Choices

How to go

The plot choices aren’t the only ones the player has to make. There are other decisions, tactical decisions, that are forced upon him. Going around killing all your foes clears your back, but you’ll find yourself in very risky situations, and using up a lot of ammo and bioenergy. The alternative is to sneak by, look for an alternate path, but this of course means that if the alarm is raised, the enemies you left behind will just mean all the more trouble.

What biomods to choose is another familiar dilemma for Deus Ex players. Do you want to run fast or run silently? Is it more important to regenerate or see through walls? The choice is up to you, and it will greatly affect your play style. The mods are of course limited by the amount of energy Alex has, which has interesting consequences for the feel of the game. Yes, you get super hero abilities, but only for a short amount of time. A conservation strategy develops as you play, since you must balance the three most valuable commodities – health, ammunition and bioenergy.

Health is the most important, the easiest to lose and the most difficult to replenish, but if played right, health is at the least risk. The more ammunition or bioenergy a player is willing to commit, the less likely he is to lose health. Interestingly enough, ammunition is all one type – plasma ammo. Every gun adapts the ammo to what it needs. A shotgun will make shells, a rifle makes bullets, a rocket launcher makes rockets. How is this possible? Presumably with the ubiquitous nanites. Regardless of the how, it’s an elegant solution, though we think the game could stand to give the player more of the ammo and let him hold more at the same time.

Experience

The Deus Ex experience was quite unlike anything else. Although a flawed game on many levels, as a whole it worked wonderfully. People latched onto the vision and looked over the inadequacies, filling in the blanks with their imagination. Invisible War fixes many of the most glaring issues, streamlining the game and making it feel more like a complete entity than disparate systems trying to work together.

Removing skills, for example, might hurt the feeling of depth and complexity but it hasn’t actually had a negative effect on the gameplay. It was quite a while before I realized they were gone, and I didn’t really miss them. The idea is intriguing, but it didn’t work very well in the original. After all, JC Denton was a trained special forces operative – so how can you justify him being bad with guns?

Deus Ex: Invisible War is more open than the original. The player gets information, often partial or mixed with biased interpretations, from the various entities trying to sway him to their side. From there on in, he’s free to make his own decisions and live with (or die because of) the consequences.