So I bought an Xbox for four games, none of which were Halo. A friend had Halo, and by the time I picked up an Xbox in 2003, I had already played enough Halo that the game didn't really interest me. My friends never played lan parties or anything like that, and what little split screen multiplayer we played, they were always trying to stack the deck so they can win. By the time I picked up my Xbox, my first PS2 had already died due to the dreaded disk read error, so the Gamecube was the only current gen system I owned that worked. The Xbox had dropped to a $150 price, so instead of picking up a new PS2, I picked up and Xbox instead out of annoyance about console unreliability.For a while during the 6th generation, I was a Gamecube and Xbox gamer. I wouldn't pick up another PS2 until I picked up my first slim in 2005.
Previously, I had played Deus Ex on the PS2. This was my first exposure to the Deus Ex series, which is why I still have a soft spot for the PS2 port of Deus Ex, I still love this version of the game, and there are things I like about it more than even the original PC version which I would later acquire used at EB games, and would get the game of the year edition with a bunch of cheap Eidos games like Thief 2 that I want to say were at Big Lots or some other dirt cheap store. The PS2 version was the version that first introduced me to my love of this series, so I will always love the PS2 port of the game.
My PC at the time was the first PC I ever owned, it was a hand-me-down HP office PC with a slot 1 Pentuim 3 running at700 mhz. If you don't remember, slot 1 processors were processors that clipped onto your motherboard through a slot one socket like you would clip on a stick of Ram or a graphics card. It was also passively cooled with a heat sink and no fan. By that time my graphics card was an AGP slot Radeon 9000, the one I talked about in my Slave Zero review that my brother bought for me at Walmart. Yes at walmart, which by the way, select Walmarts have started to sell PC components again. I'm not sure how many are, but it was trippy to walk into a Walmart Electronics section and see Motherboards, power supplies, and 7800 X3D processors.
So while my Radeon 9000 would have run the game, and I had 512 mb of DDR in the system so I had the Ram, however, the recommended CPU for Invisible War was a 1.3 ghz processor. My dinky 700 mhz processor had absolutely no chance of running running the game. My dinky little hand-me-down Office PC wasn't capable of running the game, and I couldn't afford a new PC with left me with one option.
Deus Ex: Invisible War was one of the four games I bought an Xbox for, along with Shenmue 2, Jet Set Radio Future, and Panzer Dragoon Orta. As you can tell, it was Sega who mostly influenced me to buy an Xbox.
Personally, I love Invisible War. I always have and always will, but it is definitely a controversial sequel to one of the greatest games of all time due to certain design choices made in the game. I think the reason I loved it, despite, obviously, loving the original better is that I played the Xbox version of the game and had the console experience with it verses the PC experience. Eidos forced Ion Storm to make the Xbox version the primary focus in development- meaning the PC version felt like more of an afterthought, feeling more like a console port rather than a PC sequel to one of the most celebrated PC games of all time. The PC version came out buggy, having mouse lag that made it, basically unplayable and a whole list of other problems also making the PC version unplayable out of the box. I don't own the physical PC version of the game, so I didn't go though to frustrations that PC players went through with the game. With the main focus on the Xbox port, and various technical problems, it's no wonder that PC gamers are still the most ticked off at this game to this day. Eidos really did do them dirty by prioritizing the Xbox version over the PC version, but they were just a couple of years ahead of the curve in that regard.
As I said in my Doom 3 review, in the 7th gen, developers started prioritizing consoles over the PC, even for long running PC only franchises. The main reason was the rampant piracy taking place in PC gaming. At one time, there was speculation that PC gaming was going to die because of piracy. They were saying it wasn't even going to exist in a couple of years time. Developers started shifting toward the consoles as they weren't yet cracked or hacked, at least not on a large basis, meaning that piracy wasn't going to interfere with game sales. Luckily for PC gamers, Steam came along and pretty much single-handedly saved PC gaming.
This what I meant when I said the Half-Life 2, Doom 3, Quake 4, F.E.A.R., to Crysis era in PC gaming is, to me, the last great era in PC gaming where the PC still had tons of great exclusive franchises that, even if they did later get console ports, they were still primarily PC-focused franchises. The console ports were hand-me-down ports, not the primary focus. If you wanted to Play Doom 3, Half-Life 2, Quake 4, Diablo, Command and Conquer, Civilization, Crysis, and so many more in their best and right way to be played, you needed a PC. PC gaming had a separate, and distinct flavor from console gaming. It was definitely a more sophisticated feeling platform with tons of deep western RPGs, the best shooters around, the best real time strategy games, and so many other golden era franshises like Civilization, and Black and White. PC gaming had it's own seperate and unique vibe.
Nowadays, outside of the Switch, PC and consoles are flavorless download boxes with all the same games available with few standout exclusives. People playing the most popular PC games probably first played them on consoles, but then wanted higher framerates so they could be even sweatier in online games.
The 7th gen is the era of gaming where this flavorless blending of platforms started. If you don't agree, that's OK, but tell me, what was the first system you played Call of Duty 2-4 on? What was the first system you played Fallout 3, Oblivion, or Skyrim on? What about Diablo 3 or Red Alert 3? Instead of getting offshoot ports or watered down ports, the consoles started to get direct versions of mainline PC franchises developed alongside the PC versions in the 7th gen which is a practice that has largely carried on to this day. Invisible War was just a couple of years early on this.
That being said, beyond the technical problems and the console-first focus, there were a lot of watering down, or “consoling up” as PC gamers would call it, of the deeper RPG elements established in the original. For example, instead of giving players skill points to spend on various skills like lock picking or swimming, on top of the augmentations like life recovery, and fast movement, Invisible War simplified both the skills and augmentations into a single biomod system. Hacking is no longer a skill to learn and level up through skill points, it's simply reduced to a bio mod now. In order to make the game more mainstream accessible, they stripped out a lot of the more complex depth that made the original so good. I would say it's definitely more streamlined, but yes, not as much depth, and, without awarded skill points, there's a lot less reward in finding secret paths in the game now. I would say it's definitely a valid complaint against Invisible War, and it's not like xbox gamers who were already versed in Morrowind couldn't handle more depth to the game, but mainstream appeal means streamlining the depth out of a lot of games.
Some of the other complaints PC gamers had, I didn't share in, because, remember, I played the PS2 version before the PC version. In many ways, the PS2 version of Deus Ex was the prototype for Invisible War because a lot of the changes made in Invisible War first showed up in the PS2 port. For example, moving to a simple health bar instead of having individual limb damage was first done in the PS2 port. PC gamers complained about this, but I, personally, don't miss having no legs in the middle of a hostile area while being out of healing items and having to snail crawl across the floor. The individual limb health system was a cool idea, don't get me wrong, and it did lead to some hilarious situations, but I've never found it to be that practical. You can use a health pack on your entire body, or you can use it entirely on your left leg so you can move again. Again it's a cool idea, and I understand why some people really liked it's implementation in the original, I just didn't miss it much in Invisible War, personally.
I also liked the simplified inventory system in the PS2 version and the ability to install augmentations on the fly instead of needing to find a medical bot to do it. In the PC version, I feel like I have to stop every 30 seconds and drop the stupid combat knife everyone carries in the game out of my inventory. The PS2 version has one slot for every weapon in the game, once picked up, you never pick it up again. The inventory is expanded and once you pick up the combat knife, you never pick it up again, meaning there is no need to constantly pause the action for inventory management. The ability to install bio mods on the fly instead of having to hunt down a medical bot was also very nice.
The PC version is, obviously still better than the PS2 version and is geared more toward realism with it's health and inventory system, but I will always love the PS2 port of the game as well, even with it's smaller areas that are redesigned due to Ram limitations, and a lot more and longer load times. The PS2 port is still one of my favorite PS2 games. It's still a master class in great game design.
As I said, the PS2 port was the stepping stone for Invisible War which was also hampered by Eidos' insistence that development focus on the Xbox first, with the PC version being the hand-me-down port. I'm not trying to make light of valid complaints fans had against Invisible War just because I've always liked it. I can understand how and why the game was a huge letdown to a lot of fans of the original. I'm not trying to be dismissive of those complaints. It's not just the watering down of the deeper elements, but also being a much shorter game with smaller areas with more load times in between because the game had to cater to the Xbox which had less ram and more limitations to work with, and also the biggest, most valid complaint with the universal ammo system where every weapon uses the same ammo gauge, meaning that if you run out of ammo for one, you're out of ammo for all of them, the game just doesn't feel like the original in most ways outside of the multiple-path, open exploration elements in the game.
The exploration isn't open in a Morrwind sense, but that each level is honeycombed with multiple paths that lead you to the same place. The game is linear in the sense that the story narrative will take you to the same areas in every playthrough, but your route to get there and what other areas you explore along the way is entirely up to you. You can stealth through vents, picking locks and hacking terminals, you can enter the front of an area, going rambo if you choose, or you can do multiple combinations of each. If you need to open a door, you can pick the lock, blow the door up, or often times, there's is a hidden back way into the room.
If Invisible War in no other way maintains the feel of the original, it's open-level designs do capture the spirit of the original Deus Ex. In the end, there was no way Invisible War was going to live up to the original. The original is one of the greatest games ever made and following it up was going to be a tough task no matter what Ion Storm did. None of the games in the series since can live up to the original either. The original was as close to perfect as a game can get. Invisible War didn't have a chance of holding a candle to it no matter what they did. It was an impossible task.
That being said, I still love this game. First and foremost, I associate it with getting a brand new console. My early Xbox playing, outside of playing games at a friend's place, was Invisible War, Sega games, and Return to Castle Wolfenstein which was on sale for cheap when I bought my Xbox. I would say that, those who first played Invisible War on the Xbox probably have a higher opinion of the game than those who first played it on the PC just on the merit of having a working game out of the box. The game was also designed with the Xbox in mind.
The original Unreal engine had an amazing atmosphere to it. I can't really describe it, something about the way it looked. The original Unreal had an amazing gothic sci fi art direction, which is still visually appealing to me to this day. The original Deus Ex also has a uniquely different atmosphere about it. There's something about the graphics in Unreal Engine 1 that seems to give every game that runs on it an extra atmospheric look to them. Unreal 1 is still a beautiful engine to me and it represents a golden age of PC gaming. The original Deus Ex has an amazing atmosphere, helped along with an amazing soundtrack to go along with it.
Invisible War runs on a heavily modified Unreal 2 engine, and while the atmospheric feel is definitely different from the original thanks to the jump in technology, I also very much enjoy the atmosphere in Invisible War as well. It doesn't capture the same atmosphere of the original, but I still love that dark, sci fi atmosphere. That blade runner aesthetic if you will. Dark, but futuristic. I love the atmosphere in this game. There is little to no music in the game, more ambient tracks at best, but maybe that helps the atmosphere. It's a quiet, dark, dreary, futuristic world presented in the game. While I would have loved more awesome tunes, like the amazing title screen music in the game, the more low key soundtrack helps the ambiance of the game in my opinion. As much as I would have loved having as good a soundtrack as the original Deus Ex, I do like the more low-key sound design of Invisible War.
Deus Ex: Invisible War follows the exploits of Alex D, and takes place 20 years after the events of the first game. It continues the story-line of one of the three choose-able endings of the original game. Like the original, the game tells a tangled web of multiple, invisible, factions at war with each other, allowing players to choose which one to ally themselves with. The beginning of the game starts out with a cool cut-scene where the entire city of Chicago is wiped off the map in a terrorist attack, and starts from the safety of the Tarsis academy in Seattle where Alex is evacuated to which quickly finds itself under attack by a terrorist force. Alex escapes the facility, and thus starts the rest of the journey. Like the original, the story climaxes with multiple endings chosen by the player depending on which faction they choose at the end of the game. There is a possibility of four different endings in the game.
The story telling is well done, and easy to follow, with multiple mini-stories intertwined through NPC characters offering new side missions throughout the game. For example, in Seattle, the pequads coffe shop manager offers to pay you money to go down to lower Seattle and destroy the coffee inventory for the rival Queequeegs coffee shop. When you get down to lower Seattle, the Queequeegs manager offers you a reward to hack the WTO zoning computer to allow a Queequees shop to be opened in upper Seattle. This is a completely optional side mission in the game where I like to go and destroy the coffee supply of Queequegs to collect the reward from the Pequads manager, but then I also screw over the Pequads manager by allowing the zoning of Quequegs in upper Seattle. That way they all lose, but I still get paid. The game is full of fun, but optional side missions like this with each city center acting like it's own hub-world to explore and interact with NPC characters, while also exploring and finding hidden areas and secret paths to take.
While I do agree with the complaint that the city areas feel way too small and cramped, thanks to the Xbox-first focus of the development, featuring small, cramped-feeling cities, instead of feeling like major metropolitan areas, there is still a lot to explore and find in this game. So while the game does fail to successfully simulate large city landscapes, feeling more cramped and cozy in nature, the areas are still honeycombed with hidden areas to explore. The level designs are still excellent, and a lot of care and thought went into them. If nothing else in Invisible War felt like the original, the level designs did, even if they were smaller in scale.
The story design also feels a lot like the original as well. I'll just be straight, I am not a storyline gamer, especially as of late. If anything, I suffer from what Gamepro forum alum Rade Six rightfully pointed out to me was Story-Fatigue. Modern games are such over-produced productions that throw hours upon hours of overdone story sequences your way. Maybe I've gotten less patient as I've gotten older, but I have quit playing whole games because they slow-roll into the gameplay elements throwing overdone story element after overdone story element your way. At which point, I find myself yelling at the game “JUST LET ME PLAY THE FREAKING GAME ALREADY!” So yeah, story-fatigue is a good name for it. I'm sick of the overdone production, just let me play a game, especially since most gaming storylines are forgettable anyway.
However, even though I am not a story-focused gamer, the games that make storyline a gameplay mechanic, taking advantage of the fact that gaming is supposed to be an interactive medium, and not a static form of visual story-telling like movies, are the games that do story line right in my opinion. Like the original, how the story plays out depends on which the decisions the player makes throughout the game. The story is linear in the fact that you will always end up back on liberty island at the end of the game, however, the story in between is up to the player to uncover. Like the original, there are whole side stories, and whole areas of the game you won't see or find in your first or even second playthrough of the game. So while the main narrative does end up in the same areas, it's all the smaller sortylines or sidequests in between that the player must discover, that make the storyline an interactive part of the game i.e. a gameplay mechanic in itself. I prefer the games that offer an active story experience instead of a passive one, making the player an active participant in how the story unfolds verses passive storyline that unfold identically every time. The kind that take the player out of the gameplay experience and lay one thick, forced, overproduced melodramatic story cutscenes, or piss-boring walking sims thrown on otherwise mediocre third person shooter gameplay.
After you escape tarsus, and are released upon Seattle, the open story choices start appearing through each faction contacting Alex and trying to get him or her depending in which player model you choose at the beginning of the game to run missions for them. It is up to the player to decide on which missions they take or what actions they take on those missions, and even choose which missions or actions they consider moral or not. An example of this is in Cairo where the WTO asks Alex to destroy the Nassif greenhouse because it is producing what they consider to be illegal food, that is, food production they have no control over, yet it is the main source of food for the local population. You can be the corporate stooge, and destroy the food thus giving the WTO sole control of food production in the area, or you can break into the greenhouse to explore it, and pilfer any items you want, but choose not to destroy the food production at the end.
Like the original Deus Ex, another big factor of the open-choice design is the freedom to make moral choices or not. You can choose to be evil: killing everyone and everything, or try to play the game with a mostly no-kill run: choosing to knock enemies out with the stun baton or tranquilizer darts. I say a mostly no-kill run, because the enemies at the end of the game give you no choice but to kill them because they explode when their life is drained. I guess that's one bad part about the game is, those who prided themselves on doing no-kill runs in the original Deus Ex were unable to reproduce it in the sequel.
On top of the choice to kill or not kills, players can choose to be stealthy, run in guns blazing, or a combination of both. The game's level designs and specific problems also provide a multitude of choices to the player. While I have played through the game enough I have my own farovite bio mods and favorite routes to take, not only do the bio mods allow the player to customize their attributes, using either the official bio mods or black market bio mods which give you things like hacking or having melee attacks that cause emp damage against bots, but they also allow the player to cater to a stealth approach verses a non stealth approach, or play as a good guy or bad guy. Like the original, you can play it as a good guy, or as a bad guy, going full GTA killing spree if you want. If you go the mass murder route, the game will still prevent you from killing story-important characters by protecting them behind glass or putting them in areas where your weapons are disabled, thus preventing players from not being able to progress the game by killing a story-important character.
The level designs also cater to how you choose to play. As I already mentioned, there are always multiple routes into every area of the game, so you don't have to take the most direct route if you don't want to. There's usually a hidden ventilation shaft, an underground sewer entrance, or a window you can use to enter any building secretly. The choice is up to the player, and it adds a reward for full exploration of each area, and a reason to play through the game multiple times to see everything the game has to offer. The level designs do recapture the open exploration elements that made the designs in the original so good. Similar care and thought was put into this game as the original.
Some of the other specific problems in the game are also up to the player to decide. As a quick example, the game may present you with a locked weapon cabinet. You can use your multi-tools (which combine both the multi-tool and lock picks from the original into one tool now) to pick the lock on the cabinet, or you can just throw a grenade, and blow the top off the cabinet. Doors can be blown off their hinges or lock picked for stealth. Sometimes the codes to door keypads or computer logins can be found in data cubes lying around, or computers can just simply be hacked if you have the hacking ability. Like the PS2 port, Invisible War takes away the requirement to manually enter computer logins by hand, a feature that was a fun interactive element of the original on the PC, they just automatically get entered in if you find the data cube with the logins on them. This was another stepping-stone feature the PS2 port of the original did that was carried over to Invisible war. It definitely makes entering logins a lot more convenient for the player, but I can sympathize with fans of the original in how it kind of made you feel like a hacker to manually type in logins and passwords in to a computer. I just always found hacking more convenient myself. I guess it depends on how much you liked this aspect of the original game as to weather automatically filling in computer logins is a plus or a strike against Invisible War.
Now the biggest complaint against the game among fans is one I do agree with. While I still love this game despite the watering down of the deeper elements of the original and because I experienced it on the Xbox and not the buggier PC release, I do agree that the universal ammo system in the game is a terrible design idea. This was one of the largest complaints, and rightfully so. Every firearm in the game uses the exact same pool of ammo. If you run out of ammo with one firearm, you run out of ammo with all of them, making guns like the flame thrower impractical to use because of how fast it drains ammo. The idea was to make it so players didn't have to juggle between different ammo types for each individual weapon in the game and could just use one ammo pool for all of them. This can lead to frustration in the game, being completely out of ammo for your firearms in the middle of a hostile environment, especially at the end of the game where enemies are complete bullet sponges.
The universal ammo was a dumb idea, however, it's never been a deal breaker for me in the game, because, I tend to play the game as a mostly no-kill experience meaning, I tend to run up on enemies, and use the baton to thump them in the head until they are unconscious. In fact, the melee weapons, the baton and Sword are the most effective weapons in the game, and when paired with the EMP bio-mod, which does damage to bots, makes them even more effective against bot enemies than even human opponents. The EMP bio-mod, when fully leveled through finding more black market canisters to upgrade it, not only does damage to bots, but instantly reprograms them to be an ally. Walk up to a turret or walking tank, tap it once with the stun baton, and then watch as it takes out any enemies in the vicinity. Generally, I save the ammo for shooting tranquilizer darts at enemies to knock them out over a distance, or to use the SMG that's been modded with a weapon mod that delivers EMP damage to quickly take out turrets or patrol bots from a distance.
The weapon mod system in the game is another cool feature which allows players to add extra abilities to the firearms they find in the game. For example, I like putting the silencer and a glass breaker mod on my sniper rifle in the game. The silencer is self explanatory, but the glass breaking mod silently disintegrates glass window panes when they are shot. Certain windows in the game are setup will alarms that go off when shattered, so adding the mod to the sniper is a silent way to slip through windows in the game without arousing suspicion. By the end of the game I do tend to collect more weapon and bio mods than I have use for, however, this means that there is ample opportunity in the game to change your mod choices multiple times before the end.
Overall, yes, this game doesn't live up to the original and didn't include a lot of the features the devs were planning to implement during development thanks to the Xbox version being prioritized. That being said, I've still always enjoyed Invisible War. The Xbox version is the most stable way to play the game. The load times are quite a bit longer than the PC version, there are still some wonky physics here and there, and the Xbox version freezes for a second every time a spider-bot is thrown in the game, but, even when comparing it to the PC version I bought off Steam, it is by-far more stable than the Steam version of the game which is a shame because it was never given backwards compatibility with the Xbox 360 or Xbox One. The Xbox version still remains only on the original Xbox to this day. Even Thief: Deadly Shadows is at least backwards compatible on the 360, but Invisible War never got the same treatment.
I'm not sure if there have been driver improvements that have made a difference, but when I first bought Invisible War off Steam, the game would black-screen after the intro video when starting a new game. I was like, “Great, I just bought a broken game off Steam.” This is why I laugh when I see tech channels, (which if you watch one tech channel video, youtube will then forever suggest tech channel content to you forever) in their PC verses console videos toute backwards compatibility to thousands of old games as a giga-chad feature of PC's verses plebeian console backwards compatibility (which is as simple as holding onto your old consoles). Yes, there are still plenty of old PC games that work just fine on modern hardware, for example, Winquake which is Windows 95 Quake that installed and ran just fine on my Windows 10 PC. However for every Winquake, there's an Invisible War, a Knights of the Old Republic, or a Timeshift where you purchase a game, and then have to scour the internet finding ways to get the game to actually run on modern hardware.
Luckily, Knights of the Old Republic has been patched recently and runs OK now, and Invisible War has started running. I don't remember a patch that fixed it, so maybe it was GPU driver updates that fixed it, but it at least runs now on all my rigs whether I'm using and Nvidia or AMD card. I even tried it on my Linux Mint PC I'm using to experiment with Linux, and it runs now under the Proton layer. However, the display is stretched too far, so I was unable to do things like drop items from my inventory. It runs though.
On all my three Windows 10 computers, it runs just fine now with two caveats: No matter the rig I am running (the exception being the Linux PC), the game now changes my desktop resolution to the game's resolution, so 1600x1200, and with the exception of my laptop, it also default changes the refresh rate to 30 frames per second. I took me a month to figure out the refresh rate change the game made to my windows settings, I could tell something was different with my screen, I just couldn't tell what exactly it was when playing other games or watching youtube. On my current rig, when running on my RX 7900 GRE with Radeon Super Resolution upscaling the game to 4K, I've never seen the game look so good. The unfortunate thing being, it doesn't run as good as it should because of the 30 hertz refresh rate it defaults to. I haven't played around with the available visual tweekers for the game to see if I can stop it from changing that setting. I still find it perfectly playable in this form, because it's not a fast-paced shooter. In fact the combat is pretty straightforward and basic, but the combat wasn't great in the original either, it was all the other stuff that made it great.
The PC version of the game still does occasionally shut off for no good reason, and has even wonkier physics than the Xbox version in parts. Overall, it's less stable than the Xbox version, but with way faster load times. Generally, I didn't run into a lot of freezups of the game, it just randomly shut off on me here and there when recording this playthrough. I am happy the game runs now, because I was super bummed out when I first bought it and all it would do is black screen after the intro. While there is still plenty of room for improvements to be made in how it runs on modern hardware, I'm just happy it at least runs.
It runs well enough, it plays well enough, even with a lesser framerate, and with modern GPU Upscaling whether Nvidia's upscaling or Radeon Super Resolution it looks better than I've ever seen it look.
Graphically, on the Xbox version, when I first got the system and the game, I thought this was a beautiful game. I've seen some people comment that it's an ugly game nowadays, but, for the time, a modified Unreal 2 engine with it's detailed textures, excellent lighting effects, and all that glorious bump mapping or normal mapping, I was incredibly impressed with the visual quality of the game. Aside from quality, I really loved the atmosphere. It feels like a more quite, reflective game than the original.
Invisible War is still one of my favorite Xbox games to this day. And speaking of Xbox, I thought I should shout out two other games that do similar things in nature to Invisible War that you should also check out if you have the chance.
The first needs little introduction for Xbox fans, The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay has some similar Gameplay elements to Invisible War. Checking to see, it appears that Riddick is not available on either Steam or Gog at the moment despite having a physical PC release. However, it was included for free on the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of it's Sequel, Assault on Dark Athena. That's a two-games-for-one deal. Riddick is one of the best games on the orginal Xbox, and one of the best looking games as well.
The other game is Tron 2.0: Killer App which plays a lot like System Shock or Deus Ex in the Tron Universe. I recently bought the PC version on Steam, and I'm surprised that I don't hear more about this game from retro PC gamers. The Xbox version, which added multipleyer and some other things over the PC version, I expect not to hear much about as it slipped completely under the radar on the system. Consider it an underrated or Hidden Gem for that system. However, the PC version came out and got good review scores and a lot of attention at the time, but people have, seemingly, forgotten about the game in the years since. You hear about System Shock and Deus Ex a lot from old school PC gamers, and rightfully so, but why so little love for Tron nowadays? It's a solid System Shock style romp from Monolith.
The Bottom Line: I think that fans of the Deus Ex franchise have come back around to Invisible War recently and declared it as not as bad as it was made out to be. Some people will never forgive this game, but for others, once the initial disappointment subsided, they can now come back to it and give it a fair shot. I still love this game, but have yet to play any of the more recent Deus Ex games despite owing Human Revolution and Mankind Divided now, so I can't rank it in the series having still only played the first two games. That being said, I've always enjoyed this game despite it's flaws and the many ways it didn't live up to the impossibly high standard set by the original game. Even with Eidos meddling in the development and making the Xbox the focus, Ion Storm still managed to give us an excellently designed, story-driven, open-exploration game where the player has the ultimate choice in how to explore the world presented in it.
The PC version is more glitchy and harder to run to this day. The Xbox version is the more stable version, and we who experienced it on the Xbox over the initial PC release probably had a much better time with it. If you're one of those fans who will never forgive this game, nothing I can say will change your mind. However, for the rest, Deus Ex: Invisible War is a controversial sequel to one of the greatest PC first person shooter/RPG hybrids of all time that certainly didn't live up to the original, but still manages to be a great game in it's own right. For some of you, you should give it a second chance if it'll run right on your PC that is, for everyone else, you should probably play the original game first in order for the story to make sense. On a depth level, I would put it on the same gameplay depth level as Bioshock in how it took previously complex gameplay designs, and made them more accessible/watered down/mainstream to appeal to a wider audience. Invisible War failed to live up to the original, but also succeeds in some of it's design elements to recapture the feeling of it. If you want something that's on the same level of accessibility as the original Bio Shock, you'll probably find enjoyment in this game.
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