Deus Ex 2: Invisible War

Obviously does not touch the original but if you have not played Deus Ex & Human Revolution in awhile this will fit the bill if you want to revisit the series in an entry you haven't chewed through yet before Mankind Divided comes out. But be warned it has smaller environments even by HR's standards. But still a great game. Go in with your standards in check and you'll have a good time. For two bucks on sale it was a steal and i didn't experience any crashes whatsoever in Win 8.1 like i have with a few certain rushed GOG's ports recently.

Deus Ex: Invisible War acts as a sequel to Deus Ex. The levels are denser, but smaller, with load screens everywhere. They tried to make the world seem more alive, and it does in some ways, but a lot of those attempts feel empty. NPCs stare blankly into the middle distance, boxes, trash cans, and furniture fly across the room at the slightly touch, and everything has a chunky, dirty feel similar to other games released at the time. The game isn't as bad as I expected it to be, but it's easy to see why so many feel it fell too short of the original's ambission and scale.

I had a game update recently and after it updated I can finally play the game. It has it's own interesting gameplay, but it doesn't beat the Deus EX GOTY. That game story is very good and gameplay is linear and easy to follow. In this game however it is got so many different scenarios that it makes you wonder what do you want to do next. But I like to explore it. I haven't played it for many years and previously was struggling to even launch it, but now it works, it has it's bugs that makes your desktop very tiny resolution, but at least I can play it.

Maybe it's my PC tweaking out, but this game has a serious problem to do with loading screens. maybe because it's originally designed for the orignal xbox but instead of reloading the entire game to continue, the game it kinda gets stuck on a black screen. I have read that there are patches that can fix this like the deus ex 2 visable upgrade patch but in my experience it's doesn't work for me. Maybe yalls have better luck than I do 💀

I'm not a Deus Ex fanboy, I love the new games but the original game isn't any sacred cow. That's the context I give for my thoughts on Invisible War. The game is pretty okay. The story is a bit convoluted, there are too many players and a lot of the writing is not amazing either. Some of the side quests are pretty dumb, like quests for competing coffee shops, and some of the basic premise- like the idea that you need to hire your own pilots to move from one hub to another seems at odds with the motivations of the main players. If your player is a pawn for a lot of big players, why do you need to pay your own fare to get around? Doesn't make much sense. The two opening factions are meant to be shades of grey as well, but when one faction's missions are almost unanimously "kill this person" it doesn't seem so grey at all. There are lots of upgrades. Four different biomod slots giving one choice out of three. Guns with different upgrade choices. The inventory by items but some items stack. Although later in the game my multitools wouldn't always stack for some odd reason. I find some of the biomod choices odd- why can't I get both hacking and cloak? Instead they are on the same circuit and you can only get one or the other. And for terminals you can hack or use the passcode but I never found a single passcode outside of one given by an NPC. In that way the world actually seems pretty barren- I miss being able to search people- instead when you take someone out they drop all their gear and their body is just another item. Would it not be more interesting to find pieces of lore or passcodes on say an enemy captain? My biggest problem with this game is not anything within the game, but the fact that it changes my screen resolution every time I play it. I need to hit up my display settings afterwards to fix it. Overall- I had some fun, but I'm not sure its worth playing over other FPS titles.