![]() ![]() At first, this might sound like it makes for a bit of a miserable time - the game is undeniably unforgiving, and hoping to brute force your way through a war of attrition will only be met with repeated, crushing failures. That means if you move to the wrong square by mistake, you’re stuck with that decision and any of the consequences that go along with it. There are so many factors to wrap your head around, and so little room for error in fact, unless you turn on the optional “Rewind” ability when you first set up your game, you’re not even allowed to reverse a single one of the choices you make on one of your agents’ turns. Unless you set your game to the easiest difficulty and turn all the settings to their most forgiving numbers, there’s little hope for success your first time out in Invisible, Inc. As you disperse your agents further and further throughout the facility, the map blooms from a single room into a large and often daunting set of passages and rooms - with corners to duck behind, safes to hack and plenty of obstacles to take down or avoid. For example, you can approach a door, but what’s behind it won’t be visible to you until you peek through or actually open it. You move your characters on an isometric map, but how much of that map is visible is determined by where they’re located and what actions you’ve taken. ![]() Things then play out like a combination stealth game and turn-based strategy RPG. Once you’ve picked a facility to infiltrate, the game randomly generates its interior and contents, from the credits and items you can pick up to the guards and security cameras lurking around every corner. Since you’ve only got so much time before you go head-to-head with the corporate Big Bads themselves, it’s obviously important to pick - and complete - missions that give you a better fighting chance.Ĭompleting them, though, is a lot easier said than done. ![]() ![]() From the world map, you can choose to infiltrate a number of dangerous facilities: corporate vaults that net you boatloads of credits to use for helpful items detention centers that hold captive agents to bolster your ranks cybernetics labs, where useful augments can be installed to your agents and nanofab vestibules, which house digital storefronts with much larger selections than the ones you normally find. Outside of the optional tutorial mission, the objectives you want to tackle are really up to you. If that sounds like a stressful proposition, it is - especially when you factor in that any agents killed on your missions will suffer permadeath if not rescued. The corporations that run the world have compromised your headquarters, giving you a limited number of hours (72 in the original build, now customizable) to throw together some equipment and a team to take on the final mission. After setting up some parameters and making you way through a brief tutorial, you’re thrust right into a difficult situation. This is a brief, tense little thrill ride that was built for multiple playthroughs. Console Edition has to offer in the gameplay department, you realize that a focus on narrative would necessitate a fundamental change in the mechanics. It’s not really a bad thing, but since the game got me interested in the cyberpunk world and the people inhabiting it, I did sort of wish there were more to know about them. But when you really get down to it, the main attraction here is the elegant nastiness of the campaign itself, which leaves the dialogue and character interaction to a few quips in between missions. And sure, you’ve got a bunch of agents to take out into the field, each lovingly rendered in amazing pixel art with their own skills and quirks. Yes, there are plenty of characters - most notably Central, the always-present voice in your ear that for some reason reminded me of The Chief in the Carmen Sandiego games (and I mean that in a good way perhaps I just lack points of comparison in this area). Given the impressive style and spectacle of the game’s opening cutscene, I was originally surprised to find it didn’t have much of an emphasis on narrative. ![]()
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