Graphics & Sound

Graphics

Deus Ex is a nice-looking game, the lighting is really quite fantastic, but it’s not all that. It fits a nice median between current technology like that in UT2003 and Call of Duty, and what’s coming up with Doom 3. Despite the small levels, the game is extremely punishing on both CPUs and video cards – you’d better have the big guns to play with, or don’t come to the party at all. Without multisampling or the bloom effect, I suspect my 2GHz P4 with 512MB of RAM and a GF FX 5950 Ultra is lucky to achieve 30fps at 1024x768, and likely chops down to 10fps during the harshest bits of action (which are fortunately few and far between.)

Models are quite nice but seem a bit flat from certain angles. It’s not that a character’s face is all flat, or that his cheek is a large square, but the faces never seem quite perfectly realistic – perhaps it’s an artifact of the lighting. At any rate, animations are quite smooth though it’s hard to tell given the framerate, and there doesn’t seem to be much variety in the way a character runs – it’s almost like playing a multiplayer FPS that uses the same animations for 10 different models. The biggest disappointment with animation remains in combat, as with the original Deus Ex – everyone is so stiff, nothing like in other games such as Call of Duty. There’s no leaning around corners, melee attacks are always identical and feel artificial, and taking characters don’t react to hits as they should.

Special effects are an odd bunch, some can be quite nice but others are downright … ghetto (sorry, Harvey). The night vision/see-through-walls biomod couldn’t be simpler – it just highlights viable targets with a bright green. That’s not exactly how low-light vision or heat-sensing vision work; both were done much better in Splinter Cell and Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield.

Sound

Sound effects are a little worse off. There’s no knocking the speech, which is remarkably professional – there’s none of the over-the-top acting you might expect in most games. The voices of both the male and female Alex characters are perfect as are those of most major NPCs.

The biggest disappointments come with the actual sound effects – weapons sound ridiculously weak. It doesn’t matter if you use the SMG, sniper rifle, flamethrower or pistol, the sound is dull, muted and distant. I’m currently addicted to Call of Duty multiplayer, which has the absolute crispest, most clear and powerful weapon sounds in any game – so the contrast may be skewing my opinion further against Invisible War than it deserves but I doubt it. Music is decent though somewhat generic. It could come from Master of Orion or Alpha Centauri, which weren’t really known for their soundtracks.