Deus Ex: Invisible War

This game doesn't function on modern windows. Steam shouldn't be allowed to sell such products.

Залишившись під неабияким впливом від DE: Human Revolution - я захотів пройти усі частини серії. Навіть, старі. Тому, на розпродажі взяв я першу частину й Invisible War. IW - без проблем запустилась на сучасному залізі. Навіть, співвідношення екрану 4:3 не таке візуально погане. Гра виглядає достойно, як для 2004 року. Насправді - дуже круто виглядає. Почав проходити, поринати в історію й застряг... у інтерфейсі встановлення імплантів. Бо, в меню в мене не працює курсор. Навіть коліщатко крутить, а курсор - мертвий. Тому, доводиться відкласти план з проходження. Не хочу вихідний витрачати на пошук й встановлення патчів.

i don't get the hate towards this one, it's certainly better than mankind divided, it has some issues but i enjoyed it start to finish

crashed my entire PC

2 words. absolute trash...or as the rock would say "its the biggest piece of dogsh*t"

ej, ten deus ex jest naprawdę dobry!

Might not be a bad game to play, if you don't mind waiting through a long waiting screen between each tiny map.

Al igual que Deus Ex (1), esta secuela requiere de ser parcheada por el propio jugador para que sea mínimamente jugable en equipos modernos. Quitando ese inconveniente técnico (que no es decir poco), también deja mucho que desear en lo que es el propio juego. El cual tuvo una “simplificación de mecánicas” pero para mal. Visualmente (y pese a "considerar su época") tampoco se salva por ahí, tiene una interfaz horrible, con modelados pobres, efectos lastimosos y una paleta de colores que en conjunto: son netamente molestos de ver.

I'm unsure why my playtime is listed as being so low (perhaps its because I got the "Visible Upgrade" fan-patch for the game and that messed with how it interacts with Steam?). I got to about midway through the second visit to Cairo before throwing in the towel. I've played some rough gems in the past, and sequels that lived in the shadow of astounding first games. That's not uncommon, after all. DE:IW is, unfortunately, all rough and no gem. Even with the fan-patch it ran terribly, with stuttering, audio/visual glitches, and atrocious load times despite being on an SSD. I experienced frequent crashes as well, often during loading. Maps are tiny and bland, and have almost none of the branching routes you'd expect from an immersive sim. With side quests requiring you to go back and forth between these tiny zones, I soon gave up on doing them because more loading means more chances to crash. That, and the rewards were laughably pitiful. Augmentations have obvious 'best in slot' choices thanks to the level design and mechanics, so there's zero point in having unique builds beyond hacking/strength/speed. They throw so many black market upgrade canisters at you that you wonder why they even delineated between regular and black market upgrades in the first place (and let's be honest, the only black market upgrade worth getting is the hacking one). The "universal ammo" system might work in games like Mass Effect, but DE:IW's bland weapons and 'meh' upgrades mean you mainly just stick with one or two weapons -- all I ever needed was a silenced pistol to mow down enemies with headshots and the SMG with the EMP upgrade to take out bots. Stealth really isn't a necessity unless you're on harder difficulties, and there's barely a penalty to going loud anyways. I played on Normal and never felt threatened by any combat at all, and once I realized there was no reason to sneak beyond challenging myself... I just started blasting through the game like a shooter. In the original Deus Ex, you're not really tanky, specific ammo types beyond basic 10mm can be hard to find at first, your weapon skills limit how much you can run-and-gun for a few hours at least, and you sometimes get better rewards for going sneaky and nonlethal. But here? I can go bombastically loud immediately, with near-perfect aim and plentiful ammo, against enemies with terrible AI, with no narrative or mechanical penalties against me. It was a point-and-click adventure with people's heads. [SPOILERS AHEAD] And the story is just... frustrating. Characters are cardboard cutouts of personality, and they move through the plot WAY too fast. They wanted a dramatic Deus Ex 1-style "character goes turncoat against the organization you're in" style reveal, but they do it almost immediately (like 10 minutes into the game) with a character that I know barely anything about! Dialogue hasn't always been the strong suit of the Deus Ex series, but this game's dialogue sounds like an elementary school stage play. It's like the writers felt that the player was going to be the world's biggest numbskull and decided to have every character state the most obvious things ever, repeatedly. The major factions are constantly trying to tell you what to do but there are zero consequences at all for going against them. You can literally gun down their allies, and the leaders will contact you saying "How dare you! You slaughtered all of our operatives!" ... before following it up with "... And you can get back on our good side by doing a fetch quest for us!" I killed a major faction NPC on accident during a firefight and over comms they berated me for killing her, then did a total 180 and said "try not to get on our bad side in the future, we hope to have more missions with you". Literally what is the point of having warring factions trying to control you if all of them are all bark no bite? Not even no bite, *negative* bite. Out of curiosity, I looked up the endings for the game, and much like Deus Ex 1, they are completely decoupled from the rest of the game. However, DE 1 didn't try to set up multiple story paths from the very beginning, and while I'm not a fan of it suddenly foisting multiple endings on you, it at least tried to be like "you've experienced the game so far and met all the characters, how do you respond?". DE:IW, however, tries to set up twisting plotlines from the start but then makes them utterly detached from how the game ends. You could, for example, be absolutely belligerent towards the Templar faction, defying all their orders and killing every one that you see, but at the very end you could decide to side with them, and there's not a lick of pushback. Ludonarrative dissonance, eat your heart out. [END OF SPOILERS] So yeah, even as a stand-alone game, not taking into account the other excellent entries of the Deus Ex series, this is a bland, linear shooter trying to wear the trappings of a complex immersive sim RPG. It's frustratingly unstable to play even with fan-made patches that try to limit the crashing, with an insultingly dull plot and meaningless game mechanics. Even on sale for less than two dollars, it wasn't worth finishing.

DX: IW is a shoddy fanfic of the first Deus Ex that somehow got promoted to an official sequel. If you ever want to know why PC gamers hate consoles, look no further – DX: IW is just as disappointing as everyone says it is. Everyone blames the console limitations, but I’d argue DX: IW’s problems go much deeper than small levels and frequent loading screens. DX: IW isn’t a total failure; it retains fragments of the best parts of the first game: tons of expertly-crafted dungeons with multiple paths to your goals; a large toolkit for overcoming these challenges including weapons, stealth, hacking, augmentations, socializing, or diligent exploration; a huge variety of ways to solve each problem; and lots of exciting places to explore and characters to meet in the hub worlds. There are improvements here and there: you can mantle up ledges like in Thief 1 + 2; the moving light sources still look fantastic; climbing ladders is easier; you can take manual control of cameras and robots; different food items now stack; you can play as a female protagonist; the ragdolls are excellent; and all invincibility flags are removed. The shooting is better (or at least you don’t start with the aim of a drunken sailor like in the first game); each gun has an alt-fire; the weapon modding is expanded; and you can still destroy doors and locked containers with explosives. There are more branches in the story (that unfortunately do converge later), and there are plenty of factions with contradicting (albeit basic and underdeveloped) beliefs that you can side with or against. There are more quests to solve, and many require helping one faction at the expense of another, such as the Coffee Shop wars [spoiler]or killing/saving Paul Denton[/spoiler]. But holy crap, these changes came with MAJOR compromises, resulting in a sequel that takes a few steps forward and many gigantic leaps backwards from the first game. I don’t even know where to begin with the flaws…. The most obvious issue is the inferior level design: levels are ridiculously tiny due to console limitations and most of your time is spent traversing unremarkable alleyways and painfully narrow corridors (at least there is less backtracking, I guess?). Dungeons are way too short and end just as they get interesting, and most fights devolve into a corridor shooter since the compact levels prevent more creative encounters. Key locations and rival factions are absurdly close together (why is the Templar recruiting booth right next to the Tarsus Academy school in the Cairo Arcology?), and there are loading screens every time you want to enter/exit any building. There is also too much vent-crawling: it’s a series-wide problem, but it’s especially bad here – seemingly every other room has an easily accessible vent nearby that completely bypasses or trivializes the challenge ahead. Water and swimming are also cut. So many other systems have lost depth. The UI is much worse: the circular HUD occupies too much of the screen, navigating menus requires too many button presses, and several excellent features from the first game such as the conversation log and taking your own notes are gone. Lockpicks are gone and only multitools remain, the toughest locks require at most just 3 multitools to bypass, and multitools are so abundant that you are never in danger of running out. The limb-based health system is replaced with a standard health bar, and armor/wearables are completely absent. Worst of all, there is now a universal ammo system – all guns draw from a single shared ammo pool, and if one gun runs out of ammo, all your other weapons will be empty too. Combined with the high ammo consumption and poor drops from enemies, you must play with perfect accuracy – if you miss even a few shots, you won’t have enough ammo to continue shooting. Guns have lost alternate ammo types and don’t need to be reloaded – every gun effectively has an infinite clip size, and you can spam the rocket launcher to your heart’s content. The augmentation system is simpler: biomods can install/upgrade any augmentation you want, only 5 augments (outside of the flashlight) may be installed simultaneously, the max level is 3, and there are fewer options to choose from. None of the augmentations boost your HP/damage resistance either, so have fun surviving the rocket launcher + mag rail spam in the late game. By far my biggest issue with DX: IW is the lack of character progression. For some reason SKILLS ARE REMOVED – every player is equally capable of shooting/melee/healing/bypassing locks/solving problems as every other, which drastically reduces build variety, harms replay value, and flattens growth past a certain point. As a result, the difficulty is uneven: the early game is trivial since your combat abilities are already superb, while the late game is non-stop bullet sponge spam that you fight with since you cannot enhance your combat (at least you can still sneak past with cloaking). Your character reaches full potential too soon: most strong weapons are available too early; weapon customization is limited to 2 unique mods per weapon; and biomods are so plentiful that you can easily max out all augmentations by the midpoint. You even get 3 biomod canisters in the tutorial level, so you can install regeneration immediately (or worse, grab 3 arm strengths and start 1-shotting everyone with the baton in the first 30 minutes lmao). Moreover, since biomods are too abundant and can overwrite/upgrade any augmentation slot, you can radically respec your character and switch to a completely new build with minimal costs or sacrifices, removing most of the opportunity costs the first game is famous for. The presentation is also worse this time around. The first game had a grounded and believable near-future art style like [i]Robocop[/i]; the sequel has a tacky and cartoony art style straight out of [i]The Fifth Element[/i] (which you won’t notice due to the tiny levels). The OST is generic and has fewer tracks than the first game, and the voice acting is drab and forgettable with few exceptions. The NPC models look lifeless and uncanny, and some models like the Omar and WTO soldiers look horribly out of place. The in-game text and conversations are much briefer and lack world-building and depth compared to the first game. Holy crap did the quality of the world-building take a hit. This game is only ~15 hours long (about 1/3 of the length of the first game) and is way too short to properly develop its characters or explore its themes. The new characters and factions are shallow and forgettable (the Templars are just cartoonishly evil villain-of-the-week antagonists); the references to real-world conspiracies are mostly gone; the plot relies too heavily on characters from the previous game; and the story leans too much into campy sci-fi nonsense. [spoiler](Am I the only one who finds the teleporters and flashback sequences in JC Denton’s Sanctuary to be completely ridiculous?). The final level is disappointing – not only can you join any faction regardless of past actions, but also the final dungeon (the old UNATCO HQ) is packed with forced callbacks to the first game and ends with selecting who receives the Aquinas Protocol files from a simple drop-down menu (which are stored on Alex Jacobson’s computer for some reason).[/spoiler] DX: IW is far from a bad game, but its mixed reputation is warranted – as a sequel to the first game, it is terrible, and by its own merits, it is just a decent-at-best FPS-CRPG that has been done so much better before and since. If you are looking for a proper First-Person CRPG, just replay the first game (with mods like Revision or GMDX if necessary), or check out [url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/2600/]Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines[/url] if you somehow haven’t already – DX: IW really comes off as a prototype for VTMB. 6/10, it is taking all my willpower to not give this Steam review a thumbs down.