Deus Ex: Invisible War

Video game sequels are pretty serious business. Although the sequel has become popular in nearly all forms of media, gaming is clearly one arena where it has reigned supreme. In 2013, only 6 of the top 100 best selling games were entirely original works. Even critics in 2013 showed a preference towards established properties with only five wholly original games scoring over 90 on Metacritic. As such, there’s a great deal of pressure on developers to match, if not exceed, their previous work, and when a game’s considered a masterpiece, the expectations are magnified even further.

As such, it’s no wonder that a game like Deus Ex: Invisible War has been so reviled by fans of the initial game, and many of the complaints are difficult to refute. Deus Ex has become one of my personal favorite games, and after having spent some time with War, I must concur with the majority that the first installment is a more complex and smarter game with vastly greater play possibilities, but that’s not to say that this sequel has no charms or is inferior to most.

The most marked change to the game’s core play is the removal of the skills system, which had allowed gamers to customize their play style in drastic ways, giving the cyberpunk shooter a distinct RPG flavor. Invisible War still contains RPG elements, primarily in the dialogue options and in the inclusion of Biomod super powers, but even these seem less malleable than before. Thus it plays in a much more straightforward way. There usually are still several ways to get through an area, but there are fewer times in which creative play is profitable and players will usually have to follow one of a few beaten paths instead of forging their own way.

Level design philosophy has also shifted in major ways. The areas the player explores are significantly smaller and more straightforward, which results in a much greater amount of loading screens. This design choice was obviously made to make the console porting process smooth, but for what it’s worth, they cram an awful lot into these areas. In the first game, the areas may have been large, but some of them were mostly empty. The reverse is true in Invisible War with almost none of the filler, inaccessible background areas that plagued the cities we explored in the first Deus Ex.

Whether this is a welcome change or not could be debated, because it does make it easier to find relevant destinations, and exploration was a major draw of the first game, but were this an entirely new game, I would likely think nothing of this decision, and the same could be said for many of the games widely cited ‘flaws.’ Take the oft-criticized universal ammo approach. While the ammo can be used in any weapon, each weapon uses a different amount of ammo. I found myself favoring the sniper rifle for it’s accuracy and power, but this came at the cost of conservation, especially later in the game. Though most of the enemies drop ammunition, their clips do not cover the cost of a sniper shot, adding a strategic element that was lacking in the first game with its plentiful resources. Along with this, the player has a smaller inventory, making management essential, serving as a stark counter to the comically large selection of weapons a player could carry in the first.

Besides these controversial elements distinguishing Invisible War from its predecessor, the game manages several major improvements. Even on release, Deus Ex was criticized for its bland art design and blocky textures, and the years have not done it a favor. Some of this blandness may have been to emphasize the destitute state of the poverty stricken dystopia the game depicted, but that could also be a convenient excuse not to add polish. Invisible War, however, has a vibrancy to it and is fairly detailed in spite of its age of over a decade. The difference in graphics becomes especially noticeable when comparing objects that appear in both games, such as the repair bot, which sports greater detail here but is instantly recognizable. The backgrounds are also better, effectively nailing the dystopian future but retaining enough detail to feel like a living world.

It’s the storytelling where the game really excels over its predecessor, though. The first game had plenty of interesting political and philosophical ideas, but since it was a longer game, the plot could get rather convoluted. It also featured rather poor dialogue and voice acting, although it could be humorous at times and sometimes even intentionally so. Though this game lacks some of those campy bits of fun, the writing feels a lot more professional and the story is concise enough that every section feels relevant to the overarching plot, and it does this without losing the core debate between utility and freedom that was waged in the first game. The voice acting also has been given a boost. A few of the foreign accents are just as bad as in the first game, but the principle cast has been improved with a few small cameos from voice actors from the first game thrown in for good measure.

Along with these upgrades, the approach towards female characters is also laudable, particularly for its time. The first Deus Ex was smart, but it was a game dominated by men with most of the female characters playing in menial, background roles such as secretaries and receptions or in less flattering positions like hostages and mugging victims. Here, there seems to have been a very conscious decision to level the playing field. Besides letting you choose the protagonist Alex D’s race and gender, there are plenty of female enemies, and the majority of the major characters that you encounter through the game from the pop star NG Resonance to your teacher Dr. Nassif to your classmates Billie and Klara are women, and all of these figures are powerful in some ways or other. Although strong female characters are much more common these days, that wasn’t the case in 2003, and I would bet that the game’s clear feminism has not received its due praise.

Whether Deus Ex Invisible War is a good sequel is hard to say. It loses many of the design choices that made the first game such a joy to play and doesn’t necessarily subtract for the sake of emphasizing its strengths, instead feeling like technical concessions. When looking at the sequel to such a popular game, though, the more pertinent question might be whether it is simply a good game or not. The answer to that is a definite yes. It may streamline much of what made its predecessor good to such an extent that it becomes barely recognizable, but after all, when it comes to a sequel, who really needs or wants a carbon copy? Invisible War makes a number of bold changes that don’t always pay off, but it’s well worth a look for fans of Action RPGs and 1st Person Shooters.