Caltrops - Invisible Inc. - Final verdict: still negative

Forum Overview :: Invisible Inc.

by fabio 12/23/2016, 11:29am PST

I gave this game a third chance based on Mischief claiming I wasn't playing it right, and the need to fill the disappointment hole that Darkest Dungeon left.

You don't get the rush of theft and cashing it out to buy cool loot. There's a black market guy you can talk to between missions, but he almost never has a single item to sell. He offers you can average of two items for the entire campaign. No, you must go on special missions where the sole purpose is breaking into a corporate headquarters so you can use their item vending machine. I'm not joking. You jump through hoops to earn money, and you have to jump through additional hoops to spend it. They should have just had the black market guy sell you everything at the end of each mission.

But even then, most of the items and upgrades suck. 50% of them are the same stuff you started with, but with lower cooldown and higher armor piercing. 45% is items and implants that all combo off each other (reduced alert increase for killing a guard, +5 action points when you kill, +3 movement when you kill, etc) which is stupid because you'll never random number generate into collecting a full set. The remaining 5% is the cloak, which is the only really useful item you want. It's a free get out of any situation card and it's absolutely broken.

The game punishes you for every choice you make. Wait an extra turn for a guard to pass by? That's +1 alert for the turn. Knock him out so you don't waste a turn waiting? That's +1 alert anyway.

Almost every single time you fuck up, it doesn't feel like it was your fault. It's either from the random number generator screwing you with level layout and guard placement, or the poor feedback and visual layout of how sight works. The only thing increasing the difficulty does is reduce the number of rewinds you get to the previous turn in case you slip up, which is sometimes impossible to avoid when the game decides to have randomly generate two guards wandering into the starting room on turn 1. Worse, when it does fuck you over with an unlucky level loadout, you can't abort and just suck up a penalty. You have to find the randomly placed exit for your agents to get out alive. The decision to cut your losses and bail or keep searching for the level's treasure is gone, because you have to search anyway if you don't want your entire team wiped for not finding the exit.

Even when you do succeed, you're rewarded with the worst final mission since XCOM Enemy Unknown.

Did anyone but Mischief like this?