Deus Ex: Invisible War

Deus Ex was one of the best games of the last few years, blending first-person action with intelligent and engaging role playing progression. How does Ion Storm's sequel match up to such a benchmark game?

Conspiracy theorists, rejoice! The granddaddy of dystopian rpg-shooter hybrids is back! The graphics are improved, the plot is more convoluted, and this time, it's been released simultaneously on PC and Xbox. Unfortunately, that's where the good news ends, and the bad news begins.

A lot of games have been making the transition from Console to PC lately, and frequently, the results have been good. In going from the Xbox to the PC, Bioware's Knights of the Old Republic lost several nasty bugs, and gained an entirely new world for players to explore. Rockstar's GTA: Vice City gained an overall improvement in both graphics and performance, to the delight of its fans. When development teams work to take advantage of the unique features that the PC brings to the table, like large quantities of memory, massive hard drives, much more potent graphical hardware, and the mouse + keyboard input combination, the results generally end up pleasing. When developers fail to take advantage of any of those features of the PC platform, and simply release a PC port that's utterly identical to the Console original, the game is what we lovingly term "shovelled out the damn door."

Does Deus Ex: Invisible War deserves that epithet? Well, yes and no. First, to be clear, in the strictest technical sense of the word, Deus Ex 2 is not a port. It was the ambition of Warren Spector and Harvey Smith to simultaneously develop and release an identical game for both the PC and Xbox platforms. As they've stated in recent interviews, however, this ambition meant that the more restricted platform set the limits for development. In other words, what PC gamers got in Deus Ex 2 was a game built for and tested on the Xbox. While the claim was that simultaneous development was the goal, the result makes it hard not to think the PC was a distant secondary consideration.

So, what are these limits I talked about? It seems that by far the most significant was the 64 meg memory limit of the Xbox. While 64 megabytes of onboard memory is an unimaginably small amount for any modern PC, it's what the Xbox has. As a consequence, no area in the game could take up more than that hard limit of space in memory. Meaning, not to put it too bluntly, the maps are tiny. Really tiny. There are areas in the game where you will load up a new level, have a brief conversation, walk ten feet, and load up another new level. Thanks to the lack of attention paid to the PC side of development, the game apparently uses the Xbox method of loading new levels: it quits the program, loads up a CD-check, to make sure you've got a legitimate CD in the drive, and then loads the program up again, this time with the new level in memory. You heard me right: Deus Ex 2 quits every single time you change levels. Perhaps other developers could have made this seamless, but Ion Storm did not. When the program switching begins, your monitor will flicker and switch rapidly from one resolution to another, and oftentimes, you'll see your desktop. Nice way to avoid breaking the immersion, boys.

Aside from the frequent loading, with its aforementioned problems, the tiny levels also adversely impact gameplay. The most revolutionary feature of the original Deus Ex was the robust multi-pathing. The game allowed you to tackle problems in multiple ways, using varying skill sets. The tiny maps in Deus Ex 2, unfortunately, break this multi-pathing down to "kill somebody, sneak past somebody, or crawl through a vent." In almost any given situation, these will be your options. All of them will lead you to the same point, with virtually the same consequences, and almost exactly the same rewards, bar the limited loot you could harvest from corpses.

Beyond the limits imposed by the less powerful technology of the Xbox, however, the designers of Deus Ex 2 also made a number of questionable choices in the name of "simplifying" the game. The most publicized has been the universal ammo system - instead of keeping track of how much ammo you're using for each weapon, you just have one big universal ammo bar. Each gun consumes different amounts of this 'nano-ammo', although there is no numerical counter to let you know how much ammo they're consuming, or how much is left. You just sort of have to guess. And if you run out of ammo while hosing folks down with your flamethrower, you are well and truly screwed. No reverting to a less favoured gun - you'll have to switch to a knife, or baton, or the now useless energy blade. The stated goal of the developers in this change was to eliminate the hassle of ammo management. Your weapons are the tools you use to influence events in a shooter, and if you find yourself unable to use the right weapon at the right time, because you'd previously run out of ammo, they felt it would dilute the gaming experience.

Of course, one would think this problem could be tackled by smart level design - placing sniper ammo near ledges and rooftops, machine-gun ammo near the sites of large shootouts, etc - but I digress. Unfortunately, in the process of this effort to ensure that the player would always have the choice of his favourite weapon, they also took some choices away from him. In Deus Ex 1, you could frequently switch between regular and armour piercing ammo, or between non-lethal and lethal rounds, in order to adjust your strategy to your foes. In DX2, that choice has been taken away from you. If you want to customize your weapon to work against a specific target, like bots, you have to use a permanent weapon modification on it, making it less effective on other targets. (In the case of the anti-bot mod, it makes the gun do EMP damage, but causes it to use much more ammo per shot, leaving you with a gun you wouldn't want to use on organic targets.)

Decreased choice could quite honestly be called the trademark of DX2. The skill system is gone. The bio-mod system has been dumbed down, leaving you with one slot each for cranial, ocular, skeletal, arm, and leg mods, plus the permanent light mod. In addition, some of the skills have been folded into the mod system. If you want to be able to hack computers and ATM terminals, as you could in DX1, you now have to put a 'neural interface' mod in your head, making you incapable of purchasing the 'cloak' mod, which is the only effective way to sneak in the game.

Similarly, the faction system in the game, much talked about prior to release, proved to be a disappointment. You're given the chance to take missions from several factions as you play through the game. These factions are aiming at contradictory goals, meaning that usually, you can only do one of the missions you're given, leaving the others unfinished. You'd think that working for their enemies would piss off the other factions, right? Well, not really. In fact, they'll blandly keep handing you missions, no matter how many times you spurn them or work against their interests, right up until the end of the game. No matter which faction you've supported throughout the course of the game, you can switch sides in a heartbeat, all the way through to the end of the game, when you pick your ending. Ultimately, this means that all you really have is the illusion of choice. What you decide, for the vast majority of the game, is utterly irrelevant. The game plays on exactly the same as if you'd made exactly the opposite decision. Quite disappointing.