Order Church side) and find out that she's fled to Germany. Also, you're a clone of the guy who caused the end of the world. You fly to Germany. In Germany, you learn that the WTO and Order Church (BITTER ENEMIES TO THE END) are about to undergo peace talks, but the leader of the Order has been kidnapped. You go and rescue her and discover that the WTO and the Order Church are both part of the Illuminati, and the rivalry (including yelling at you ten minutes ago when you picked sides) is all a big ruse. Surprise. The Illuminati want you to wake up JC Denton who is asleep in Antarctica. So you go to Antarctica and then JC Denton tells you, his clone, that he needs your help to turn the world into a hive-mind linked into a giant computer to promote peace. The Illuminati want to link themselves into a giant computer to control the world. The Knights Templar want to destroy technology once and for all... or you can choose to screw everyone over and give the world over to a renegade band of biomodified traders called the Omar.
One thing that's exceptionally dumb about the story is that no one gives a shit. Fuck over the Order Church and seriously damage their infrastructure and research? You get a voiceover that says "HOW DARE YOU... but you are forgiven if you do the next mission for us". Hell, the fucking Knights Templar VO told me that I was worthless and subhuman, but that they'd still like me to help them. Err, okay. Apparently I should go to a tent to receive further instructions. Then ten feet later a bunch of Knights Templar tried to kill me, because of course that's their objective. Wait, how can I get my further instructions that are necessary to help the Knights Templar achieve their objective if some grunt rocket launchers me into oblivion? This persists to the very end of the game. If you make 200 choices in a row favouring one side, all the opposing sides will still ask you to pick them up until about 5 minutes before the ending.
Making matters worse, your characters automatic response to each party until the very end is "I'll think about it". Even if you've screwed over that faction 100 times and called their leader a terrible person and vowed to bring them to justice, you'll still end up saying "I'll think about it" until you choose which ending you want. As a result, your character never seems to have an inquisitive or astute mind. JC Denton, in Deus Ex, seemed like he was genuinely learning things about the world and applying critical thinking to make the choices he made. Alex D just says "I'll think about it" and eventually pushes a button to make a decision. Occasionally he offers the token resistance ("Wouldn't you agree that enslaving the entire world sounds like a dictatorship? Well, I'll think about it.")
In an effort to make "shades of grey", every faction end up being insufferable assholes. The WTO asks you to destroy a family farm because the family doesn't have the right permits. Destroy, really? I can't just write them a ticket? The Order asks you to publicly assassinate research scientists supporting the WTO. Err... I can't just shut down the research? The Illuminati openly want you to turn the world over to them. The Knights Templar call you subhuman from the first time you talk to them and still ask you to help them.
Technical Issues
As I mentioned, the game runs in 4:3 on PC. I found a guide online to hack it into 16:9 or 16:10. This requires a few changes to INI files and the use of a hex editor. Once you get the game running in 16:9/16:10, prepare to run into a wide array of technical issues.
First, Steam does not properly record your playtime on this game. This is because the game uses a launcher app which launches the main game as a separate process. Every single time you move between levels, the main process dies and the launcher process launches a new main process. I have no idea if this is universal, but for me what would happen was that the game window would disappear (leaving me on my desktop) and then about 1.5 seconds later, the load screen would come up.
The load times are long. Probably 10-15 seconds on my triple-core system with 4 gigs of ram. The maps in this game are tiny. I have never seen a video game with smaller maps. Expect to move between maps constantly. You might get a quest in lower Seattle which will require you to go through 4-5 map transitions to fetch a widget in upper Seattle and then 4-5 to bring it back to get some credits. Expect to spend a lot of time watching load screens.
The game's last level takes place on
Liberty Island
Another great aspect of this is that if you die, you're instantly returned to the main menu. Load your save game, and you've got to sit through another load screen. In a few particularly tricky parts I died five or six times in a row. Losing minutes to loadtime when it's the same 100 square foot area I just died in is obnoxious.
I also ran into a few bugs. One mission involved me having to listen to a holo-recording in an office. Apparently I must have saved at the wrong time, because when I loaded my save, the holo-recording had spawned but wouldn't play. Since it wouldn't play, I couldn't complete the mission, and since it was spawned, I couldn't spawn it again. I ended up modifying some files to enable a debug mode and forcing the game to delete the holo-recording object, and then triggered it again.
Grabbing items is kind of buggy. When you kill a character, they drop items. First, they normally drop items under themselves, so you pretty categorically have to pick up the dead body, throw it somewhere, and then pick up the item. If multiple items are near each other, it's easy to pick the wrong one. Because your inventory is tiny (another console limitation?), you spend most of the game with a full inventory and it's annoying to be told "Inventory full, can't pick up noise making grenade" when you actually want the ammo clip next to the grenade.
Items don't stack properly and you can't merge them. I frequently had cases where I'd have 5 health kits and get another one; the health kit would take up a second slot in my inventory (you only have 12 slots). Then the next health kit I'd get would stack on top of the first 5. This also happened with energy packs (which recharge your biotics) and omnitools (which pick locks and other devices).
The game crashed four times in the ~8-10 hours I played it. These were instantaneous hard crashes to the desktop.
It was one of the first games to use Havok to give objects their own physics models. At the very beginning of the game, you get a basketball, and it's kinda neat that you can actually throw it. The problem is that nothing in the game has weight; either it's too heavy for you to lift and you can't, or it's light as a feather and you can throw it across the room. Corpses are a joke. Bang into an object and it'll go flying. Half-baked.
The thing is that the levels are so small, the load times so long, the interface so poor, the physics so half-implemented that it just feels like a much more modest, smaller game than Deus Ex, which makes it feel older. Say you want to read a book on the shelf? You go to do so and discover that the book consists of three or four lines of flavour text... three or four lines in a game contemporary to Morrowind where there were hundreds of mini-essays and novellas? Really? Every time I go to interact with anything in the game, I keep thinking either "This is a worse Deus Ex", "This is a worse System Shock 2", or "This is a worse Morrowind". It feels really old. I can't describe it. I think the last game I played that aged this poorly was Red Faction, and Invisible War feels about as old as that game despite being three years newer and looking much nicer.
Conclusion
I'm sure someone is going to quote this and say "That's a lot of words for a game that everyone knew sucked"). Feel free. But the case I want to make here is that the game sucks as a sequel to Deus Ex, it aged terribly, it's a technical mess, it has no novel gameplay ideas, and the gameplay ideas it does have were all implemented elsewhere. It's not a good RPG, it's not a good FPS, it's not a good game.
The storyline is silly, the characters forgettable except when they're so stupid that you'd remember them, the plot milquetoast and so "small" feeling compared to the original game. What a disaster.
In the words of Harvey Smith, the key designer on the title:
Despite all of this, the game is made by talented individuals. I have no doubt that the team could have made a worthy sequel to Deus Ex, and I have no doubt that both Warren Spector and Harvey Smith are still able today to make game-of-the-generation quality games. But this is absolutely, positively not one of them.
