Invisible Inc.

I thought the idea of this game was fun, but in practice I found the gameplay lacking. My biggest problem with the gameplay is that there's actually very little planning one can do, unlike say turn-based RPGs, since you can't really see the layout. There are possibly micro-optimizations (which I find tedious), but since you don't know much about the level, for the whole game you're basically just reacting to things that appear, and you appear to mostly get punished for minor tactical blunders rather than larger strategic blunders. This really limits the game's depth. Also, the purchasing/upgrading system is a bit opaque. I never really know what to buy. Maybe it's because I haven't invested the time, but the game hasn't really convinced me to do so at this point.

It's good, it's different. You'll probably like it if you like turn-based strategy and working around problems rather than killing everything. Read the other reviews for why it's good. I even like that it's short, which eliminates much of the grind. The main problem of the game is that the theme does not fit the mechanics smoothly. You're running a clandestine operation and deploying highly trained agents around the world in a desperate battle against huge multinational corporations. Too bad everyone, including the most elite soldiers in these corporate forces are total idiots. Knocked out guards will wake up and start "investigating", which means going around in circles around the place where you left them. So if you left half of the levels guards at the other side of the map, you're good. When they do get in your way, you can always swing some door to get their attention and ambush them. That gets them every time. Unless they have armor and you don't have an armor piercing stun gun. In that case you can't do anything. Except maybe walk right by them if they happen to be looking at the wall or something, which they often do. And let me tell you about the guns. Most of the time you knock people down with cattle prods or tasers or whatever they are. But there are actually lethal firearms in this game, if you manage to find them and have the credits. Too bad though, that your highly trained stealth operatives only have 1-3 bullets per gun per mission. If you need to reload, you have to use a charge pack, a one-use item that takes up inventory space. All of this makes sense from the point of view of the game mechanics. The effect is that the bubble of escalating tension can burst any time you have the opportunity to cheese your way to victory past the corporate dorks. It's still a very good game. The problem is subtle and there is no clear way to fix it. It's also a great example of how hard it is to get the theme working with the actual gameplay.

I'd love to love this. Hotkeys for everything. Challenging, as you make tradeoffs every turn, and you absolutely can fail. And beautiful, and things work as they should, and really tactical. But I don't feel clever when I finish a level, neither do I care about the story. (The characters feel fake, and the writing forced.) The posed challenges are random frustrations more than anything else. Like the ever-increasing cooldown time of weapons, or the stacked penalties for spending too many turns on a level. This may capture the true spirit of an espionage agency though, but in a "here's more paperwork" way, rather than in a "can you save the day" way. It *does* keep you thinking and worried and wanting to finish well. But it's more addiction than joy, for the perfectionist workaholic.

You only get 2 stars from me. Here's why; I'm playing Endless Mode, have spent hours on building my agents, and I go on a mission. Start off in a room as usual. Only one door to exit first room, this happens. The room outside there's 5 guards. The door I can use is being watched constantly. I spend 12...12! turns to get a window to exit the room. For 12 turns the door was being watched, and the area in the next room was being watched by the 4 other guards so I couldn't make a run for it without ending up in the red zone of another guard. It took 12 turns for a window to open. I go for it, get 2/3 agents out. It's a detention center mission, where you free an extra agent. One guard in the detention room, he watches the lock terminal and there is no way of reaching it without trigging his attenting. NO blindspots. Trigger him, take him down. Extra security - more guards. Break the terminal - more guards. The hallway up to the detention room has one blindspot, and now 3 guards are interested in checking out what happened in the detention room. The other side of the hallway is the guard room of doom! Turn 20 something, Still got an agent in the starting room. Yeah, he hasn't gotten one window to leave. So on 20something turns, I've had 1...ONE! window of leaving the starting room. This is ridiculous. Anyways. I wait for the hallway to clear before i can move my two agents through it. It's clear I go for it, and two guards show up and kill both agents. There was absolutely nothing I could do. I really enjoyed this game. I get that it's procedurally generated and I've encountered some levels where this has shown in a way that make it very hard to get around, but I've always managed. But this time I got completely screwed over. Loosing agents I've spent a ton of resources on building? So it got me thinking. This could happen at any time. I don't loose because I mess up. I loose because the generated level is impossible. Not playing this game again with that in mind.

Don't believe anyone who says this game is too short or doesn't have the complexity for replayability. The true depth of mechanics and gameplay of this game emerges at difficulties Expert and above. I and many others in the community have 1000+ hours in this game and haven't gotten bored yet. There's an active Discord community and a creative modding scene, too. This game is at its best when you're pushed to your limits in terms of difficulty (which is where mods come in to ramp it up even further once you've mastered the vanilla), forcing you to make tough decisions and think five turns ahead to get your agents out of a seemingly impossible scenario. But once you do, the success high is unbelievable. I haven't played any other game that lets me go from "Damn it I'm an idiot (for letting my agent get spotted)" to "Damn it I'm a genius (for making it out of there alive)" in the span of an hour that much. In that sense, it often plays like a series of tactical puzzles, albeit usually with multiple solutions. The random level generation keeps things perpetually fresh, and the deterministic nature of the gameplay makes it possible to plan ahead (you can predict what will happen if you know the variables, and the gameplay is largely about balancing information-gathering against risk). The game also has enough flavour and personality (in terms of premade, rather than randomly generated, characters) to satisfy those of us who like things a little more RP and story-heavy, especially with mods. The one gripe I have with this game is that the tutorial does a terrible job of introducing you to the mechanics that actually matter, and even outright forbids you from using some that are crucial are higher difficulties (like using movement through peripheral vision as a distraction tool). Once you figure out that the game isn't meant to be played by knocking everyone out, the true beauty of its stealth/infiltration nature emerges. Sadly, many players never figure that out.