I really wanted to like Invisible Inc. The positive reviews, the cool art style, and it being turn-based tactics which is one of my favorite genres, AND stealth which is another favorite genre of mine - made it seem like this would be right up my alley. Sadly, the game severely failed to meet my expectations, and even though the 4 hours I spent with it were somewhat enjoyable, I can't in good conscience recommend it.
A detailed, spoiler free description of my experience:
The game started off by immediately throwing me into the action, with a tutorial mission right out of the gate, which was fun and easy to follow. Once that was over, the game prompted me choose a difficulty - Beginner, Experienced, or Expert. As I tend to go for the medium difficulty on first playthroughs, I went for Experienced - but then was warned by the game that this is for people who have played this game before - not just games like it - and if this is my first ever time playing it, the intended first-time experience is to play Beginner. So I thought, fine, I guess they know what they're saying. I'll play beginner.
I'm glad I did, because honestly, I think that otherwise, I would have probably quit halfway through the campaign. You might be thinking "wait, you didn't? You've only played 4 hours" - Yup, that's how long it took to beat the campaign. It's actually extremely short - you have 72 in-world hours before the final mission triggers, and traveling to-and-from missions takes 6-12 hours, so you only get a few of them in before the final mission is forced on you. The missions themselves are very short as well, as they are on a timer and you have a limited number of turns to complete them. As such, I got to see the whole story and finish the game in 1 evening.
Now, the missions themselves...
Here's the thing. The base mechanics, I thought, were mostly great. No dice or random percentages to your attacks, stealth and hacking were interconnected in a cool way that made both mechanics compliment each other, and having to balance speed with stealth was interesting and tension inducing.
But, at every single point, the level design just bugged the hell out of me. Levels are completely randomized - just a set of rooms connected to each other with various guards, cameras, and other devices. One of them has your objective.
Now, unless you've done a certain type of mission before and know what to expect - you don't actually know what your objective is. You're basically playing spies dropped behind enemy lines with 0 intel. What does the objective look like? What general direction is it in? What does it do? The game doesn't tell you this. Going through a level basically just becomes bumbling aimlessly through the building, interacting with everything that is interactable, until one of them suddenly marks the objective as complete.
To make things worse, due to the random nature of the mission layout, the difficulty feels really imbalanced. You might get a level that's very linear, leading you directly to your objective, or you might get one that's a complete maze and you have to guess right. You might find your objective almost immediately and have the exit teleporter right next to it, making the level a joke, or you might have to check every inch before you find it, with enemy security growing on every round, and the exit teleporter is on the furthest possible point from it. Thankfully, on the easiest difficulty, this was always manageable and I never failed a mission - otherwise I probably would have just quit.
The levels also started feeling quite repetitive after a while. Every mission type is exactly the same, really. Bumble around, find the thing, interact with the thing, leave. Sometimes it's a safe, sometimes a computer, sometimes a nano-fabricator, and a bunch of other things. But whatever it is, it all plays exactly the same. It's also worth mentioning that some missions have prerequisites (for example, to get into a safe you need a specific key card you can only get from another mission), but the game doesn't tell you this. You get all the way to the safe and you're like "wait, where the f*ck do I get a key card?"
The rewards for missions don't feel like they really matter that much. You get some money, some gear, some augments. Yeah it buffs your team a little, but it doesn't really feel like you're really making progress. The story, basically, tells you - every time you start a mission, it helps us find our target. It doesn't matter if you finish the mission. Start it and immediately teleport out, and you still progress through the story - because the objectives don't actually matter. That just feels... strange.
The whole story was utterly disappointing, really. The world-building felt lazy, the cyberpunk themes were extremely shallow, the characters were just emotionless talking heads providing you with exposition between missions, and the ending... oof. I rolled my eyes so hard at the ending. Such lazy, generic, formulaic trash. At one point I thought - maybe this isn't the TRUE ending, maybe that's just the "beginner" ending - and this actually sets the starting point for the Experienced campaign. Maybe that's why the game insisted I should play Beginner first. That would have been cool, and I was really hoping that's the case.
Alas, when I tried to start Experienced after finishing it - I realized that's not the case. I'm just supposed to play the exact same thing again, with the exact same story, same mission types, same very short time limit - but this time at a higher difficulty. Unfortunately, I didn't see any reason why I'd want to do that. How can I play through the same story again when I know how terribly it ends? Just for the added challenge? That's not enough to keep me playing. Especially not when the degree of challenge seems to be severely impacted by random factors.
Sadly, while the style is really cool, and the core mechanics are pretty great, I found everything apart from that to be just... bad. I genuinely can't understand how it's so positively reviewed. Maybe I'm missing something - but I honestly just don't get it.
