The Most Disappointing Video Game Sequels Ever – Part 7 of 8
Deus Ex: Invisible War
There are sequels on this list that failed because they crumbled under the weight of their own ambition, the scope of their grand dream ultimately crippling them (like MGS3). There are sequels on this list that failed because of outright laziness in story and character development (like KOTORII). There are sequels on this list that failed because the developers were deliberately trying to sabotage their own creation (like Devil May Cry 3…and possibly MGS3). There are sequels on this list that failed because the game was so hideously ugly to look at that even if it had a great personality, it would be impossible to tell because most gamers just can’t get over the fact that the game has a harelip, a hunchback, and an extremely unfortunate skin condition (like Wind Waker).
Then there is Deus Ex: Invisible War, a game for which the developers at Eidos deserve to be on trial for crimes against humanity.
I’m going to come out and say right now that even though this list is not in any way ranked (because then I would be obliged to make the list conform to some arbitrarily numbered format, like The Top Ten or The Top Five, and fuck that noise), if it were, Deus Ex: Invisible War would be first. It’s not just a terrible sequel; it’s legitimately one of the most horrendous games ever made.
What made it so awful is the fact that the first game was unequivocally brilliant, quite possibly the most unique and well-crafted game of its generation, for any platform, the Portal of its time. The fact that it managed to pull this off while also being a first-person-shooter is doubly incredible, since in lieu of original thought, most FPS developers simply decide to build another “shoot man in head make face go boom” clone of everything that came before it. Deus Ex was, more than anything else, different. It managed to blend elements of fast-paced FPS gameplay, intuitive and well-constructed stealth sequences, and a surprisingly involving RPG element pertaining to the character’s skills and bionic augmentations. You had a wide variety of options to solve nearly every obstacle you faced; it was the incredibly rare sort of game where Player Choice wasn’t just a buzzword. It was pretty much the game Peter Molyneux’s been trying to make for the last seven years, only if it was made by someone far less incompetent than Peter Molyneux. The player’s combat style could, through specialization, range from picking enemies off at range with a sniper rifle, to mowing them down with assault weapons, to carrying a giant rocket launcher, to specializing in stealth takedowns with the crossbow, to rushing enemies and beating them to death with a laser sword (it’s worth commenting that any involvement or iteration of the phrase “laser sword” automatically increases the quality of a game by about triple). The fact that this was a game that allowed the player to jump twenty feet into the air, become invisible, and have flashlight eyes didn’t exactly hurt.
Yeah, maybe the graphics weren’t exactly spectacular, but they weren’t awful, and if I have to sacrifice some pretty pictures in the name of fantastic gameplay and a killer story, I’m perfectly happy to do so…and if you aren’t, you’re the sort of knuckle-dragging three-toed ar-tard that deserved the likes of MGS3 and both of the first two Halo sequels. The point is, the first Deus Ex was good enough that you can replay it now and still love the hell out of it.
But I’m completely convinced the makers of Deus Ex: Invisible War were on a heroin binge, because that’s the only explanation I can come up with for the tragedy they inflicted on such a wonder of creative and intelligent game design. The only other one (which is more likely, but a lot less fun) I can think of is that company executives at Eidos saw that the first game hadn’t been particularly popular in the mainstream (for more on this, see my next article series, “Games You Bastards Never Played, Goddamn You”), but had a rabid cult following. They thus hatched an insidious plan to create the most insipid and unoriginal mainstream FPS-clone they could to attract a mainstream audience, only they attached the Deus Ex name to it to ensure that the first game’s small but potent group of fanboys stayed onboard. Then they rushed it through production like a racehorse on amphetamines.
This had an interesting effect. Normally, when a game gets rushed through production and doesn’t receive proper playtesting, it winds up possessed of innumerable bugs and glitches. That didn’t quite happen with Deus Ex: Invisible War. See, in order to have a game that involves lots of bugs and glitches, the game must also involve aspects of it that aren’t glitched or bugged. The game was effectively just one gigantic glitch, straining and crying for someone to kill it like a nightmarish genetics experiment gone horribly wrong. What I’m trying to say is that the lead developer of Deus Ex: Invisible War was Dr. Moreau.
There’s really no adequate way to list the things that are wrong with this game. You have to start by saying, “Everything,” and then work your way backwards from there. And the conversation just gets so depressing you don’t want to continue after five minutes. That’s the most appropriate word for the game: depressing. Speaking of which, I’d write more, but at the moment I find myself parched, and there’s a bottle of Drain-O with my name on it.
