The shining reputation the first Deus Ex enjoys is no accident. Director Warren Spector has stated that Ion Storm’s John Romero asked him to make the game of his dreams without budget restrictions and with a large marketing push. Under those circumstances, visions of grandeur seem inevitable. What is not inevitable, as shown by most other Ion Storm projects, is the artistic or commercial success of the product. Thankfully, Deus Ex pulled it off with its unique blend of genres, palpable atmosphere, and sparkling quality.
In the three years since the release of Deus Ex, the technology available to video game developers and consumers had progressed by surprising lengths. Physics simulations, fancy lighting effects, bump-mapped textures, and other advances promised to further connect players to their game experiences. Applying many of these advances to a sequel to Deus Ex is a tantalizing prospect… Until you realize it’s being developed for the Xbox. This comment deserves an explanation, but let’s understand the game first.
Deus Ex: Invisible War is set around twenty years after J.C. Denton merged his consciousness with the Aquinas A.I., triggering a new dark age of sorts known as The Collapse. The sequel thrusts you into the role of Alex D, a promising agent-in-training at the Tarsus Academy, which is experimenting with cutting-edge human enhancement technologies. After a devastating nanobot bomb targeting the Tarsus Academy’s Chicago branch disintegrated a huge swathe of the city, you are transferred to the Seattle branch. This branch is then immediately attacked by a shadowy religious organization called The Order.
Upon your escape, you meet the security forces of the World Trade Organization, whose interests sit directly opposite those of The Order. Later on you meet the Knights Templar, who are fanatically opposed to any human modification and discriminate against augmented persons. These are the main forces driving a story that transports you from Seattle to Cairo to Trier, Germany, to uncover the motivations of these factions and find your place in this mix of conspiracies. The story is a fun ride while you’re in it, nodding to our current time with commentary on the impact of artificial intelligence and a general meditation on free will in a high-tech world. Still, once it’s over and you look back on it, it’s rather flimsy and disappointing. Any potential branching of the story is betrayed by the fact that no matter how much damage you do to these factions, in the last 20 minutes of the game, they all leave the door open for you to deliver their version of a new world. The game reveals the provenance of The Order and the WTO in a way that appears intent on blowing your mind but is rather sad instead. Ultimately, the story will propel you forward, but it will not invite further reflection.
In Deus Ex games, the missions and the areas they take place in can often be well-designed and fun to play in, but the hubs between missions can be even more engaging. They are chock-full of places to explore, side quests to complete, and generally lots of details that make you believe in what you’re seeing. They don’t feel game-like, but instead like authentic places where people live and go about their lives. These sections are some of the most profoundly connecting of these games. In light of this, when one sets foot in Seattle, the first hub of Deus Ex: Invisible War, it is impossible to avoid the feeling of sinking melancholy.
The great city of Seattle is apparently a cramped series of nearly empty hallways. The time it takes you to walk until you hit a loading screen can be under a minute, but even if the whole area were seamless and load-time-free, it would be tiny for a Deus Ex hub. It gives you the impression that the technology used to power Invisible War can’t comfortably render more than three or so NPCs at once since the citizens are spread out and hidden in the corners of the narrow maze of a map. Yes, there are side quests and items to find while exploring hidden areas, but at the end of the day, what should be the most connecting part of a Deus Ex game is instead alarmingly disconnecting. The Seattle nightclub, for example, is one of the most depressing sights in the game, with its minuscule, nearly empty dance floor and cramped, deserted VIP room.
It’s not all bad, though. Deus Ex: Invisible War sports incredible lighting and shadow effects that remain highly convincing decades later and make great use of physics simulation, with nearly every object in an area being affected by the forces acting upon it in a believable way. Even in hub areas, Invisible War puts its worst foot forward, as each subsequent hub improves upon the previous one, with Trier being particularly believable. The missions and mission maps also tend to be pretty great, with ample opportunities to sneak, hack, and fight your way to each objective.
Thus, we see a game in conflict with itself, with contradictions bearing down on contradictions in a twisting pile of missed potential. Invisible War‘s lighting and physics systems represent an admirable effort to connect you to the game world, while the moribund hub areas rip you out of your suspension of disbelief. Engrossing missions can be ruined by running out of ammo for your favorite weapon. Which is the ammo for all the weapons.
Yes, Deus Ex: Invisible War contains the absolute head-scratcher of a decision to unify ammunition across all weapon types except grenades. Yes, flamethrower ammo is the same as rocket launcher ammo, tranquilizer dart ammo, etc. Not only does this kill any sense of authenticity in the world, but it also makes no sense from a gameplay perspective, as there’s no need to conserve ammo for a specific weapon or differentiation between lethal and non-lethal weapons.
This leads to the hair-pulling state of inventory management in general. It’s easy to understand how “Tetris-style” inventory management isn’t for everybody, but Invisible War‘s “streamlined” solution causes far more problems than it solves. Every item, from a bag of chips to a heavy flamethrower, takes up one slot. Thankfully, consumables stack in the inventory, but it further plunges the concept of this inventory system deeper into madness. It makes nothing easier. On occasion, you still must go into your inventory to drop an item so you can use the energy cell on the desk in front of you to replenish your power, then pick the first item back up.
In a similar fashion, the character building boils down to a biomod system that’s paltry for a Deus Ex game. You don’t gain skill points but instead install and upgrade biomods. Some are cool and useful, like Cloak and Bot Domination, and some are not, like Enhanced Vision or Defense Drone, but it’s all rather underwhelming and fails to provide any experience of worthwhile progression. You can cultivate an unstoppable build in the first third of the game and end up with many extra biomod upgrades you can’t use because you’ve maxed out all the ones you care about.
All of this brings us back to my earlier point about how unfortunate it is that they built this game for console before porting it to PC. The early 2000s was a time when rendering techniques new to video games had generally worked themselves ahead of the hardware available to most people, so the great lighting effects and physics calculations likely took a toll on the other aspects of the game. Of course there’s a degree of speculation there, but during this time there was indeed a dismal trend of developing games for console first, then poorly porting them to PC with spotty mouse support, bad optimization, and other issues. This is the case for Deus Ex: Invisible War. One example is that the inventory design seems to favor controller inputs. Thank goodness that Eidos Montreal realized you could do decent inventory management with a controller in the prequels that followed.
As for the cramped nature of Invisible War‘s maps, it would be tempting to blame the Xbox for that as well, but it’s more likely that the Unreal 2 engine, mixed with the aforementioned physics and lighting systems that it valiantly shoulders, are more to blame. Back then, these bells and whistles were especially expensive to implement from a performance standpoint. Perhaps related factors are also the cause of the sheer amount of bugs I found. Inventory glitches occur when certain items are placed in a new precious slot instead of a stack of the same items you already possess. There are also some ear-shattering sound bugs I experienced on at least two maps when an explosion happened. Even with my volume at twenty percent, these explosions were so loud that they came out of my speakers distorted. There were also no less than three occasions where loading a save put me back about 45 minutes from where I last saved.
Deus Ex: Invisible WarΒ is a fun game. The missions are well-designed with many approaches to success, the story is an enjoyable ride (for a while), and it can be graphically attractive. However, its failure to live up to its predecessor is an unavoidable inconvenience. PerhapsΒ Invisible War‘s biggest crime is that it’s not the originalΒ Deus Ex, even if there’s a lot to enjoy on its own merits. Unfortunately, some frustrating decisions and circumstances let this game down, even divorced from its heritage.
In a world that enjoys the existence of three truly great Deus Ex games plus a whole landscape of great works that carry its legacy and influence forward, there is little reason to play Deus Ex: Invisible War. After the first Deus Ex shone a ray of light into what players thought was possible in a computer game, this sequel throws a curtain over it. The greatness behind desperately reaches out through pinpricks, but sadly, it fails to warm the room.