A Slew of Deus Ex: Invisible War Previews

Ion Storm’s Deus Ex: Invisible War is receiving a lot of coverage this week, with five more previews popping up on the web. The first two are at GameSpot, with both a PC and Xbox version:

Based on what we’ve played, Deus Ex: Invisible War is an impressive follow-up that appears to be fulfilling the promise of the first game. Fans of the series or anyone looking for a change of pace will want to watch for this one. Deus Ex: Invisible War will ship this December for the PC and Xbox.

The third is over at Telefragged:

While I remain a bit doubtful of some of ION Storm’s decisions to change the Deus Ex formula, it just doesn’t seem that they would make any real difference on a console anyway. It’s not like the RPG systems in Final Fantasy X were overly simplistic, and the controls and characters in Virtua Fighter 4 or Soul Calibur 2 take months of play to master. Streamlining the character by making his or her skill rely on the player’s own ability (rather than a statistic that is arbitrarily increased) is much more appealing to me.

The fourth is at ActionTrip:

Graphically, the lighting effects make for very tense game play as you move from shadow to shadow to get the drop on a passing guard. Or, as you move through a vent shaft and the light ripples through the blades of a slowly rotating fan. As I played, I got goose bumps and could not help drawing parallels to the Thief series or System Shock II. Not bad company to be grouped with. Obviously, the stealth I employed and guards’ reaction to noises or opening doors reminded me of Thief. The way I was able to customize my character using Biomods so I could increase my speed, mask my passage to security bots or cameras, and customize my weapons reminded me of System Shock II. Each mission in the game can be accomplished by stealth, combat, or bribery. Don’t have enough cash to get the building entry codes from the janitor? Hack the security system and shut down the cameras so you can enter through the sky light undetected.

And the fifth is at VideoGamesLife:

The open-ended, non-linear nature also seems to have been dumbed-down. There are only a few choices to make in the demo, and not very many ways to go about them. Stealth or action is the basic choice, and a poor one at that, as long as the stealth gameplay remains dogged by problems. The mission areas are very small indeed, highly limiting the player and nothing like the open area we saw on Liberty Island in the original. We simply did not find the story which was largely unexplained engrossing or the gaming area compelling or interesting (apart from the greasels, who are just as annoying as they were in the original).