Saturday Morning Gaming: Invisible Inc.
One of my favorite genres is the old tactical shooter. You know, like… the XComs. XCom:Enemy Unknown was AMAZING and, when I first played XCom 2, I realized that I could never play the first one again. It was just a tutorial.
But the number one thing about those games that bugged the ever-living heck out of me? The percentiles. Like, you had an X% chance to hit any given enemy and they told you what the percentage was when you were making the shot. If you had high ground, you got a bit of a bonus, if they were behind cover, you got a bit of a penalty… the game really rewarded you for flanking the enemy and getting them from the side. But, sometimes, the game said “you have a 99% chance to hit” and then you’d miss. Like, not 1 out of 100 times, either. Like, ALL THE TIME. There are memes about it in the various X-Com forums. “I missed two 99% shots in a row. I re-started the entire game.”
Well, Invisible Inc. fixed that. You either have 0% or 100%. More importantly, your *ENEMIES* either have 0% or 100%.
But let’s back up a bit. In Invisible Inc., you are in charge of a shadowy organization that just got busted by the various corporations that you’ve been spying on. You and a couple of your agents get out, barely, with your AI. It’s time to hit these guys back… but you can’t hit back hard. You have to be sneaky about it.
And so, unlike the X-Coms, this is a tactical sneaker rather than a tactical shooter. You do *NOT* want the guards to see you. Why? Because, if they do, they have a 100% chance to hit you. Your main weapon (to begin with, anyway) is the simple tazer. You have to be right next to the guard to use it and it will only knock him out for 3 turns. Lucky for you, that should be enough for you to get past him and into the next room.
There’s also a hacking mechanic. Like, the corporation has several safes and computers lying around. Your trusty AI, Incognita, will hack them for you allowing you to break in. Breaking in requires power, though… and, when you start, you start with a program for Incognita that just gives you 1 power per turn. (You can hack consoles to get a little more juice, though. The better hacking skill you have, the more juice you get).
Different missions have different aims. Some missions are simply to get cash. Some missions are to get weapons. Some missions are to get cybernetic upgrades. Some missions are to free one of your fellow agents who got caught in the opening cutscene (who will then be available for future missions and future games).
You start with Decker and Internationale. Decker has a small boost to speed and comes with a cloaking device. Internationale has a small boost to hacking and comes with the ability to hack consoles at a distance. Use them to go up against the corporations and, if you’re lucky, free up some more people for future games. Guys who have a boost to strength or anarchy. Guys who come with weapons. Guys who come with extra cybernetic augmentations.
Each one with different stats and different powers who will play differently.
The maps and missions are procedurally generated so each mission you go on will be different (though the goal for the first mission is always the same as is the goal for the Final Mission).
On top of that, you arrive into a map with a low level of security but, as time goes on, security creeps up by drips and drabs. If you stay on the map too long, there will be additional guards and additional threats from cameras (the good news is that the cameras can be hacked too). Get in, get your goal, get out.
And the game is somewhat short… you have only a handful of in-game days and, like it or not, the Final Mission is coming down the tracks. You had best gotten a bunch of cybernetic upgrades or good tech or just put a lot of points into your stats because that last mission is a doozy.
And then you’ll want to play it again with new techniques.
It’s twenty bucks and the DLC is five (comes with 4 new agents, new enemies, new augmentations, new programs for Incognita, and so on) but it’s been out long enough that it regularly goes on deep discount sale (in the last Steam Christmas sale, it was 75% off). It’s an absolute delight to play and I cannot recommend this game enough. If you liked X-Com, give this a try. It’s a fresh take on something you already know you like.
So… what are you playing?
I started to play this towards the end of having a monthly game subscription – I hadn’t gotten very far before my subscription lapsed, and I didn’t go back to it.
I’ve been playing Return to Monkey Island – pretty fun but definitely designed for nostalgia. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who hasn’t played the old ones. It also follows the model of newer adventure games in that it feels more like a sequence of smaller encapsulated areas rather than one big world – which makes it a lot easier and less satisfying to solve. I guess they’re assuming no one has the attention span to be stumped for more than 15 minutes at a time anymore.Report
Not sure how far you are, but there is a point where Return to Monkey Island opens up. I haven’t played much since I reached that point, because I got distracted by other games, but you suddenly have multiple things to accomplish and you the ability to sail around to different locations to accomplish them. I think it is pretty near the end of the game, though.Report
Ah ok, I got to that point. Each island is pretty small, but now there are multiple problems to be solved and more items in my bag to choose from. I thought I was pretty close to the end when I first posted, but I guess it was more like the halfway point.Report
One of the sponsors for the Rumble last night was Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.
And here’s how bad Gotham Knights was: I’m going to wait to get it. I’m going to wait to see the reviews. I’m going to wait to see if the game screws it up.
Because I am not confident that it will come close to getting it right.Report
Oh, and the Epic Game Store free game this week is Infinifactory. It’s a Zachtronics game.Report
The thing I really appreciated about “Invisible Inc” was that nearly any aspect of the game could be changed in the difficulty editor. And you could get really deep with it.
Like, the basic game runs on a timer. Every so-many ticks of the clock, the enemy capabilities go up; you can’t just sit back and grind a mission down or scout the whole thing to determine the optimal path, you need to push to the objective and take what lumps the level-generator throws at you because before very long the game brings in an enemy with “knows where you are, has nearly infinite move, and one-hit kills you”.
But the difficulty editor can change that to “there’s no timer, but every time you mess with a guard the Alert Level increases and every enemy gets stronger”. Like, turn it from a pressure situation to a puzzle-solver.
Or maybe you want to go combat-monster, and the enemies start out strong but killing them (or knocking them out) doesn’t affect it.
One thing I didn’t like as much is that it’s impossible to not play the story. As in, there’s always going to be a Halfway Through The Game Special Mission, and an End Of The Game Final Mission; the “endless” mode just keeps going after the final mission. I don’t like that so much because I want to just play regular missions, and the special missions have weird goofy differences.Report
I’m told that the modding community has addressed many of the issues left in the wake of the game being “abandoned” at this point. Steam’s workshop has a NewGame+ mod and a plethora of new agents (some of whom look pretty cool) but nothing that addresses the whole story thing.
Which is something that I never encountered. Whenever I beat the last mission, I always felt like I had just finished a marathon and I never needed to play again.
For a month.Report