Instead, for the rest of the game, they’re constantly in your head as if you directly work for them. Yet despite this, the Order can’t get it into its head that, just maybe, you might hold something of a grudge. The intro starts with you under attack by the religious faction, nominally to ‘rescued’ from a fate as a test-subject for the not-particularly-scary Tarsus Academy, only instead the leader of the assault has decided to kill everybody. Wander into an apartment block, the Emerald Suites, and the head of the WTO-a complete stranger at this point-phones up to ask if you’d mind raiding the Minister of Culture’s bedroom. Seattle looks like a succession of slum and warehouses, slightly melted into metallic blue and grey. The faction system, for instance, spends most of the game bouncing between being comical and just plain broken. The deeper issues are rooted in its basic design. Invisible War could be forgiven its technical shortcomings, but they're just the start of its problems. Much of this is, again, the result of having been designed for the original Xbox, though the bland futuristic setting and inferior writing somehow make it feel like both the big budget sequel and cheap straight-to-video knock-off of the first game. It’d be great if the answer was yes, but replaying it now, Invisible War has aged about as poorly as a game can. Now that the disappointment has faded, and a new incarnation of Deus Ex has gotten its own sequel, is it time to re-evaluate Invisible War for what it is, rather than what we hoped for 13 years ago? Coming second to one of the greatest games of all time would hardly be a shame, though. Looking back all these years later, the question isn’t whether or not Invisible War was a better game than Deus Ex, because the answer is a flat no. Such is the risk of following up one of the best games ever made. Everything that the original map did so well, its return trip fails miserably to match. The once natural choices now stated outright, blunt and simplified. The map split into chunks because the system can't keep it all in memory.
The inferior aesthetics that make every location look the same. In Invisible War, it’s more a sign of submission, where the sequel’s many concessions to the original Xbox hardware are all on display.
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