one of gaming's all-time great punchlines is how this is, to this day, one of the most technically fraught and unstable games ever made, chugging and stuttering on computers made nearly 20 years after it's release, where the game will, at every loading screen crash and then reload itself in the new area just to keep the memory leak from crashing your whole PC, and then you see the majesty, the sheer ambition of Downtown Seattle that this game struggles so hard to render...is like three rooms where if you look at a lightbulb the framerate is halved. genuine comedy gold.

only other real reason to play this is to witness how The Bush Years hit Deus Ex so hard. any semblance of rebellion or hope from the original's world has been stripped away completely, Alex D is a remorseless gun for hire without any of the charm of JC Denton, well-meaning terrorists like Tracer Tong from the original are suddenly apologetic state actors utterly condemnatory about their past dreams of a world free from the yoke of megacorps and fascism, and where any path not based in the perpetuity of the american empire will lead to the actual destruction of humanity. either With Us or Against Us indeed. the possibility for subversion, either narratively or experientially, is crushed underfoot by this contrition to the status quo and the obscenely narrow level design. as a game about Choice and Consequence and Freedom it's a disaster, but as a game about the lack of those things, about living in Francis Fukuyama's End of History? Invisible War can only be called a tremendous success.

don't know if i would call this a good game, exactly, but it is a deeply fascinating one. i think the ideology it espouses is truly evil but as a game design object I have to recognize the care and attention to which the game goes about communicating it. each deus ex game is a fascinating time capsule of the moment in which it was made, for good and ill, and this one is maybe the most unhinged and weird of them all. would love to give it a full proper replay to pick over it in greater detail but that would require it not crashing my computer every 25 minu-

Reviewed on Mar 20, 2022


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