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dkirschner's Invisible, Inc. (PC)
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| [November 18, 2018 05:43:11 PM]
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What a short and sweet stealth tactics game. It reminded me of a mix between XCOM and Shadowrun games, with a little bit of System Shock thrown in at the end. You are an operator leading a squad of agents to ultimately infiltrate an evil corporation and upload your organization's super AI onto their mainframe to shut them down. You've got 72 game hours to do it, and each randomized mission you choose takes, as far as I saw, between 5 and 12 hours. After each 24-hour day, the story advances and the sites you infiltrate become more difficult as the corporation gets onto you. Missions come in a handful of varieties, including ones to acquire information that gives you more mission choices, free hostages (some of whom can join your permanent roster as playable agents), steal vault keys, use vault keys to get tons of cash, and access rare items through theft or purchase. I'm not sure if I got lucky on my second run or what, but I was able to recruit two new agents very quickly, thus giving me three (of four possible) for almost the entire game. I never saw another hostage rescue mission.
The gameplay is familiar stealth tactics fare with fun twists. Use AP to move and perform basic actions. What sets it apart is how perfectly balanced and precise everything is. If I screwed up, it was 100% my own fault. The game gives you a lot of information. For example, open a door and you get a little vision cone that your character can see. Peek around the corner and they can see most everything in the room. If you see an enemy, you can spend 1 AP to observe his movements and know what path he is taking. You can also see his vision cone, including the squares he sees and those that he is "watching," i.e., his peripheral vision (which oddly doesn't apply to squares right next to him). You can also see when enemies are alerted and what position they are alerted to. This gives you time to plan an ambush or get out of the way or distract them. Laser grids can be hacked, allowing you to cut off certain areas of the level, or, if you're clever, frying an enemy who moves near it! Surveillance drones, machine gun turrets, and various other useful things can be hacked and used to your advantage too.
In return for such access to information, you have a lean number of AP and potential moves on any given turn. Thus, you always have to do a lot with a little, which makes every decision feel weighty. On Easy, you get 5 Rewinds per level, so you can screw up some without wiping your agents. In addition to your agents, you have your AI, Incognita, who can spend a resource called Power to hack enemy electronics, create noise distractions, and other things. Incognita hacking disables cameras, captures turrets, unlocks corporate safes, and later even decreases enemy armor. You want to manage Power very carefully because it isn't an infinite resource, although there are panels scattered throughout the levels where you can siphon more, and I luckily found a mod for Incognita early on that passively gave me 1 Power per turn. You also need to watch out for daemons, which debuff Incognita and/or your agents for a few turns (-2 AP for all agents, +1 Power cost to hack things, spawn one more enemy, etc.).
You can install various implants in your agents and equip items. Some of the implants are freaking awesome, such as Internationale's ability to remotely siphon power from terminals. Couple that with dumping points into the Hacking stat and she wound up sucking +5 Power from every terminal from a room away, which was HUGE. Upgrading passive stats is a big deal, and costs money, which you steal from safes and from guards. It was a tough decision whether to upgrade my agents or to spend the money on new items. I went with upgrading my agents most of the time, and by the end of the game, they had maxed out speed (more movement, always useful in these games). Hacking was Internationale's specialty as mentioned earlier. I gave Decker (nice reference) a lot of strength (carry more items, drag guards farther), and Prism I gave Anarchy (steal more and better from guards), though that didn't turn out so useful, and I wound up making her well rounded.
I played the game on Easy, which was recommended. It was challenging and taught me the game, but was never too hard, especially once I learned everything. It was constantly nerve-wracking though. As soon as I beat it, I gained experience, unlocked two new agents and two new mods for Incognita, and it said that the real challenge is on Experienced difficulty. Well! Tempting. I am sure the game becomes brutal. But I've still got Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun to try, so the next stealth game will be another new stealth game.
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dkirschner's Invisible, Inc. (PC)
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Current Status: Finished playing
GameLog started on: Tuesday 13 November, 2018
GameLog closed on: Sunday 18 November, 2018 |
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