Movement is simple, positioning is everything, and the true thrill of the experience - the thing that really makes you feel like a spy - comes from the regular shift between the physical world, with its pot plants you can hide behind and its doors you can peek through and its action point limitations, and the Incognita layer, a digital map that covers the same territory but picks out objects you might like to hack.
Now, the game is far more focused, but it's lost none of its depth as ephemera has been stripped away. When I first played Invisible, Inc last year, it was fascinating but slightly too busy: each turn you not only moved your agent, for example, but also had to decide what direction they were facing afterwards. The core of the game unfolds in the missions you despatch your agents on - turn-based tactical scrambles that have been polished by a shortish spell in Early Access. This game is all about the amazing run that ends in unexpected disaster. You can rewind a bad turn or even retry a level on certain difficulty settings - both will make you feel like you're missing the point, though. Invisible, Inc really isn't screwing around.
By comparison, the last time I headed into the final mission I had four guys, and they were seriously tooled up. The first time I arrived at the final mission, I was down to a single agent, and they were armed - ha - with nothing more deadly than some reviving gel. Getting the most out of your 72 hours is a crucial concern, then, even before you've set foot inside an enemy compound or chambered your first stun dart. It can take a long time to fly to Alaska, where a sweet new gun might be waiting for you - time that you could maybe spend taking in two separate missions closer to home, whose objectives, granted, you're less excited about. But that 72 hours is encouraging you to play temporal Tetris.
Invisible inc ps4 review free#
With a wealth of options available at all times, you'd imagine that you're free to ignore the objectives that don't interest you and zero in on the ones that do. You do this by jetting around the world and raiding rival corps, stealing new weaponry from Alaska, say, or busting a fellow agent out of a holding cell in China. Invisible, Inc's structure is seemingly pretty simple: you have 72 hours to rebuild your ravaged corporation and gear up for a final all-or-nothing mission that will probably kill you.
With limited resources, warrenous maps, deadly enemies and short sight lines, Invisible, Inc prompts you to make one quick decision after another - and then dark emergent joy erupts as you try to live with the consequences of what you've just done. A ditherer by nature, it is fun to roleplay as someone so clear-eyed and free from doubt - someone who's able to ditch a team-mate when things get bad or decide, on a steely whim, if such a thing is possible, to risk absolutely everything on a hunch. I love Invisible, Inc because its systems come together with one aim: to make me decisive. To do that, you have to strike beneath the careful template and get at the behaviours that the game's rules and restrictions encourage. This doesn't explain why I love Invisible, Inc so much, though. The art is angular, long-limbed cartoon noir, the title's a truly stellar pun, and the whole thing's put together by Klei Entertainment, a virtuoso group of ludic shapeshifters whose last few games - Mark of the Ninja, Don't Starve - have closely orbited a core of brutal, unforgiving, economical brilliance without letting the paths intersect. This is a stealthy turn-based tactics game in which you lead a squad of double-dangerous secret agents through procedurally-generated maps whose wayward sprawls are broken down into neat little tiles. On paper, Invisible, Inc reads like a long list of things that I already love. Klei turns its hand to turn-based stealth - and the results are beautiful.
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