If you've heard anything about this game, it's probably that it doesn't work very well. Which is true.
Also, it fucking rocks.
Genuinely, I did not expect to have such a good time with Invisible War, from start to finish. There's a whole second one of these? That feels right? And it's basically not in the conversation?
To be fair, the things that aren't good are pretty, uh, major; they had to design it primarily for the Xbox, which necessitated cutting down on a lot of that PC-game-ass-PC-game fiddly complexity that's key to DX1. Also, it's visually less interesting. Also, a bit janky just generally. Also, prone to glitches like in my case "forcibly alt-tabbing out when I load into a new area and not fixing my resolution when I close it". So, you know, this isn't a "you should run out and play this" post. This is an "I'm sickos and I clicked with it and had a blast" post.
And I really did, from start to finish. The areas are as large and multifacated as ever, with loads of possible approaches. I posted before about one of my favourites--there's a politician whose apartment you're trying to break into, and I initially messed up and broke into the wrong apartment, only to find the occupant is a master thief planning a heist on the same guy, so I knocked him out and just stole his heist plan and did it myself. And even just in that area, you can get into the different rooms by impersonating officials, finding maintenance corridors, bribing staff or getting roped into a gay threeway; and you can even resort to picking locks or throwing bombs, but the more creative approaches don't use your resources.
The other known thing about this game is how it uses an insane mix of all three of DX1's endings as its premise, and that really sets the tone going forward in the best way. It's got plenty of that good good "people spouting philosophical quotes to justify their stance on some cyberpunk shit", but also the way they critique and take down each others' arguments feels very real. For as silly and turn-of-the-millenium-'deep' as it all is it genuinely had me considering whether what I wanted to have my character (Alex, by the way, starts off seeming a bit passive in that game protagonist way, but she gets some real great lines as things progress) do in the moment would actually lead to a large-scale outcome I wanted. And it's full of sentences like "engaging in parasocial mind games with my VR egirl as I try to radicalise her and she tries to gentrify me", or "I have just located JC Denton's secret base in antarctica where the grey aliens from area 51 are helping him in his plan to become the most logged on person in history, and then I went into his dreams and stole a laser sword and took it back to the real world". It's deus ex baybee!!!
While I'm on the story, pleasantly surprised by how well the story of the Tarsus students comes together. It's like a messed-up covert-ops alumni reunion. Oh yeah, Alex is inventing new kinds of identity crisis every time she talks to someone, Leo became the legendary dudebro antifa, Billie is getting really into medieval heresies and ecoterrorism and Klara's inner bimbo finally defeated her inner cop. Class of '72! Would've been much stronger with an additional mission at the start to set up the status quo before the academy gets broken up but I still thought it was quite a strong throughline.
Some of the builds you can do (despite the overall simplified mechanics due to the console focus) are really cool! The distinction between regular and black-market biomods is neat (my reliance on black-market ones meant I got to hang out lots with the Omar, who are super-cute imo), and I've seen builds suggested that let you do things like summon every drone type at once and simply unleash the swarm. As for me, because I'm a sicko, I went for what I call a "melee hacker" build, where I max out speed/strength/EMP-discharge and zip around at lightspeed with an energy sword. Level 3 EMP discharge lets you hit a bot or turret in melee and instantly hack it to turn it on your other enemies. I gleefully refer to this as the Malware Sword.
The final level is also very fun because it just drops you on an island with all the faction leaders (note: there are no invincible NPCs in this game) and goes "do as thou wilt". Which is kind of an extension of the way there's a lot of areas that can be friendly bases or hostile fortresses depending on whose missions to mess up the other faction's base you accept (or if you're really careful about it, you can mess them up subtly enough to keep them all friendly). Anyway, a criticism I'd had was that the midpoint of the game loads you up with way too many health and energy restoring items, so that I was always carrying full stacks of both, but the last level sure made me use basically all of them, with large groups of enemies that are tough in honestly pretty interesting ways once you've figured out how they work.
Again, all of this is just my experience, and there's definitely something wrong with me. But I had such a good time with Invisible War and I'm already excited to replay it to take some entirely different approaches. Genuinely loved it.
