It honestly wasn't that bad of a time. Was it a good sequel to Deus Ex? Absolutely not, the entire environment was cramped and felt like a series of hallways. Not even Thief Deadly Shadows was that boxed in and it was the same development team. A lot of people blame the Xbox being the lead platform as to why Invisible War was like that but the Xbox had GTA San Andreas which was a whole ass open world. If you could put San Andreas on the Xbox, you could've put a game that had the size of the first Deus Ex's hubs (unless i'm HUGELY not understanding something). All that said, I actually really liked some of the changes Invisible War made. I liked the augmentations being swappable. I liked that collecting the same augmentation meant you could upgrade an aug rather than separate upgrade and aug collectables. I liked that the endings were slightly less decided by what you did in the final level and more how you played the game and who you sided with (but even then it's still mostly dependent on what you do in the final level).
in reply to @DisasterMillennial's post:
Yeah, I went through both on stream recently and it definitely has some really neat things in it. Is it a great game? Nah. Is it a good successor to Deus Ex, which is still incredible? Certainly not. Did it deserve the hate it got? Not really. It's pretty fun still and some of the changes are really smart.
I kinda get why it got the hate because it did simplify a lot of mechanics from OG Deus Ex (not to mention the environments becoming hallways) but not all the changes were bad imo. Invisible War just had to follow up Deus Ex which had a bit of complexity that FPS games didn't have at the time. People praise Human Revolution but I find it has about as many flaws as Invisible War if not more so (I highly recommend hbomerguy's video on Human Revolution but you might want to play it first if you haven't already)
Oh, I get why it got that much hate. I just disagree, lol. It's definitely a loooot worse, but it's not a terrible game. Mediocre.