Deus Ex: Invisible War Retrospective

Eurogamer took the release of Deus Ex: Human Revolution as a chance to go back on its direct predecessor, the arguably unloved Deus Ex: Invisible War, to explain why the title deserves “a better fate than being remembered for what it is not rather than for what it is”. Here’s a sampling:

For a start it’s a better shooter than Deus Ex. For a series that prides itself on player agency the tricky gun play of the first game nudged people towards creeping around rather than allowing them to choose between being a sneak or acting like RoboCop.

Then there’s the universal ammo concept. No more messing around rearranging ammo in your inventory like an obsessive compulsive – just one clip to rule them all.

Sure the execution wasn’t spot on as nothing told you how much ammo each weapon would drain, but the basic concept certainly didn’t do Mass Effect 2 any harm. There were also some great biomods like the nanobot spy drone that you could use to scout an area before piloting it up a military bot’s rear end and letting it dissipate in an EMP blast.

That said, for every decent addition Invisible War screwed up somewhere else. It reduced hacking to waiting for a bar to fill up. Even worse, it then rubbed that in by robbing us of the joy of playing a nosy parker who gets their kicks from reading emails that provide tiny insights into life as a bored office worker from the future. The scale of the areas in the game is another bugbear, each seemingly squashed down to the size of a bedsit to help Invisible War to fit on the Xbox.