Brett Plays Old Games: Deus Ex: Invisible War::08.08.2010+03:57
This is the first in a series of posts where I play and review old games that were possibly high-profile at the time they were released but have since faded. The majority of these games will be PC games because there are a lot of old PC games that most modern gamers haven’t played, and I happen to love PC games.
Often thought of as the ugly stepchild of the original rather than the direct successor, Deus Ex: Invisible War builds upon Deus Ex in some ways while stepping backwards in others. Released in 2003 and developed by Ion Storm, the game was visually appropriate for the time. Running in a highly-modified version of the Unreal Engine 2, it sports dynamic lighting, stencil shadows, normal mapping, and projected textures. It’s reasonably stable, crashing only twice in the three of four hours that I played it. This review only covers those hours, not the whole game, but first impressions are everything, right?
From the beginning, the dialog is pretty weak and the delivery the same. This is a point where the original was lacking too, so not much change there. Unlike the original, conversations also had significantly fewer options and branching, though this could be due to an increase in total conversations. It may have been me not paying close enough attention to the dialog, but at one point, some scientists expressed that they could not leave the room because there were some lasers blocking the exit. These lasers could be deactivated with a keypad (requiring one multitool to hack). There was a multitool lying on a nearby lab bench. I guess learned helplessness is a much bigger problem in the future.
After a bit of running around in corridors, I finally came across my first chance for augmentation. This game unifies bio-augs and upgrades into one pickup, the biomod. You’re given three to start and they can be used in any slot. Each slot has three different possible augs to select from, the third of which requires special black-market biomod canisters to activate and upgrade. There are no skills or skill points, and as a result, the hack skill is now an augmentation and there are no ICE-Picks. The ammo in this game is also universal across all weapons, and the weapons differ only in how much of the universal reserve is used per shot.
In terms of story, the game starts off in a way similar to a lot of games. You aren’t sure who you are. Your foster parents are dead. You’re in a strange place. All very common themes. The name of the main character is “Alex D.”; what does the D stand for? Probably “Denton”. The world is divided into three factions, the WTO, the Order, and the Knights Templar. Yep, the Knights Templar. The underlying struggles here seem to be that of the rich versus the poor, and the augmented versus the natural. The plot itself seems to be pretty open as you can choose which missions you want to complete for each faction, though there are missions that will directly contradict each other and thus only one can be completed. A gripe that I have with the way that the missions work is that you have to go back to the person who assigned it to you to receive the reward. This can often mean trekking back over three or more maps to some remote corner of the world to find them.
Due to its simultaneous release on the original XBox, the user interface has been streamlined and unified considerably over the original. It has also been polished and is extremely slick, with the menu options spiraling in and out on each transition, while still being very responsive. Also due to the XBox, the levels themselves have been reduced considerably in size and as a result there are a lot of area transitions and long loading times, which was doing a good job of killing the immersion for me.
On the whole, my experience so far has been positive, and I find the simplifications to be a welcome change, rather than a dumbing-down of the original. I am especially happy overall about the loss of skill point management because the reworked biomod system forces the player to think more critically about how they want to play the game without having the extra layer of confusion that skill point management carried with it.