Much Ado About Everything

I finally finished Deus Ex: The Invisible War a few days ago, after starting it at least 3 times since it came out. Only now I could get the performance to be acceptable enough for the game to be playable. That alone – needing a machine 4 years from the future – should be a telltale sign that this game is bad. Which it very much is.

You might wonder why’d I be trying to to play this game so desperately. Well, because it’s the sequel to one of the best games of all time – Deus Ex. That game has such an incredibly well crafted story – the ultimate conspiracy theorist’s dream – and such a flexible gameplay that I could not ignore anything related to it. I replayed the original 3 or 4 times and I still have very fond feelings of it. And its content is becoming more relevant as time goes by, not less.

But the reviews of this sequel, that were in 7 to 8 out of 10 range when the game came out, were way too lenient. Everything in this game sucks, starting from the packaging – a lame picture of a guy with a sideways facing gun, and ultra-lame “the future war on terror” label. I have never seen a worse fitting slogan – ever! The original game was exactly the opposite of this, and in fact even in this sequel 3 out of 4 game endings would make you a “terrorist” according the the world police (including the “main” ending). Not to mention playing off the 9/11 events which occured a year earlier. Deus Ex was a game anyone who hates this new world order would enjoy immensely, and when I hear “war on terror” I immediately get images of American foreign policy, George Bush, “if you’re not with us you’re against us” and the campaign against civil freedoms that started after 9/11. While the game offers you choices to fight against organizations that promote things such as “war on terror”! It’s like advertising books and video tutorials on how to open locks during the commercial break on “Cops”! Just appaling.

But I shouldn’t waste much of my time reviewing this. Sufficient to say is that the game will disappoint anyone who played the original game, as well as anyone who hasn’t. Horrible performance that stopped me an hour or two into the gameplay three times in last 4 years – and wasn’t decent even now on vastly superior hardware! – fairly crappy storyline that only in the end starts to look like Deus Ex but never actually comes close, obvious lack of transition between cities (meaning, no cutscenes whatsoever except opening and ending, both of which are fairly short and not really all that impressive), many illogical and/or absurd situations, very few characters populating the world (other than the generic cannon fodder enemies), incredibly long load times between areas – which are triggered very often – and the list goes on and on. And when it’s all said and done, Deus Ex had
a definitive ending (whcih you could choose!) and didn’t really need a sequel. In fact the sequel was destined to fail, unless it was to use the original game’s world only as a backdrop for a completely separate story – which this one didn’t as it is a straight sequel. This is the problem with a vast majority of sequels to good games, or movies or anything nowdays – the good ones typically don’t need a sequel becuase if they were left unfinished, they wouldn’t be good in the first place! This isn’t always true, of course, but if something was originally designed to be standalone, and it is made well, it is unlikely that a true sequel could reach the quality of the original. It’s best to design something from the ground up to be “extensible” but then it’s even more difficult to make it good, incomplete as it is.

People say the game suffered because it was also released on Xbox – which I also tried to play but had to give up due to, again, bad performance. Perhaps, but there are console games that sport depth of story as well as great gameplay; though PC games at their best surpass consoles, games of that class are few and far between nowdays, as PC gaming is deep in a recession from which it may never come out (not that it is necessarily a bad thing). It is however quite possible that the game did suffer from being published on a console – the influence of whoever the publisher was might have been fatal, meaning they forced the developer to shape the game in the way they believed a console game should be, and then they marketed it as such (“future war on terror”). If that’s true, than indeed they destroyed a game; it’s like it was written by marketing and financial analyst types rather than artists.
It should’ve never been allowed to exist. Shame on Ion Storm – which incidentally doesn’t exist any more, which is hardly a suprise given this disastrous example.