Deus Ex: Invisible War, the demo
Nov. 21st, 2003 07:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
solipsistnationOkay, I just finished the demo for Deus Ex: Invisible War (AKA Deus Ex 2).
It's not bad. It's got a reasonable approximation of the feel of the first game, which is nice, including the usual round of people appearing in little fuzzy video screens in your head and telling you what they want you to do. Lots of nicely interactive world-stuff to play around with, and, it looks like, a couple of different ways to go about the goal in the demo.
The demo consists of two locations, The Greasel Pit, a bar and horrible-sewer-critter-fighting-pit, and an apartment building with an attached helipad. Yeah, I know, modern convenience is great.
Once again, the protagonist must acquire a pilot, and in this case it's somebody with what sounds vaguely like an Australian accent who needs his original employer off his back so he can get his Harrier jump jet back.
Here's where the options come in. The player has a few options for reaching this goal-- steal the cash, bet on greasel fights, or just go in, shoot all the guards and the crime-boss employer, and take care of the debt that way. When betting on the fights, there are even neat things to do: get hired to go kill the reigning champion, and the fight is as good as won, plus you get a bonus from the trainer of the new winner.
The graphics are lovely, as we've come to expect from a current generation 3D game, although some objects have a surprisingly low polygon count-- barrels, for example, are a little blockier than one would expect. People look pretty good, though, and the locations are nicely detailed, with bump-mapping lending everything a sort of extra-squishy appearance. The Havok.com physics engine is put to good use, and there are lots of things to play with and move around and throw.
The interface, though, makes it all very annoying.
The game's interface, rather than following the pattern of the first game and giving the player a pop-up inventory screen and putting little displays in the corners of the screen, instead shows all status in curving semicircles arrayed around the center of the display. Unfortunately, these curves are WAY too small, and the end result is like looking down a little round tunnel at the game action. Sure, the area outside the semicircles is used, and stuff is rendered outside it, but the circle provides such a strong visual cue of a boundary that it's hard to train the subconscious to treat that space outside the circle as actual screen space. I played the game with an uncomfortable claustrophobic feeling, as if I were playing, say, Doom on a really slow system and had turned the screen size down to postcard-size in order to get it to render properly, or as if I were looking out of a pipe at everything in front of me.
I'm not sure how well I'll be able to get used to that. I could just turn the interface opacity way down, but that's kind of weird and distracting.
I'm about to try it again, and play it through as a total shooter and see how it works. That should be interesting, and I'll see if I get any more used to the tiny interface circle after a few more minutes of gameplay. For now, though, it's REALLY annoying.
Oh, and the demo doesn't save the screen settings, which is very annoying as well.
It's not bad. It's got a reasonable approximation of the feel of the first game, which is nice, including the usual round of people appearing in little fuzzy video screens in your head and telling you what they want you to do. Lots of nicely interactive world-stuff to play around with, and, it looks like, a couple of different ways to go about the goal in the demo.
The demo consists of two locations, The Greasel Pit, a bar and horrible-sewer-critter-fighting-pit, and an apartment building with an attached helipad. Yeah, I know, modern convenience is great.
Once again, the protagonist must acquire a pilot, and in this case it's somebody with what sounds vaguely like an Australian accent who needs his original employer off his back so he can get his Harrier jump jet back.
Here's where the options come in. The player has a few options for reaching this goal-- steal the cash, bet on greasel fights, or just go in, shoot all the guards and the crime-boss employer, and take care of the debt that way. When betting on the fights, there are even neat things to do: get hired to go kill the reigning champion, and the fight is as good as won, plus you get a bonus from the trainer of the new winner.
The graphics are lovely, as we've come to expect from a current generation 3D game, although some objects have a surprisingly low polygon count-- barrels, for example, are a little blockier than one would expect. People look pretty good, though, and the locations are nicely detailed, with bump-mapping lending everything a sort of extra-squishy appearance. The Havok.com physics engine is put to good use, and there are lots of things to play with and move around and throw.
The interface, though, makes it all very annoying.
The game's interface, rather than following the pattern of the first game and giving the player a pop-up inventory screen and putting little displays in the corners of the screen, instead shows all status in curving semicircles arrayed around the center of the display. Unfortunately, these curves are WAY too small, and the end result is like looking down a little round tunnel at the game action. Sure, the area outside the semicircles is used, and stuff is rendered outside it, but the circle provides such a strong visual cue of a boundary that it's hard to train the subconscious to treat that space outside the circle as actual screen space. I played the game with an uncomfortable claustrophobic feeling, as if I were playing, say, Doom on a really slow system and had turned the screen size down to postcard-size in order to get it to render properly, or as if I were looking out of a pipe at everything in front of me.
I'm not sure how well I'll be able to get used to that. I could just turn the interface opacity way down, but that's kind of weird and distracting.
I'm about to try it again, and play it through as a total shooter and see how it works. That should be interesting, and I'll see if I get any more used to the tiny interface circle after a few more minutes of gameplay. For now, though, it's REALLY annoying.
Oh, and the demo doesn't save the screen settings, which is very annoying as well.