YMMV / Deus Ex: Invisible War

• Angst? What Angst?: Alex isn't surprised when he/she learns that he/she is the same type of clone as JC Denton, the guy who allegedly caused The Collapse at all. He/she also barely registers distress about the fact that his/her family was killed in the Chicago attack, though that is mentioned a couple of times. Even when coming face to face with the people responsible, there is no mention of it being a personal tragedy for Alex.
• Anti-Climax Boss: JC Denton, should you fight him.
• Awesome Music:
  • The Deus Ex: Invisible War Theme took the original and made it even better with a sweet vocal.
  • Any song by N.G. Resonance. Her whole album in the game is even actually take from that of Kidneythieves which is a real band.
• Broken Base: There are those who liked Invisible War and those who pretend that the first game (and for another good portion of these people, the third) was/were the only installment(s) ever made.
• Complete Monster: The seemingly pious Saman is the primary orchestrator of the game's war, as both the leader of an extremist sect of the Order, and secret Grandmaster of The Knights Templar. Believing Her Holiness has been too lenient in pursuing the Luddite beliefs of the Order, Saman converts an army of followers to his cause, seeking to depose her. Under his orders, the Templars commit a series of attacks to exterminate genetically altered beings; to get to an ApostleCorp lab alone, he has the city of Chicago blasted with a nanite detonator, reducing the city to ashes and killing millions of people. He then corrupts Alex's friend Billie into being his loyal foot soldier, to try to kill JC Denton and eventually having Billie and Alex fight to the death. Despite all this, he still tries to manipulate Alex onto his side and will actively try to kill Alex when Alex resists. Saman's ultimate goal is to spread a nanite plague around the world, at which point he would start a genocidal theocracy under his command.
• Contested Sequel: Most agree that Invisible War failed to live up to the original Deus Ex, especially when it comes to scope of the game and its environments which ended up being severely limited by the jump from PC to Xbox. The contested part is whether or not this is still good in its own right.
• Demonic Spiders: Armored Templars if you are going for a Pacifist Run. They can't be knocked out (Doing so will cause them to explode, killing both you and the Templar), are immune to flashbombs, gas grenades, and boltcaster darts, usually have powerful weapons like rocket launchers, and come in large groups. Cloak is necessary to get past these guys if you are going for a no-kill run.
• Disappointing Last Level: There is a certain point where all the plot threads have come together, after which the level design in the remaining couple of levels in the game becomes much less... "immersive", shall we say.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: The Omar.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Spy Drone Biomod, at the highest level, can knock guards unconscious. Combine this with a repair bot, which constantly replenishes your bio-energy, and the Cloak biomod, to make you invisible, and you can secure an entire map from the safety of one room. This is a complete about-face compared to the nigh-uselessness of Spy Drone in the original Deus Ex.
  • Electrostatic Discharge on level 3 turns bots and turrets on your side and disables cameras and laser beams, all just by hitting them with a melee weapon once.
• Genius Bonus:
  • The names of the competing coffee houses Queequeg's and Pequod's both come from Moby-Dick. This not only foreshadows that they are both owned by the same parent company, but is also an unusually oblique instance of Bland-Name Product, as another prominent character in the same novel is named... Starbuck. It should also be noted that Pequod was a possible name for the real coffee chain before the company settled on Starbucks.
  • The John Stuart Mill quote from the Helios ending seems, at first blush, to be saying that the primary work of a human being should be to improve themselves. However the quote is part of an argument against automation, which claims that the more machines that are created to fulfill human functions, the less human people will become. In other words, it's a very harsh rebuke of the player's choices.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The game has Chicago destroyed in a nano-terrorist attack by a member of a fanatical cult in the intro and Seattle is featured as one of the levels in the first half of the game. Cue another Cyber Punk game released exactly a decade later featuring Seattle as its main setting and Chicago being ravaged by an insectoid invasion channeled out of human hosts from a dark occult-like ritual perpetrated by a seemingly innocuous Happyology-like organization.
  • Shadowrun had Chicago being overrun by Insect Spirits as a plot point as far back as 2nd Edition which was released in 1992.
  • As can be seen here, the game was to have giant squidlike sentries for underwater segments. Their design is almost identical with Mass Effect's reapers.
  • An organization that frowns upon technology, wants to destroy all augmented humans for being impure, has Knights and Paladins in its ranks and wears Powered Armor. Are we talking about the Knights Templar or the East Coast Brotherhood of Steel? Add to the fact that their power armor's Achilles' Heel is in the back - just like fusion cores.
• Ho Yay: The Seattle Minister of Culture invites some kind of artist to his apartment, and asks you to be his chamber boy in hopes that you will make it a threesome. This is quest-relevant but not explicit.
• It Was His Sled: Alex D is really Alex Denton.
• Narm:
  • "I just saw a man die", a line from Alex in the first level delivered with a monotone so impressive J.C would be proud. Made even better if they actually only saw the body, but not the death itself.
  • Like in the first game, characters barely move while talking. While it isn't that noticeable in the first game due to its graphics, the more life-like visuals here mean everybody just looks stiff - if their hands weren't hanging down they'd be almost t-posing.
• Nightmare Fuel: The Grey Goo bomb is truly frightening. A device the size of a test tube, and when activated it sends out a geometrically expanding wave of stuff that spreads across entire city blocks in a matter of seconds. After it is done, everything is left looking like it has turned into ash yet still retaining its former shape. It's one step from a Strange Matter apocalypse.
• The Scrappy: The real NG Resonance is this. The holographic one is sociable, friendly and cooperative. The real one is obnoxious and bitchy and, since she's only seen in a single area, has no way of showing any positive traits to her. Many players actually kill her on the spot when they find her because she's just that grating.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The attempt to make the game run better by practically restarting it during every loading screen causes several issues today; for examples, if you have multiple monitors, the resolution changes every loading screen which is extremely immersion breaking (it does change back once the loading is done, so at least settings aren't affected), and steam controller stops working after each time the game loads up a new area (not a huge issue as keyboard and mouse are always available, but trying to play the game on a TV and a sofa is damn awkward.)
  • The "one ammo type for every gun" mechanic. In theory, this would be great because (unlike other FPS games) you no longer have to worry about finding the correct ammo for your guns of choice. In practice, once you're out of ammo for one gun, you're out of ammo for all your guns. Another problem comes from that the UI represents the amount of ammunition in the current clip as a plain unsegmented bar that lowers as you fire. This leaves the player guessing precisely how many shots they can fire.
• Special Effects Failure: A lot of the voice work sounds like the mic used for recording them was faulty. Playing with headphones makes this particularly noticeable.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • While many praised the idea of having no side truly be evil (except the Templars) and the idea of playing for multiple factions, the execution on the other hand....
  • By assigning the anti-augmentation viewpoint to the Templars, who are religious fanatics, the creators immediately prejudiced most rational gamers against that point of view. If that point of view had been espoused by a group of radical environmentalists, on the other hand, it would led to some awesome cognitive dissonance.
• Vindicated by History: When the game was first released, while it got overall positive (if a little lukewarm) reviews from critics, it received a very mixed reaction from the playerbase. Nowadays, most people concede that as a sequel to the original Deus Ex, it falls somewhat flat, but as an RPG on its own merits, it's actually quite good.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: This game came out in 2003, yet in part because of great usage of lighting, the game still looks good over a decade later.

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