In 2000, Ion Storm came out with the ground breaking Deus Ex, a first-person shooter with RPG elements. It had a storyline that was influenced by the player's decisions, and situations that could be solved in different ways.

It has now been a few years since the original Deus Ex hit the scene, and gaming has made some major strides. With successful games like Knights of the Old Republic on the market, it seems clear that gamers want to have direct influence on how their games turn out. The challenge for Ion Storm is to create a game that is just as dynamic as their original, while upping the ante to match or surpass the competition. In this respect, Deus Ex: Invisible War just about fits the bill.

The story takes place twenty years after the original game. The world is just recovering from a worldwide depression known as "The Collapse," which was precipitated by events that occurred in the first game. Earth's environment has been all but ruined, the world economy is a wreck, and the division between the rich and poor is wider than ever. In other words, the time is ripe for someone to sweep in and seize power. Your character plays a critical role in deciding who control the planet.

The game opens with a terrorist using a nanotech weapon to wipe out the entire city of Chicago. You play Alex D., a student at the Tarsus Academy, a military school where the students are biologically modified. The terrorist attack, seemingly aimed at your school, forces an emergency evacuation, and you're helicoptered to Seattle before you know what's happening. Unfortunately, soon the Seattle branch of Tarsus is attacked, and from then on, it is up to you to uncover all the lies, choose which side you want to work for, and shape the game.

There are four major organizations fighting for global control. The WTO is a militaristic force seeking to restore a strong economy through tight control over market prices. The Order offers spiritual balance and enlightenment to the masses, and is viewed as a cult. The Templars are fundamentalists who abhor biomodification and seek to return to "pure human" roots. Finally, there is ApostleCorp, the force behind Tarsus Academy, that has its own mysterious motives. All of them want you to play for their side. It is up to you to decide which faction you would like to promote. You can also try to play one side against the other, or choose to support no one. You have the option to support or betray anybody you want throughout the entire game.

Deus Ex is all about choices, and Invisible War offers plenty of them. Before the game starts, the player will be able to choose Alex's gender and skin tone. This seemingly simple decision, playing as a man or woman, actually influences how some of the side missions turn out for you. With every decision, some doors are opened and others are closed. This is a key theme of the game, and it works out very well in most cases. Should I run inside and shoot everything in sight? Should sneak through one of those ubiquitous air vents (all conveniently large enough for a person to crawl through) and bypass dealing with people altogether? These same decisions were in the first game (complete with air vents), but things have obviously been taken up one notch here.

The graphics have also been "upped"; characters are excellently put together, and practically everything in the game world can be picked up or destroyed. But remember, for every decision there is a consequence. For Invisible War, the cost for having a detailed, complex world means taking a significant performance hit, and the game has trouble operating on even the most powerful computers. Many of the major performance and interface issues were resolved after installing the 1.1 patch, but there are still problems. It got to the point where I began to really hate playing the game because it was impossible for me to aim straight. On a whim, I decided to set the game's resolution down on notch... and behold, it was as though I had passed through a magic barrier. At 800x600, the game runs perfectly, even with all other settings at maximum. However, I was still a frequent victim to annoying graphics glitches, slight choppiness in large rooms, and game crashes. The important thing is, though, after getting this game to run smoothly, I was able to sit back and truly enjoy playing.

The two most important things in the game are subject to modification: You and your weapons, both of which are very easy to do. You'll generally find both standard and black market biomod canisters hidden or locked away in various places. There are five areas of your body that can be modified, each with three possible upgrades - two normal, one black market. Only one mod may be installed into an area at a time. I was disappointed by the lack of selection at first, but soon realized that the biomods offered a broad number of abilites, and some great combinations Unfortunately, the ammunition system needs a lot of getting used to. In a future with nanotechnology, ammunition has all become standardized. Pick up an ammo clip and the nanomachines will conform it to whatever weapon you are holding, meaning that the same ammo that drives your pistol is the same that goes into your flamethrower. The only thing that needs to be taken into account is how much ammunition each weapon uses. Very cute, but a universal ammunition detracts from the game. Though it does force ingenuity, there's no last ditch effort like in most other first person shooters, where a player ditches a depleted rocket launcher for a dinky pistol to finish the job. Run out of bullets for one, run out of bullets for all, and I'm forced to run up to them with my hunting knife. As one might guess, melee weapons are pretty useless against enemies who wear power armor.

Then again, I remember marveling at the fact that someone was able to play through the original Deus Ex without having to kill anyone. This is certainly true of Invisible War, and can be done much more easily, even though there are only a handful of non-lethal weapons. Unfortunately, they don't seem to matter. In the first game, people responded to you differently if there was a high body count. In Invisible War, it seemed like I could kill every man, woman, and child in the city and it wouldn't matter. I made it a point to kill every Templar I came across, but nonetheless, their leader persisted in trying to recruit me. The developers have make it clear that there is no wrong way to play this game, and no decisions are judged, but this notion might have been taken a little overboard.

Some of the AI responses seem pretty stupid. Enemies don't appear to be very good at fighting, and will generally stand in place to shoot you. They won't duck behind cover or retreat. When you kill an elite soldier and toxic gas spews from his corpse, some characters will run in to the hazardous cloud. Lastly, random corpses don't appear to bother anyone for any prolonged period of time. You can leave bodies strewn all over the place, and only on a few occasions will it matter. You can walk around armed with your weapon and no one will bat an eye. Stun someone in the next room, and they sit up and notice. Incidentally, if someone could explain to me how someone in a hallway, across a large room, behind a locked door, can hear me zapping someone with a stun prod inside a noisy nightclub, I would love to hear it.

The attention to detail is obvious, and much has been done to link Invisible War to the original Deus Ex, from the complex plot to returning to Ellis Island and the now-ruined UNATCO facility. The Statue of Liberty, as many will remember, was destroyed by a terrorist attack in the first game has been replaced by a gigantic hologram. Even the multitools, which were high-tech lock-picks from the previous game, make a comeback. They look better, but perform the exact same function.

Invisible War is an excellent sequel to Deus Ex, as long as you are willing to look past the buggy programming. There's a gem here, you just have to dig through a lot of rock to get to it! While there are instances where having multiple solutions will make the game too easy. Instead of hunting for a key or using a multitool, I could set and explosive to break down a door. Also, I noticed that there weren't any characters to attach to. In the first game, there were some people I felt I could trust, like JD's brother Paul. In Invisible War, there is a persistent feeling that everyone is lying to you, or trying to exploit you... and they are.