Deus Ex: Invisible War - what's good about the series' worst?

This article was originally published in PC Gamer issue 297. For more quality articles about all things PC gaming, you can subscribe now in the UK and the US.

Deus Ex opens on Liberty Island pier. Under the nighttime glow of New York s skyline, JC Denton gets to work, first making his way across the island, then infiltrating the statue and taking out the NSF terrorists inside. As an intro, it s indicative of the game to come: large, open and potentially alienating. No concessions are made. Deus Ex throws you straight into the deep end and challenges you to swim.

By comparison, the opening of Deus Ex: Invisible War is a paddling pool. Alex D gets to work, walking through a blue-grey corridor not yet trusted with the tools that would allow her (or him) to break into the rooms of her fellow Tarsus recruits. She enters an elevator, triggering a loading screen. Playing now, on Windows 10, that loading screen forces a quit to desktop. Moments later, Invisible War lurches back to life, and the loading bar completes.

It s bizarre, and it happens on many occasions. Invisible War has many loading screens. Like Liberty Island, the intro is indicative of the game to come: condensed and constrained. Invisible War is not a bad game would Kieron Gillen have given a bad game 92% in his PC Gamer review? but it s not a good sequel. It takes Deus Ex s wide open spaces and reduces them to a console-friendly size. Normally I wouldn t blame consoles for dumbing down a PC game.

In this case, however, it s impossible not to see the compromises created by its Xbox release. Deus Ex is able to use its large spaces to create a sense of realism through sparse but effective environmental detail. The streets of Hell s Kitchen are wide, and littered with barrels, crates and garbage bags. In Invisible War, the locations feel cramped and chunky. Seattle the first hub feels more like a mall than anything else. What should be a major US city is instead an underwhelming series of cramped corridors and staircases. The first time I played, I didn t realise I was outdoors. It s about as underwhelming a cyberpunk dystopia as I ve ever experienced.

Other locations, Cairo and Trier, Germany, are more recognisably urban, but still just narrow streets for NPCs to stand in. When I replay Deus Ex, I still feel immersed by the environment. That s not the case in Invisible War. Despite the graphics looking better than in Deus Ex, it s aged worse. The problem is compounded by the number of NPCs able to exist in each environment. Seattle s Club Vox seemingly one of only two businesses operating in the upper city limits has more staff than patrons.

Nevertheless, Seattle is an enjoyable slice of intrigue and backstabbing. Ion Storm makes effective use of limited space by offering a nested stack of sidequests each contact simultaneously someone else s target. It starts when a WTO employee tells me to infiltrate Club Vox and find proof of the owner s tax evasion. While there, the owner asks me to assassinate a lawyer in the nearby Emerald Suites. Tracking down the lawyer, I impersonate an arms dealer, swindling him out of a few hundred credits before killing him.

For completing the job, I m given access to the VIP area.