Invisible inc is another game by Klei entertainment following their other successful games like Shank and Mark of the Ninja that got rave reviews (we will confirm or deny that hype at some point). The marketing was stylish from amazing videos that grabbed the Xcom lovers as well as those who wished they could play chess with cartoon characters instead of the boring royalty.

Story

It’s the future, where corporations have taken power away from governments, away from the people. In this grim dystopia groups such as Invisible Inc offer wet work to those who want it be it these corporations or the people. Staffed by highly skilled and augmented agents Invisible Inc gets the job done.

Not every corporation is approving of being infiltrated and decide that Invisible Inc needs to go, that is where we are now, are you up to get a secret agent agency back to it’s former glory or will you die trying?

Based on the video trailer you will end up thinking it has a good story line which might motivate you complete the entire game at a stretch. However, to your surprise this is not a game that holds a story-line.

Graphics

Frankly, the animation is good. There is no lag or delay with movement of players across the map. The level layouts are muddled at times. When spinning the camera around it’s tough to tell if an object you are targeting is in one room or another.

Gameplay

Invisible, Inc. is a turn-based tactical stealth game. The characters in this game are player controlled remote operators for an spying agency which is being attacked from multinational corporations. You start by selecting your team with two agents to begin with. You can unlock a list of agents based on different playthroughs and experience you have earned. Each of the agents has a different set of equipment to start with, a different set of stats and is usually equipped with a skill specific to themselves such as cloaking. If one of them is dies during the mission, you can either revive them back to life or will have to drag their stupid ass to the exit.

I can totally relate it to playing chess. It is like a combination of XCOM and Splinter Cell. I find it a bit stressful as the game gets harder and harder when you spend too much time for completing a level.

The game generates levels randomly, so you are never going to see a level twice, but most of the levels look very similar. Every time you do a campaign, whether you succeed or fail, you gain experience which gives you more unlocks. Every campaign is based on total hours and once you exhaust those hours you are forced to the final mission.

It has a lot of different difficulty levels. They have three standard difficulty levels:

1. Beginner – Allows you to retry a level and gives you 5 rewinds
2. Experienced – Gives you 3 rewinds
3. Expert – You get one rewind

The higher the security level gets, the more difficult the level is going to be. Additional cameras will be activated which are harder to hack and require more power when using the partner AI.

You don’t really get the opportunity to kill too many people, because ammo in this game for weapons is very hard to acquire and expensive. You most rely on your disrupter, which is a close combat weapon and it will keep enemies down for like two or three turns. So it gives you enough time to get the hell out of that level.

This is very familiar to grid based, action points based games. But the obvious difference is, unlike other stealth games, you are trying to avoiding killing people as much as possible. You are starting with bare minimum resources and you are trying your best to acquire gear and upgrades.

I liked the concept of partner AI which is a hacking interface that is provided to the player to disable security cameras, alarms and locks on safes. It requires power and that has to be collected in the mission itself. Even though, collecting power source may sound easy, but the available ones are not enough to complete the level unless you have all of your moves planned ahead of time.

The game play is divided into action points, this is the part where at first I couldn’t figure out what was going on. I was confused of why I was not able to move my players not knowing that the action points had exhausted and I have to end my turn to refresh them.

Each agent has limited number of actions points which are used to move the agents around the map. This also includes doing other activities in the game, like opening/closing doors, knockout guards etc. Once these action points are over, the player has to end their turn and the enemy team takes the turn.
OK, so maybe it’s not perfect, but it’s strategic, flexible and has great animation.
This is not a lengthy game so it is designed to be played multiple times with randomized level generation. 

Conclusion

To be honest, gamers like myself are far more interested in a logical, and convincing story line which this game lacks. I think it’s totally fair to say, it has very little story line. Every decision is very deliberate and you have only yourself to blame when you make a mistake. The combat is exactly as functional as it needs to be. This game is about robbery, it’s about sneaking, it’s about stealing. You have to plan this out pretty carefully and if you don’t you’ll end up in a lot of trouble.

On the other hand it’s difficulty gets frustrating, the turn based system falls flat when you see nothing happen at the end of your turn. The time limit along with the randomized levels are severe let downs and make the game quite annoying at times.

Final Score: 5/10