"The end result is
unquestionably one of the best games you'll find on the Xbox and
definitely a worthy successor."
This has the potential to sound a bit
presumptuous, but I have no qualms with statement that the original Deus Ex was one of the most remarkable
achievements ever crafted by the hands of mankind. As a result, it's only
natural that my expectations were extraordinarily high for the sequel. While Ion Storm decided to trim some parts of the game, everything that
made the first game great are present in one of the Xbox's best games.
Deus Ex: Invisible War picks up twenty years after JC Denton, the protagonist from the last game, had destroyed the global communication
network and brought the world to a new dark age. However, society has rebuilt and is once again the same futuristic dystopia filled with corrupt
governments, rich corporations and a whole lotta bums. At the center of this is Alex D. (you can choose either male or female), a young student at
Taris Academy for those who dig biomodification. Things get hairy when Alex's school is destroyed (along with the entirety of Chicago) and a vile
conspiracy is exposed - that their mentors are really spying on them and
performing experiments. Tossed out to deal with the real world, it's up to
Alex to discover why s/he's a guinea pig and discover the scheming minds
behind this betrayal.
Undoubtedly the key concept being the greatness of Deus Ex is its open-ended nature. As soon as you finish the opening sequence, you'll have
competing corporations requesting that you run missions for them. None of these organizations seem completely trustworthy, and all seem to have
some ulterior agenda that could be contrary to your own. The religious Order seems to have some groovy ideas about equality, but often times
feels like a cult. The WTO enforces world order and does a good job of bringing about peace, but is often ignorant of the plights of the common
people. As the plot progresses, trying to separate the good guys from the
bad guys just becomes even more confusing - naturally you begin to learn
why Alex D's are in such high demand, and what impact he has on the future
of humanity.
You can switch sides constantly throughout the game, and while the game still follows the same general linear path, whom you choose to trust will
alter the final level, as well as what side missions are available (which
there are plenty of - I've definitely never played a game that involves you getting involved with a business war between competing coffee chains.)
Not only is there an underlying sense of paranoia underneath every decision you make, but you're constantly questioning your own social and
political ideologies. Some of the themes presented in the game almost had me reaching for de Tocqueville's heavy Democracy in America to fully
grasps the concepts of an utopian society. Very few, if any, games like this truly force you to confront issues like these, and that facet alone
is enough to elevate the game to masterpiece status.
But there's a lot more freedom of choice than just how the story flows. Every obstacle has at least two different methods to be conquered with.
You don't feel like bribing those guards? Well, either shoot them in the
face or find the vent shaft that reaches right beyond their feet. If you're toe to toe with a gigantic robot, you don't need to blow it up -
it's just as well to turn on your thermal cloaking to sneak by it, or use
your bot domination skill to take it over and use it as your own personal
killing machine. The open-ended approach almost makes the game feel easy,
but rest assured, if you choose the most direct (i.e. violent) route, you'll have your work cut out for you. The general design limits the
amount of ammo you have, and unless you set the difficulty to the lowest
possible setting, you'll find that for all of the biomodification Alex D
has, he'll keel over pretty easily. Still, no longer are you faced with trying to find an obtuse solution to a scripted roadblock - the fact that
any problem can be solved by method makes Deus Ex feel more like reality
and less like a game.
Most of these concepts are evolutions of what was found in Deus Ex, but other elements have been altered somewhat. First off, the original had an
experience system that let you customize the skills that you wanted to become the most proficient in. This has been tossed totally out the window
- your customizations are limited to a set number of bio-mods that allow
you to upgrade certain skills, like self-healing, faster running, or invisibility. The simplification of this character building system ends up being the
proverbial two-edged sword. On one hand, you don't need to play hours of
the game just so your character can use a sniper rifle - just pick one up
and blast away. On the other hand, the developers forgot the whole point
of a role-playing game - that you start off weak and, through hard work and experience, you craft a character that you can truly call your own.
The role-playing element isn't the only aspect that's been slimmed down.
Invisible War as a whole is much smaller than original, as the maps are mostly pretty lean. Even with tackling some of the extra missions and
getting all of the endings, my total play time was around ten hours. I have no idea how long the original was, but it felt like
an absolute epic of extraordinary magnitude. The fact that there are so many different ways
to do things and vaguely different story threads to follow add plenty of
replay value, but it definitely could've been longer. Still, the advantage
of having a short game is that the storyline is wound much tighter and flows much faster.
Other minor aspects have either been altered or cut out entirely. There is
a single ammunition type for all weapons, which sounds weird, but actually
makes dealing with your arsenal much more manageable. While once again every line of dialogue is fully
voiced (with better acting than the original), the music never changes during action or
conversation, staying static (and mostly mute) nearly all of the time. And while you can still
hack into computers to disable security cameras, you can't sneak in and read e-mails on personal computers. These aren't major, but some of these
were nice little touches that really added a nice layer of extra polish,
and their absence is slightly saddening.
More important than these minor quibbles are the performance issues - the
PS2 only did a competent job with the original Deus Ex, and while Invisible War fares slightly better on the Xbox, it's still not as good as
it should be. The loading times between areas and after deaths are often
thirty seconds (or longer). The frame rate is stable during most of the game but takes a dive during the combat - it even freezes momentarily
whenever an unarmed enemy takes out their gun. It never becomes unplayable, but it
inadvertently ends up steering you away from the action approach and more towards other methods.
Due to its length and absence of skill building, Invisible War doesn't QUITE surpass its predecessor. But then again, the only way that would
really be possible is if it somehow traveled back in time and eliminated
the original from existence. The core gameplay is still here, just as good
as ever, and it still has that absurdly addicting quality that makes it
impossible to leave it alone. The end result is unquestionably one of the
best games you'll find on the Xbox and definitely a worthy successor.
