by Tonight on WHEN GOOD GAMES GO BAD.
I’ve played Deus Ex: Invisible War already a while back for 3 hours according to Steam. My original impression was that the game sucked. Having played and finished the original Deus Ex, I considered that maybe my newly acquired sense of Deus Ex lore and context may provide the missing link enjoying DE:IW. Nope. In fact, knowing what I know from the Original DE, as well as my experience with how good it was actually just tells me that this game sucks even more than I had originally thought. I can’t believe how far it fell. Everything about this game just feels wrong.
Question: How do you make a sequel with technically better graphics than the original that are still somehow worse? Answer: DE:IW. I can’t even explain it, but the graphics feel wrong. True, they’re smoother, have better shading/lighting and have way more polygons than the original but… are just somehow worse. When I think of how JC Denton looked, I think of a badass. When I think of any of the characters in this game I just think they all look… doofy. To coin Lepcis’s phrase in his Serious Sam 2 review, it hits the “cartoonish […] early-2000s 3D syndrome.” Considering this game came out in 2003, I think Lepcis and I might be on to something here. It’s almost as if everything is too round and smooth. Don’t get me wrong, some of the face textures and other bodily polygons in DE were muddled or downright hilarious in regards to how pointy they were, but they felt more believable than this newer child-friendly no-sharp-edges style. Especially when you consider that this game and its predecessor have an M rating, want to be taken seriously, and take place in a dark twisted cyber-future, the look just seems at odds with the content.
The game starts off with some mystic techno-babble mumbo jumbo, and while its pretentiousness bothers me, it looks sort of cool. It feels like we’re watching some kind of bad-but-good 2000’s Matrixy movie and it ends on some grand fashion about an Invisible weapon, spanning over some chick. Maybe not the chick I would have chosen to play as, but whatever, it’s kind of exciting (if a bit hollow) and I’m preparing to play as her:
Except you don’t. You’re not her. In fact, your character isn’t even in the opening cinematic. Right the cinematic, you get hit with this screen:
And I’m like “… k.” I think this can sort of be used to explain most of the game’s problems. It doesn’t feel like you’re the main character of this game. In fact, it doesn’t feel like you’re playing a game at all. It feels like you’re inside a story that someone has a very distinct plan for exactly how everything goes–and you just happen to be a side-character. Oh, and I don’t just mean your avatar. I mean YOU as a player are also a side-character. Your job is to just sit back, turn your brain off and consume everything that’s presented to you. And it’s bad.
The environments are squashed and feel fake. Things exist within the environment to be the vehicle for quests or other storyline interactions. Every few steps you progress is halted by someone who wants to exposition dump on you. “Choices” in this game are merely flavors. Do you walk 10 feet to take the stairs up to take out the guard, or do you crouch through 5 feet of vent to take him out? You decide! Choices are horribly binary, painfully obvious and devolve into each respective side shouting “pick me! pick me!” Mood is completely devoid in the setting; I don’t feel like I’m in a super nanite techno-future, I feel like I’m walking through a fake-plastic fun house of Tomorrowland. One moment you’re running away from murdering terrorists. The next moment, a man is casually giving you a quest at a coffee shop for no reason. Instead of… I don’t know, continuing to RUN for her LIFE, your character takes the time to hear him out, in spite of needing to escape to safety. Characters are bland and forgettable; whatever character trait they might have is told to you, never shown. Tutorials blatantly break up gameplay with pausing popups for idiotically stupid things that either didn’t need to be explained, or could have sufficed with a simple non-pausing text popup. I mean seriously, check this out:
People are constantly telling you where to go and what to do. They act like you have a “choice” in matters but as stated already, they’re just flavors not meaningful differences. Your hand is held at every turn and the world feels sterile and soulless. The environment exploration is a joke which is sad considering it was such a strong suit of DE. I don’t even know what else to say–the developers took their original game, removed all the fun bits in lieu of a focus on their bland and poorly written story and characters. The entire concept just makes me sad, awarding it Tier 3. Were I to include into my grade the distance by which it fell from its original progenitor, it would easily be Tier 4, but I feel the game should at least be measured upon its own merits, regardless of my enjoyment of the original.
Yeah I did and it came from this game. It was as if millions of fans suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened to Deux Ex.