IWAssassin
8th Aug 04, 10:14 PM
Year of release: 2003
Development House: Ion Storm
Publisher: Eidos
Website: http://www.deusex.com
Game score: 48
Graphics: 3
Sound: 2
Gameplay: 2
Concept: 2
Execution: 1
Controls: 4
Enjoyment: 1
Replay ability: 3
Difficulty: 1
Learning Curve: 2
Patch version: 1.2
Bugs: 4
Modability / Community support: 1
Review
Deus Ex: Invisible War, one of the most highly anticipated games of 2003, one of the only ones anticipated to actually be released in 2003. The Sequel to the multiple Game of the Year award winning Deus Ex, with the potential to easily be named best game of all time.
Sadly it doesn’t come close to even its predecessor. For those that don’t know Deus Ex Invisible War is a hybrid First Person Shooter / Role Playing Game. You shoot things just like you would in Quake or Doom, but you also build your character over time as you would in games like KOTOR. At least that was the original. In DXIW, it was decided that many of the traditional RPG elements are not necessary to the RPG Genre, so your character has no skills, no traits, no abilities. Your character has a gender and skin tone. Okay it also has the ability to gain up to five "Bio-Mods" which essentially give your character super-powers.
That’s okay though, Role Playing is about playing a Role, where actions have consequences, where how you play affects the game. Sadly this isn’t the case either. The storyline is utterly linear. You have 2-3 ways to approach any given situation [generally kill, sneak around, or bribe] but no matter how you approach things the result is the same. Vital characters are always placed in "no-kill zones" so you can never break the game by killing people who might be important, and for everyone else it simply doesn’t matter. Even decisions on hot to play have no effect on things. A stealth player will have no problem at all killing any opposition with ease when stealth fails, and a killer can sneak past any opposition almost as well as a stealth player.
This can be attributed to some of the worst combat AI I have ever seen in a game going back to the original Doom Game. Generally an engagement works as follows. The AI detects you. It turns towards you, and proceeds to shoot. It stands there still shooting. Naturally this poses no challenge to anyone who has ever circle-strafed. This problem is accentuated by weapon selection. Without a doubt the most powerful weapon in the game is the riot-baton. Generally able to kill absolutely anything in the game with one hit. All you need is to be at point-blank range to use it, which is easily done as DXIW has the smallest levels I have ever seen, a large room generally being no larger than a master bedroom. For those times you don’t want to use the riot baton, use any ranged weapon you want. They all draw off the same ammo pool in a revolutionary system which is supposed to allow you to do anything you want, but just really is a bad joke.
Okay don’t use any weapon, I lied. The fact is most weapons aren’t worth using. From the pistol which takes 6-7 headshots to kill anyone, to the SMG which eats ammo even faster for the same effect. Really the Sniper Rifle and the Rocket Launcher are the weapons of choice. The Rocket Launcher follows typical quake style, and the Sniper Rifle suffers no ill effects from being fires at point blank range while running.
But running I don’t recommend. Levels are small, very small. The largest level in the game is less than half the size of levels in the original game, as seen in proof when you revisit a well known place from the original. Sadly expect to be greeted by 60 second load times after the level took 30 seconds to complete. Or worse, running an in-game mini mission that involves 15 seconds of walking across 5 levels and 5 minutes of a loading screen.
Story. Well I did say nothing matters in your decisions, right? The game is filled with "role playing" decisions that doesn’t effect the story at all, and in fact is filled with cliché’s and areas that are just outright predictable, even pointing out these cliché’s in conversations that would be amusing were it not so utterly sad.
Controls are standard FPS, though with a very consoles approach. In fact many UI settings were at the Xbox settings when originally released, though this was patched in 1.1 and 1.2 which merits a higher score. Some areas are still not great, but it works, and its hard to give a game a bad score in controls when its mostly WASD and a mouse.
Graphics, are stunning. This was the first game I know of to have fully dynamic lighting and shadowing. However stunning doesn’t mean pretty. The high resolution textures will generally remind you of games of the Quake1 era, with minimal normal mapping applied which generally only makes the textures worse. The fans within a month of release released a real high-resolution graphics patch, which unfortunately doubles the already atrocious load times, and serve to point out many other flaws of the graphics engine, where a simple thing like light reflection would add so much to the game. Technically its astounding, but the result looks like garbage, and will leave most systems absolutely crawling. I was lucky if I could sustain 10fps at minimum resolution with everything turned off. Turning everything on only reduced frame rate by about 1-2fps. Fortunately the other flaws of the game made this less noticeable. You don’t need blazing frame rates when the AI is no challenge and there is no multiplayer.
Notable bugs. Physics system would often throw you outside of a level, or throw you far in a random direction when jumping. Gravity would often not work. Many CTD Errors. Ability to jump out of several levels voluntarily with ease.
Good stuff: Fully Dynamic Lighting, Simple User Interface
Bad stuff: Low Resolution Textures, Terrible Performance, Bad AI, Little RPG Elements, Predictable Story.
Reviewer System Specs:
CPU: AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1333 (1600+)
RAM: 640mb PC133 SDRAM
Video Card: ATI Radeon 9200 128 @ 640x480 No FSAA/AF
Sound Card and Speakers: Hercules Fortissimo II w/ Quad Surround Speakers
Development House: Ion Storm
Publisher: Eidos
Website: http://www.deusex.com
Game score: 48
Graphics: 3
Sound: 2
Gameplay: 2
Concept: 2
Execution: 1
Controls: 4
Enjoyment: 1
Replay ability: 3
Difficulty: 1
Learning Curve: 2
Patch version: 1.2
Bugs: 4
Modability / Community support: 1
Review
Deus Ex: Invisible War, one of the most highly anticipated games of 2003, one of the only ones anticipated to actually be released in 2003. The Sequel to the multiple Game of the Year award winning Deus Ex, with the potential to easily be named best game of all time.
Sadly it doesn’t come close to even its predecessor. For those that don’t know Deus Ex Invisible War is a hybrid First Person Shooter / Role Playing Game. You shoot things just like you would in Quake or Doom, but you also build your character over time as you would in games like KOTOR. At least that was the original. In DXIW, it was decided that many of the traditional RPG elements are not necessary to the RPG Genre, so your character has no skills, no traits, no abilities. Your character has a gender and skin tone. Okay it also has the ability to gain up to five "Bio-Mods" which essentially give your character super-powers.
That’s okay though, Role Playing is about playing a Role, where actions have consequences, where how you play affects the game. Sadly this isn’t the case either. The storyline is utterly linear. You have 2-3 ways to approach any given situation [generally kill, sneak around, or bribe] but no matter how you approach things the result is the same. Vital characters are always placed in "no-kill zones" so you can never break the game by killing people who might be important, and for everyone else it simply doesn’t matter. Even decisions on hot to play have no effect on things. A stealth player will have no problem at all killing any opposition with ease when stealth fails, and a killer can sneak past any opposition almost as well as a stealth player.
This can be attributed to some of the worst combat AI I have ever seen in a game going back to the original Doom Game. Generally an engagement works as follows. The AI detects you. It turns towards you, and proceeds to shoot. It stands there still shooting. Naturally this poses no challenge to anyone who has ever circle-strafed. This problem is accentuated by weapon selection. Without a doubt the most powerful weapon in the game is the riot-baton. Generally able to kill absolutely anything in the game with one hit. All you need is to be at point-blank range to use it, which is easily done as DXIW has the smallest levels I have ever seen, a large room generally being no larger than a master bedroom. For those times you don’t want to use the riot baton, use any ranged weapon you want. They all draw off the same ammo pool in a revolutionary system which is supposed to allow you to do anything you want, but just really is a bad joke.
Okay don’t use any weapon, I lied. The fact is most weapons aren’t worth using. From the pistol which takes 6-7 headshots to kill anyone, to the SMG which eats ammo even faster for the same effect. Really the Sniper Rifle and the Rocket Launcher are the weapons of choice. The Rocket Launcher follows typical quake style, and the Sniper Rifle suffers no ill effects from being fires at point blank range while running.
But running I don’t recommend. Levels are small, very small. The largest level in the game is less than half the size of levels in the original game, as seen in proof when you revisit a well known place from the original. Sadly expect to be greeted by 60 second load times after the level took 30 seconds to complete. Or worse, running an in-game mini mission that involves 15 seconds of walking across 5 levels and 5 minutes of a loading screen.
Story. Well I did say nothing matters in your decisions, right? The game is filled with "role playing" decisions that doesn’t effect the story at all, and in fact is filled with cliché’s and areas that are just outright predictable, even pointing out these cliché’s in conversations that would be amusing were it not so utterly sad.
Controls are standard FPS, though with a very consoles approach. In fact many UI settings were at the Xbox settings when originally released, though this was patched in 1.1 and 1.2 which merits a higher score. Some areas are still not great, but it works, and its hard to give a game a bad score in controls when its mostly WASD and a mouse.
Graphics, are stunning. This was the first game I know of to have fully dynamic lighting and shadowing. However stunning doesn’t mean pretty. The high resolution textures will generally remind you of games of the Quake1 era, with minimal normal mapping applied which generally only makes the textures worse. The fans within a month of release released a real high-resolution graphics patch, which unfortunately doubles the already atrocious load times, and serve to point out many other flaws of the graphics engine, where a simple thing like light reflection would add so much to the game. Technically its astounding, but the result looks like garbage, and will leave most systems absolutely crawling. I was lucky if I could sustain 10fps at minimum resolution with everything turned off. Turning everything on only reduced frame rate by about 1-2fps. Fortunately the other flaws of the game made this less noticeable. You don’t need blazing frame rates when the AI is no challenge and there is no multiplayer.
Notable bugs. Physics system would often throw you outside of a level, or throw you far in a random direction when jumping. Gravity would often not work. Many CTD Errors. Ability to jump out of several levels voluntarily with ease.
Good stuff: Fully Dynamic Lighting, Simple User Interface
Bad stuff: Low Resolution Textures, Terrible Performance, Bad AI, Little RPG Elements, Predictable Story.
Reviewer System Specs:
CPU: AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1333 (1600+)
RAM: 640mb PC133 SDRAM
Video Card: ATI Radeon 9200 128 @ 640x480 No FSAA/AF
Sound Card and Speakers: Hercules Fortissimo II w/ Quad Surround Speakers