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Thanks for fixing the viewmodel.. I find, especially on older games, and ESPECIALLY on older console ports that the default 4x3 fov ends up doing double damage at 16x9 (Unreal being one of the worst offenders) with not only decreasing your view window, but also cutting off the viewmodel to something that while often bad by default is now so far removed from looking like you were holding a weapon... It's actually uncommon for that last part... as in one hand counting would be generous, and yet, you sir are on that much appreciated hand with this video! (first one I'm pretty sure for this game to boot) It's always a little heartbreaking when people who run these retrospective channels think they have solved some complex technical struggle in getting the aspect ratio for older titles, but don't even notice they cut off half the viewmodel. For the games that had it trash to start with, it's less of a thing... but it is kinda unfair to the original devs, especially with games like og half-life where they put alotta effort into that aspect (outside of the magnum... no idea wtf was up with that one) That said though, it's legit scary at how many folks think that actual wide screen effect is solved and acceptable... and then putting footage out of 4x3 stretched like it's an old folks home... So again, thank you.
@jussy1287 You are absolutely right. When Invisible War was released I was a huge fan of the firsf DE already, and nevertheless loved IW on first sight. I hsve the impression that this YTer read somewhere that the 2nd Deus Ex was disappointing, and just didn't check that IW is the 3rd part. 😁
For some reason I vividly remember one of the times I had this thought (walking on my own past my old school's netball court at the end of the day), but there was a time when I genuinely couldn't conceive of a game looking better than the screenshots of Deus Ex: Invisible War I'd pored over in an issue of PC Gamer
I’d still say it has a cool stylized aesthetic for the time it came out. This is still pre Half Life 2 and Chronicles of Riddick. I love the level of detail we have now, but that period was great for games having an instantly recognizable aesthetic.
I rember a screenshot of a room with a lightbulb in a gaming magazine and how the journalist wrote about how it was real time lighting and shadows that moved as the lightbulb dangled around ... It's amazing!
I still learn something new every playthrough. I visited the basement of the order mosque while the nanite swell was still around. There were people incapacitated by it. I accidently turned on my Health Leech Drone when nearby them and consumed them. No one would talk to me to further quests after that.
You're brave playing this beyond 1x. Then again I've played the Starship Troopers Marauder FPS multiple times, and it's objectively a dumpster fire sooo I can't judge :)
@Trinity Prime I'm a huge starship troopers nerd (Heck I even enjoyed the original controversial book to some extent). But yes, that game is... objectively bad by most metrics and some levels require you to employ copious amount of cheese to pass, but yes I did enjoy it multiple times
I do have a strange appreciation for Invisible War. It got me interested in a genre that I otherwise wouldn't have known existed, and of course lead me to the original game.
I wish there was an SDK. I mean look at Thief 3 - community fixed it to high heavens and back, making it one of the best stealth games ever created. Deus Ex 2 could be fixed, it's not fundamentally broken, it is still Deus Ex through and through.
@@chillyapples4401 because SDK's are built for the game specifically. The Thief 3 Editor will only work with Thief 3 files. They're still running on the same tech though. They COULD have given us an SDK, but they didn't for whatever reason. My guess is at the time Deus Ex wasn't known for it's mod community like Thief was, which had editors for each game in the series prior
I enjoyed it and played through a lot, it's definitely not as good as the OG Deus Ex but it stands as a quite decent game and on it's time, the graphics were really impressive and before Splinter Cell this was the first time I've ever saw dynamic lights and shadows on a videogame and before HL2 it was the first time i saw realistic physics, tough the universal ammo was one of the worst ideas ever made for a game and it has way too many loadscreens, but except for that it's a solid DEx experience, in my opinion.
Yeah wasn't as great as the original but it had it's moments. Some of them I still remember decades later, like how I was able to assasinate one of the faction leaders that double crossed me earlier. And that wasn't a mission or anything like that - it was just an opportunity and I took advantage of it. In my playthrough and "my story" that was a really significat thing for how it made me feel back then.
The original was one of the greatest games ever made and it helped changed the industry forever. The 2nd if you take it on its own merits was a good game which looked stunning back in the day. I loved this when I first played it back 20 years ago. However it didn't leave me with the Holy fk feeling of the original. It also lacked the wonderful Alexander Brandon soundtrack of the original.
NG Resonance is the best part of Invisible War. Her, "I am Surveillance society" existence is SO good. It speaks of what we have now. With Chat GPT and in lesser ways, things like Alexa and Google Assistant. And the Conservation with Helios is also really good. There's NO good Conversations in Human Revolution/Mankind Divided.
I can't even tell you how many comments I received back then, guess why... Anyway, I love this game. I play it at least once or twice a year. It's one of my classics, along with Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2, Witcher, Morrowind, Oblivion, and Mass Effect. Even recently, I commented on someone's RU-vid channel who makes videos about KOTOR, saying that I didn't know you could use stealth to that extent in this game. He replied, 'Really? I thought Alex D knew a lot about stealth ' 😂
Disappointing sequel? No arguments there. Still a good game? Most definitely, just not up to the lofty heights of the original. Consolification caused it as mentioned, the lowest common denominator was the Xbox classic, at best a weak pc of the time.
Game is quite good. Trying to follow up on perfection is actually impossible, honestly, unless they had given you more of the same, then people from nowadays would say it looks like a dlc. They took risks by trying a different approach, and for that i give them credit.
This game on the OG Xbox was my very first "I'm sim." I know it's not as good as the first but it holds a special place in my heart. I did ot have a PC until I was well into my late 20s so I never got to play all those amazing PC exclusive games back then. I could only watch xplay and drool over what I knew I could not have. Same reason I still love thief 3. Another game that was "consolized." I will always love the first Xbox because it allowed me to have a taste of what was going on in the PC side of gaming.
@@oh-not-the-bees7872 the safe route would be to keep everything the same, like go for a prequel and not advance the story. It is definitely "consolized", but there is no way a sequel would live up for expectations, as there are a series of circunstances that led the first game to be as good as it is. Lightning in a bottle, as they call it. Whatever sequel they made was doomed to be in the shadow of the first game, one way or another.
@@Rihcterwilker see you're just loading everything with so many logical fallacies. Just because the game before was great doesn't mean they are predestined to fail in an attempt at a sequel. Lightning in a bottle is not what you're referring to, what you're referring to is the idea of "the sequel curse." It is not, and absolutely should not be something used to justify why a game is mediocre, or to grade any part of the experience. Criticism is pointless if every work is precluded by "well the previous game was so good we need to forgive this games short comings as if the first was so good they shouldn't even try because no matter what they do it'll just be worse than the thing before." Get the hell outta here with that nonsense. Any sequel is in the shadow of its previous title, that's called being a SEQUEL. Things are not the way they are because of pretense, they are the way they are in this game because people made decisions, JUST like the first game. Game development is not some ethereal and nebulous game of fishing in a pool of what came before, it's a business where people make decisions. The game COULD HAVE and SHOULD HAVE been better than it was, end of story.
I completely disagree! ..this game was and is the most atmospheric game i ever played. i still get goosebumps from the menu soundtrack, the sounds in this game are fantastic. the gameplay is also great, whatever you do, everything has consequences, you can upgrade your body. and our german dub is soooo much better than the original :)
This game is memorable for me for one reason: It's the first game I played that used Havok ragdoll physics. It felt really futuristic at the time 20 years ago to be able to pick up objects and corpses and see them bounce off things and skitter across the floor.
This was my first deus ex game. Brings back memories of my formative years. My brother built an epic lan room and we would hang out and game. I just finished high school and was figuring out who I wanted to be. I’m pretty sure I had my first monster energy drink playing this game too. I always think of it when I drink one. It’s got nothing on the others but It has a special place in my memory’s.
What's odd is going for a console focus, but then releasing it on XBOX only! I did buy it for PC (played both PC and PS2 Deus Ex to death; PC one was buggy but more to it, PS2 was more reliable but cut down) but it kept crashing. It wasn't until a patch was released nearly a decade later that I played DX2:IW all the way through--it still crashed about 5 times during the whole thing, but much better than every 5 seconds!
I loved the first game. I was excited to play the second, but I couldn't make it past a few minutes. The game never worked right on my computer. After I got a new one years later I dug the game back out and it was just as bugged out and broken.
I love the game, for 1 simple reason - It's the first Deus Ex I ever played. And to be honest, I got it the best - The original is better, so, playing it after playing invisible war, was actually a step-up experience, and it was very rewarding seeing those characters in their past form, and seeing where they progressed in the future, it felt good. I also had the odd luxury of fully playing the games in a prequal order - IW, TC, HR (Didn't play MD). I appreciate IW for what it is, it's dumbed down, but a very simple introduction to the world, it has various minor charming memorable moments, and I love it. It's bad to play it after playing the original. It's perfect to play it before the original.
Deus Ex: Invisible War had the uncommon curse of a game sequel trying to live up to the original. Thankfully Human Revolution and Mankind Divided was fun in my opinion.
So I remember this one sci-fi series where this, I want to say modern ish dude was transported back to like 40s alternate history thingy or another but there was a hyper advance group of folk... and they had a gun that when the guy ran out of ammo.. the solution basically was to shove a bunch of cereal into the drawer for the ammunition, and it would basically extract the necessary minerals out of the cereal which.. I mean.. cool idea and all but we're measuring in micrograms it's a stretch but either way.. it was a perfectly reasonable solution for universal ammo in the universe and it was cool.. and it works in a book where ammo management isn't necessarily a primary thing you know.. where you're not gatekeeping things like a rocket launcher and balancing it with a limited ammo pool.. also this wasn't even doing that it was just making regular bullets for a space gun.. I don't know why that just came into my head and I figured I'd write it down, but the animal thing isn't what bothered me about this at all like it gets weird.. it feels weird.. But.. I would take universal ammo all day if I could still lean left and right or had some basic mechanical autonomy like even close to what the original had LOL, and I'd probably give like organs to have the amount of control that you had in the original system shock LOL.. but that kind of goes for any game.. once you start adding those things back into a game with proper controls for it oh my gosh it makes so much fun and it's so sad that we'll never see it...
Been playing Deus Ex since 2001, and I've never understood the hate of Invisible War. Yes, its a shadow of the original, but the original was in my opinion the best game ever made back in 2001, and it still is today, so the bar is already set as high as possible. I really dislike the console-ification of it, and I think if it was PC-only release the game would have been better for it, but ultimately in the several times I've played it, I still found it an engaging and enjoyable experience. If you had asked me 10 years ago if Human Revolution was better than Invisible War I would have said yes, but in the past couple of years I've changed my mind. I think that Invisible War is the only other *Deus Ex* game that captured the feel and aesthetic and theme of the original. Human Revolution might be a better game, but Invisible War is a better Deus Ex game. HR and MD don't capture the original game nearly at all, and I've become increasingly disillusioned with them over the years. And my problems with HR and MD have made Invisible War stand out more and more to me over the years as the only other game that even remotely captured the original. HR and MD are cyberpunk games, and Deus Ex was never cyberpunk, like Ghost in the Shell, it is Post-Cyberpunk, and were more grounded and realistic for it. IW continues that post-cyberpunk trend. A very niche genre that has few representatives.
I actually didn't even know Trump showed up in east Palestine.. it's a shame those people don't know the type of thing that caused that entire accident..😢
Your pronunciation of "Deus Ex" is downright adorable. You're trying, almost there! It almost sounds like you're pronouncing it around a mouthful of taffy. Great review tho!
Another person repeating this nonsense about "consolization" of this crap. What does that even mean? Xbox couldn't technically cope, but a much weaker PS2, have a nice port of the first Deus Ex, with improved graphics and two aiming modes? Propably Microsoft wanted "his" Deus Ex, for idiots who were beyond anything other than shooting = whole genesis about creation of the Invisible War. Ok - we shoud add to this problems with the engine and the emphasis on a quick release of the game. To this day, we have many people who like this crap.. because they played it, as a child.
Looks like this review was heavily influenced by the one Ross Scott (Accursed Farms) did :) Yeah, this game has plenty of plot holes (such as that "Aquinas Protocol Specifications" being stored in a strange location for 20 years), but it still did a good job in terms of keeping an interest to the ideas of the original game - and its lore of course - alive.
Kind of unrelated but the same thing happened to crysis 2 imo. It was a downgrade in every way because of consoles. Unfortunately you can't say this without being called a PC supremacist lol.
I wholly understand Invisible War's reputation of being an absolute downgrade to the series' scale and direction. But I really can't hate it, for it's my entrypoint game for the series.
I remember having a copy of this game way back in the day when I was a kid, but I never played it. My PC at that time was too shit for it, I couldn't get it to run.
IW will always have a soft spot in my heart never would have gotten into Deus Ex if my dad didnt give me his xbox with IW and i loved it and had a lot of fun with it, 9 year old me was too stupid to figure out the first game and i dont think i made it past more than the training mission at the time
o thought it was good me the bad ending is very sad with the omar and ya mate who gets forced into been one and the girl who loved the WTO but they killed her i thought it was a good game me
Why make a video about the game only to then not accurately represent the game? I don't know why people keep using texture packs and whatnot when reviewing games. That's not what the game originally looked like. You're talking about Invisible War, not some modder's interpretation, so showcase Invisible War.
What is your dumbass complaining about? He is representing the game. He is using a texture pack and there is nothing wrong with that. People will still be able to tell what game it is. You're acting like this dude is reviewing skyrim and his gameplay footage has 1000+ mods and is completely unrecognizable from the original game. Seriously dude, grow the fuck up.
I remember getting this and Thief Deadly Shadows on original Xbox. Dang shame Xbox didn't get a port of the original Deus Ex. Oh Xbox could've handled it better than PS2. Look at Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Tides of War compared to the PS2 port, Xbox wins that match. Soldier of Fortune on console pulled this too. You got a good port of the original on PS2, but not Xbox. Xbox got a port of Soldier of Fortune 2, but not PS2 lol.
I remember being so excited for this game and then was so disappo8ed. Seemed so linear and just bland back then. Haven't revisted this game since launch.
Fallout New Vegas was a huge victim of consolization too, yet it miraculously turned out as good as it did despite all that had to be cut and gimped to fit it on consoles.
I think that 'consolization' (while definitely partially responsible) gets a little too much blame for this game's flaws. There was some behind the scenes drama at Ion Storm that doesn't get talked about much. The 'Flesh Engine' (the modified version of Unreal 2 that this game and Thief 3 run on) was extremely unfinished when Ion Storm was developing their final two games. From my understanding, the engine's lead engineer either left the studio, or was laid off (probably when the Dallas office closed), and left no documentation on the engine's use or code, leaving the remaining employees to develop two games on an unfinished, half broken engine that they didn't know how to fix due to lack of documentation. This was probably far more responsible for the vast majority of technical issues (like the reduction in level size, and constant loading screens). A tangible example of this really bearing the blame would actually be an example cited in this video: the lack of swimming in Invisible War (and Deadly Shadows). Unreal 2's default water shader was removed in favor of an in-house one. Then, before the in-house shader was finished, that aforementioned engineer left, and the remaining team didn't know how to finish it because they didn't have documentation, so swimming was next to impossible to implement. There definitely were parts of Invisible War's design that were ill informed, and I'm certain that the original Xbox's laughable memory limitations didn't help, but a lot of Invisible War's issues (and frankly ones that are shared with Deadly Shadows) are probably more due to the engine being unfinished & broken.
We should remember that the weaker PS2 got a very nice port of the first Deus, with two shooting modes and improved graphics. This version finally allows more and looks better than IW...
