Four years ago one of the finest non-traditional FPS games was released to critical acclaim and brisk sales. The game was Deus Ex, and it blended the FPS action game with the stat growth of the RPG. It was a game that people were quick to use the term "classic" with, and rightly so. It was a phenomenal game. And, as with all games that are successful, the sequel was eventually announced and produced. Unfortunately, there is an unwritten law about sequels. The law is very simple, it states: "Most Sequels Do Not Live Up to the Original." Unfortunately, that is true with Deus Ex's sequel, Deus Ex: Invisible War.
In this game you find yourself in the role of Alex D, a male or female character who is suddenly thrust into a world spanning ever-complicating conspiracy. You find out that you are genetically augmented human that was made to become a super-agent. These events take place several decades after JC Denton of the first Deus Ex caused the "Collapse" by his actions at the end of the first game. The Collapse was basically the flummoxing of the entire world's economy and information systems. The world fell apart, and now is in the process of building itself back up.
In this world you'll find yourself drawn to either the WTO or the Order. The WTO is the current geo-political power in the world that is trying to rebuild the old world. The Order is a quasi-religious group that is a weird combination of the entire world's religions; they are opposed to the materialism of the world. Of course, there are numerous splinter groups and factions you must contend with. Honestly, they all just sort of blend together and you just shoot who ever is red when you put your reticule over them.
That sort of confusion is typical of the game's problems. In the original Deus Ex, you had stats that affected your ability to do certain tasks. Not so with the sequel. In the original you had a dozen bio-mods that helped you along. You've got a choice of 6 this time around, one of which is already assigned. In the original you would modify a gun until it was a harbinger of complete destruction. You can add two mods to your weapon, no more, this time around. Simply put, they stripped out all the RPG elements that made the first game so much fun. For example, in the original you could computer hack any terminal and your success was dependant on your computer skill. However, in this one you need to waste one of your 6 bio-mod slots if you want to access computers. There was no need to redo the system, but they did it anyway, and in doing so killed one of the best parts of the game.
Visually, Deus Ex: Invisible War is rather a disappointment. It's supposed to be a next generation game, but doesn't come across as such. Or rather, it tries to be, but the technology wasn't ready to be used in this way. For example, there are dynamic shadows that change when you move a light source. But, when you leave the light source alone the shadows sort of strobe across the surfaces completely breaking the immersion of the game. The physics were also something that was broken in the game. Things bounce around in an almost realistic manner, but then they'll do weird things like get stuck in walls or wedge you into a corner where you can't get out. Bodies will contort into ridiculous positions when thrown around. Also, I think they were using some kind of precursor to Normal-Mapping on some of the objects to make the textures pop a little more. Again, this is another technology that wasn't completed at the launch of this game, and it just makes you look at an object and wonder why its texture looks vaguely 3D instead of completely 3D. Another down side to all this new technology is that it's all really system intensive. I had to go through a good two hours of tweaks and patches (including some non-standard graphics card drives) to get my game to run at a decent rate on a 3.2g p4 with two gigs of DDR RAM and a 9800Pro ATI card, something that I feel should not have happened.
The controls are just as frustrating as the visuals. When they shipped the game, they set the mouse delay in the default settings to a ridiculously high number. What this means is that as you move your mouse across the screen, the game takes time to catch up to you. This gives you the feeling of constantly experiencing frame-rate lag, even if your system is running fine. Trying to find the fix for this is a big headache. You have to go digging through the support forums to find the solution to a problem that shouldn't have happened in the first place. Once you get the game moving with you, you'll notice that the items your heads-up-display (HUD) selects for you aren't the ones you're trying to pick up. The selection area for your HUD is actually just under where you're looking, something that can be greatly annoying when trying to pick up small items out of a group. Once you get the item you'll discover that you're inventory is minuscule and fills up way too fast. But part of the reason that it's filling up so fast is because certain items are bugged. Mult-itools for example, are supposed to stack in piles of 20. But, right now I have a stack of 20, a stack of 8 and a stack of 6. Guess what I can't do. Combine the stack of 8 and the stack of 6. Even if I drop them all and pick them all back up, I get a stack of 20, a stack of 8 and a stack of 6. That bug is indicative of far too much of the game. The game is not polished.
Deus Ex: Invisible War is a poor rendition of a truly amazing game. They tried to capture the lightning that the original had, but they went looking for it in all the wrong places. They tried to make it look amazing with the newest graphics tools, but ended up making their game bloated and slow because they forgot the original game wasn't that pretty to look at but people still played it anyway. They stripped out the stat advancement because they wanted to appeal to a more general audience, but ended up making their game into just another FPS game because they forgot that the reason the original one was so unique was because it had stat advancement in a FPS game. They cobbled together a poor story from general elements and pieced them together in a way that didn't really make any sense and made their game into a soulless facsimile of the original. Simply put, this game lives up to the Sequel Rule. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it could very well be the paragon of that rule.
And the TV says to me, "I will eat your children." I look back, and say, "Only if I get to play their games after you're done."
