My first impression of Deus Ex: Invisible War was its reuptation, which was bad. It wasn’t the worst game of all time, I heard, but when compared to Deus Ex it was pretty shit. A number of people seemed to blame its general dumbing down on console parity, but Warren Spector (you may have heard of him) was talking before release about player accessibility, “smaller, deeper maps,” and other intended benefits.

And combining the two systems [of skills and augmentations] had the added benefit of eliminating some particularly silly decisions…

(…as if the system of biomod slots wasn’t silly by itself. If I want night vision I can’t have regenerating health because… the regeneration bio-nanites can only be stored in my eyeballs?)

Reputation is only worth so much, though…

My next first impression, when I eventually bought Invisible War and started playing, was that the loading screens kept glitching out, the mouse was wack, and the textures didn’t upscale well to my unsupported monitor resolution. I didn’t get far; my approximate reaction was “I may get back to this, or it may be unplayable.”

Then I created an “Unplayable” collection in my Steam client, and for the longest time, this was the only game in that collection. I guess I wasn’t sure I’d get back to it.

My next first impression, when I revisited the game recently, was pretty much the same, but I swallowed my bile long enough to turn the mouse sensitivity almost all the way down and then installed the Visible Upgrade mod to get some more recent resolutions. After that, loading times became comically long and, when I quit the game, my laptop was convinced it had two monitors, one of which had a tiny resolution while the other displayed tiny text. I guess I can’t run this game in fullscreen, but at least with the Visible Upgrade I can use most of my screen in windowed mode and not break anything.¹

At least I didn’t have to mess around with processor affinity settings, install multiple other utilities I’ve never heard of before, or uninstall my audio drivers, as some have had to do.

I’ve given this game a lot of chances at a first impression so far, and I haven’t even started thinking about the story, or the characters, or the levels…

Level design first. Remember Liberty Island? It was a goddamned masterpiece. You’re given an objective, and you have a bunch of different ways to get there. It can be a bit grating how many times you’re told that there’s a back way into the Statue, but it was a new idea at the time… and Liberty Island, like most Deus Ex levels, is a bit like a miniature open world full of side areas, resources, and alternate approaches.

Tarsus Academy is mostly a long hallway with a couple of side rooms, a bit of backtracking, and multiple loading screens. (Thank fuck I’d switched to windowed mode.) For at least the first half of the level, there are no obstacles with more than one way to get past. And the devs felt the need to give me a tutorial for the compass.

And the writing was clubbing me over the head immediately with the idea of mistrust. Before I’d left my new dorm room, Tarsus leadership was evading serious questions and giving me the “nothing to see here” treatment about the explosions rattling the building. Before long, I’d been shown some lab workers spying on me from behind the holographic version of a one-way mirror, and I’d been told by a competing faction’s officer that her mooks had only tried to kill me because a subordinate got “overzealous.”

I get it, game. I’m playing a conspiracy thriller and should trust no one. It’d be nice if you trusted the player to have a brain.

Do you remember how Deus Ex built this stuff up slowly, with some things, like Paul’s effort to avoid killing NSF troopers, only becoming clear in hingdight?² How the characters differed in, well, character, how UNATCO turned out to be a mix of ideologues, decent people, self-interested people, and shitheads, and so was the NSF but with more desperation? How it took several more levels to peel back the first layer of the conspiracy? That was so much better.

Also, the combat doesn’t feel good, the enemy AI isn’t good, and the voice acting… actually started improving a bit now once I got out into the city, but before then, I was wondering how they’d made it so stiff. And while the character models are a step up, their animations seem to be a step down. For example, this is a T-pose.

At the moment I’m not sure how much longer I’ll stick with this. If Seattle doesn’t show me it’s worth my time in short order, this may be the first Deus Ex game I DNF.

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1. If half my screenshots look windowed… they were.

2. Why is Paul carrying such a lethal weapon, then? Other than the obvious but gamey reason, which is to smack down players who attack him?