Deus Ex 2: Invisible War

No mincing words: Even with its problems, the new Deus Ex is simply awesome.

If we told you that you?d be hard pressed to find an action game more intelligent than Deus Ex: Invisible War, you might think we were crazy. Rarely do the words ?intelligent? and ?action game? fit together in the same sentence; something like Metal Gear Solid or, natch, the original Deus Ex springing to mind as the exceptions. Invisible War is not only the proverbial sequel-better-than-its-original, but it?s also deep, challenging, and intelligent on a level that action games usually don?t reach.

Scratching the surface of the game, you?ll find that you are a highly trained specialist who?s been modified with biomods, nanomechanical implants that give you special abilities that range from silent steps to super strength. As the game begins, your hometown has been eradicated and you?ve been relocated to another training facility in Seattle. Before you can even finish the tutorial, the facility is attacked, and not 10 minutes into the game you dip your toes into your first conspiracy theory.

Fifteen minutes into the story line, you?ll be making choices that seem world-ending: Do you help this group, which offers you tons of cash and continued status as a good citizen, or should you help the other group, which might be more shady and mysterious but offers you underground items you might not find anywhere else? Hard choices are the meat and potatoes of Invisible War, and you get started on those right away.

The hard choices continue into the game mechanics as you choose how to develop yourself as you play. You?ll find biomod canisters along the way, which you can implant to gain new powers or upgrade your current ones. You have five slots for biomods (eyes, cranium, torso, arms, and legs), and each slot can hold one of three modifications. This leads to the tough choices: Would you rather have enhanced vision or regeneration? Super speed or silent steps? If you make a mistake, you can replace your mods with other ones, but you lose any upgrades you might have made in that slot, and, well, biomod canisters don?t grow on trees. See? Tough choices.

Aside from your biomods, you also have the ability to upgrade your weapons, so that the pistol you randomly picked up in the beginning can become a powerful stealth tool when you add a silencer and a mod that enables it to disintegrate glass without setting off alarms. Try explosive rounds for your sniper rifle or put an ammo scavenger on your submachine gun. This cool little gameplay nugget really helps with the feeling of development in the game as you take random weapons from enemies and turn them into modified instruments of destruction. Anything that encourages you to keep that first pistol from the tutorial throughout the game is a winner.

Meanwhile, the game places you in areas and gives you goals, but it doesn?t give you much to go on once you?re there. Each situation has at least two different ways to get by, and often you?ll find a route that no one else might have thought of. Out of ammo? Toss a trash can to distract the guard, then run up and bean him with your baton. Giant robot sentry in the way? Use an EMP grenade to take it out, dominate (or hack) a nearby gun turret, or simply sneak by it with your thermal masking biomod. A little exploration and ingenuity will take you far in this game; you?re only ever as stuck as you want to be. There are no weird design decisions intended to extend your play or artificially make things difficult; the developers built you a world, set up a bunch of rules, and placed you inside it to go nuts. When you play, go in and try every weird thing you can think of?toss crates at people, crawl around in random vents, break into apartments, and experiment with your powers. You might not be able to venture from Seattle to Cairo on foot and at-will, but each level is a wide-open playground filled with interesting characters, side-quests (almost unheard-of in shooters), and fun stuff to do.

Of course, if you?ve glanced at the scores, you?ll notice that some of those scores aren?t 5.0s. While the game looks great graphically, it suffers from a distracting frame-rate chop that can make aiming with precision difficult in a firefight. The game ran pretty well on a machine with minimum specs with just a little reduction in quality, but even on a well-above-spec machine the frame rate is a bit low. You can fix the control problems caused by the frame rate with the auto-aim feature in the Options menu, but that seems a bit like cheating. Invisible War?s sound is strictly lovely and is nearly perfect for stealth-based gameplay, but some weirdness in sound levels during dialogue scenes makes it hard to hear what some characters are saying.

Y?know what? Just go get this game. It?s a great game that takes some patience and some brains, but there?s just so much payoff in actually solving a level by yourself, without having to figure out what the designers wanted you to do to get through. You?ll feel like it?s your story, not Ion Storm?s.

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