Are you sure you want to spend it on anything mundae? And when you do get in trouble, the decision of when to spend a Rewind, and whether to use it multiple times, can lead to wonderful time-angst where you think if you rewind just once, you could probably beat up those three guards when they enter the room. This is the only tool that can reliably get you out of really deep trouble. Obviously this can jump you back before you were spotted and allows the developers to be a little more surprising in their level generation, but it can also let you scout rooms and then time-hop back out of them to save you a turn.Ĭareful, though. Further allowing the developers to keep the game balanced atop a tightrope of tension is the Rewind button, a feature I wasn’t expecting to like but that won me over completely.ĭepending on your difficulty setting you get 5, 3 or just 1 Rewind, each of which will take you back to the beginning of the last turn in a flash of white, as if someone on your team had a vision of what was coming. So being spotted in Invisible only ever results in your magnificent escape or untimely demise, et voila! The entire game is now stealthy, with no rubbish bits. Those of us still walking have a business to run. Perhaps it’s best to just sneak over and grab the holographic cover projector they were carrying. Trying to be a hero could doom your whole team. You can drag them to the exit elevator, or try and locate a medkit. Except here, in a superior system, losing an agent instantly generates a captivating, atmospheric decision tree, because you *can* save agents, but the cost is immense. Taking a bullet is instantaneous, and final, the agent concertina-ing to the ground and threatening a devastating loss to your campaign, just like in XCOM. There are no drawn-out fights in Invisible, no hiding in a cupboard until the guards lose interest. Some sample solutions: you’re able to hide from a pointed gun if you do so by moving to an adjacent tile, so with careful positioning your agents can always slip around a corner or behind a desk or maybe you just activate that agent’s optic camouflage and he simply vanishes in front of the stunned guard maybe a second agent slips behind the guard and zaps him into unconsciousness, robbing his wallet and keycard to boot maybe you use one of a dozen different items you might have liberated from a corp R&D facility.īut if you can’t slip away in these moments, failure has a charm all of its own. Finally, the building’s alarm increases, because in Invisible the alarm is a creeping threat rather than a ridiculous ON/OFF switch, something I’ve already made an entire, loved-up video about (though be warned, that’s footage from a pre-launch build).įinally, control returns to you, and with the detachment of an MI6 operator solving his Sunday supplement’s chess puzzle, you wonder how you’re going to get out of this one. The game’s fantastic soundtrack even takes an interest, adding drums and additional instrumentation to the music. Let’s say a guard catches a member of your team hunched over an open safe. You’re given the opportunity to exist in that heartbeat. This is often followed by a chase, which would be agreeable except it’s not sustainable, so you’re only ever fleeing from surreal goldfish guards who assume that the hulking man squatting in a shadow was probably nothing untoward and your bungling burglar can attempt his fourth break-in. Here, stealth games almost always transition into terrible combat games.

Let’s start by talking about how it’s a stealth game with a solution to *the* problem with stealth games, which is the game deflating like a balloon the moment you’re spotted.

is the best turn-based strategy game I’ve played in years, in a time when we're spoiled for choice. In just 72 hours you’ll be taking on a fittingly impossible mission, and failure is not an option. You control a tiny team of sleuths working to rob the procedurally-generated vaults, server farms and detention centres of four high-tech corporations. is a game of “tactical espionage” from the creators of Mark of the Ninja, immediately understandable as XCOM meets Mission Impossible.

Invisible inc ps4 review