PC Reviews

Inversion Review

Published

June 19, 2012

The guys who gave us Timeshift and Battle: Los Angeles have decided to give us a not-Gears game with a pretty iffy gravity gimmick. What ultimately should have been an awesome idea ends up being pretty mediocre with some poor gameplay and a gimmick pretending to be a feature ending up feeling forced at times. You start the game as Davis Russel, a cop living out the buddy-cop dream with his best friend Leo Delgado. On your way home to give your daughter a birthday present the world goes to hell with the invasion, but not really an invasion (it’s never made clear), by the Locu-Lutadores who have no relation with actual luchadors. Gravity is going crazy and Davis’ daughter is kidnapped so it’s up to the buddy-cop team to save the day. The game moves on from plot hole to plot hole with easily the most annoying protagonist of the year so far. While Leo is concerned with fighting the Lutadores and stopping them from enslaving everyone on the planet, Davis couldn’t give a single fuck about the planet with his only concern being the safety of his daughter. They quickly get captured and thrown into a prison camp where they have to dig all day, it’s here when Davis really shows how much of an idiot he is. If you told me that their time in the camp lasted a few years I’d understand all of his bitching, but Davis is only in there for a month and he’s saying things like how he’ll never be able to go back to a normal life after all he’s been through. I played the game Davis, all you guys did was dig with some shovels and get yelled at occasionally, it wasn’t fucking Auschwitz. Now that I think about it, this game probably would’ve been better if a race of luchadors were invading the planet instead. At least that way I would know for sure it’s in full parody mode and not a ‘super serious’ game like how it is now.

Inversion
Developer: Saber Interactive
Price: $60
Platform: PC, PS3 (reviewed), & Xbox 360

So as a warning I’m going to go into detail of the plot, so if you think that this game actually has a story worth touching with a 10-foot pole then stay away. Here’s your first spoiler: the story is ass. So when the game starts out an invasion of sorts occurs with the not-Locusts attacking the city and gravity begins going crazy everywhere. The not-Locusts are capturing our children for some unknown reason that the game never mentions, they’re killing our women, and making the men work in mines to dig for something that is never explained. Halfway through the game Davis and Leo get into what they thought was the main not-Locust HQ, find a futuristic train, then ride it to the plot twist where it’s revealed they were in space the entire game and that their city was never on Earth, but actually in a dome in space. Now I figured the Lutadores had taken the city and moved it to space, but the rest of the game heavily implies that it’s always been there and that nobody has ever gone far enough outside the city limits to realize this. There’s also no explanation for the main villain’s plan or what these flying robots that show up are or where they’re from. We do get a view of the Lutadore home (in their own dome) with once again, no explanation on what caused their home to crumble apart and turn them into speech impaired barbarians. There’s also a moment at the end where I assume the big bad wants to blow up all the domes (can’t tell because they all speak gibberish) but the scene makes no sense at all because they’ve had access to the room for ages; what were they digging on our dome for when the secret room was in their dome the whole time? The game continues to throw things at you that are never resolved, with some clearly stupid moments such as some soldiers who should have had NO clue where you are, somehow show up to bust you out of a jam. Usually I don’t mind plot-holes, but this game just continues to add more to the pile that are so obvious and in your face that they become a distraction from the gameplay.

So the game plays as generically as it can get to Gears of War; if you squint a little bit you probably couldn’t even tell the difference between the two. The cover system plays the same, it’s got the same sprint animation, the gun-play is basically the same, and the enemies even wear the exact same armor as the Locust. It’s amazing that with all these hits the game still manages to play worse than the game the developers clearly had on a second monitor making sure what they’re doing is exactly like it. Everything is just so damn dull and I can’t even remember a single memorable moment in the game besides the stupidly annoying bosses. You better get used to fighting the same 3 bosses over and over again because they’re there to help pad out the game length to stop anybody working on the game to actually come up with something interesting; I simply refuse to believe anybody there tested the boss fights and said “Yea, this is fun”. They all force you to use the gravity suit to throw objects in the environment at them because while your gun that shoots electric fire won’t do shit, a tiny rock you pick up will knock a quarter of their health off. The game pulls a Metroid on you by letting you play with a fully upgraded gravity suit that allows you to lower gravity, raise it, and lift objects. Once this quick tutorial is over you’ll spend most of the game waiting for the 3 moments to unlock them, not because the gravity suit is fun to use but because it at least gives you something interesting to do for 5 minutes. Your suit runs on fuel and you can pick up refills in the environment or off certain enemies, but I really felt the game would’ve been improved by making the suit slowly recharge the energy instead of making us pray there’s some fuel pick-up around the corner. Lowering gravity is easily the best power to use because it causes any enemies hit with the blast to float in the air, making them easy pickings to take out with your gun or to use the manipulation power to pull them towards you then either send them flying or take them out with a finishing move; this is also how you’ll be picking up objects like cars or rocks because you can only grab things that are floating. Now high gravity is easily the most useless thing to do since all it does is push enemies to a prone position for a few seconds. Now think about it, you’re playing a cover based shooter and you’re making an enemy who’s already in cover even more protected. Sure it works fine if some random guy runs out of cover for some reason, but why would you do that when you can send a low gravity blast at them that will pull them out of cover? I also found the aiming of where my blast of energy will land pretty hit or miss. Sometimes I’ll be aiming directly at something, only for the field of energy to not affect anybody around it. Sometimes you’ll miss so many times that you’ll just say “fuck it” and stick with your gun.

There are some moments in the game where you’ll enter a zero-G area and you navigate the *linear* environment by highlighting a piece of cover and floating over to it. These moments are pretty hit or miss because sometimes you’ll be floating down a vertical turbine which looks really cool, but other times you’ll be going down a giant hallway instead. The game also throws in a ton of info on how to navigate these areas such as being able to hop on the other side of whatever cover you’re in, back flipping, and dodging while in the air. These all end up being useless since you’re never going to be in a moment where you’re in front of an enemy to make jumping to the other side of your cover necessary, if you’re EVER thrown in the air (either here or if a gravity suit enemy hits you with low gravity) you’re basically dead, especially since dodging uses up your gravity juice. What’s the point in introducing all these dodging and back flipping moves when it’s to my benefit to stay in cover the entire time? The game even decides to spice things up by throwing in enemies that can navigate these areas with ridiculous speed and seem to suck up more bullets than the regular enemies even though they’re wearing little to no armor, i.e., these enemies are NOT fun.

The game just overall feels like a huge disappointment especially with what should have been a genius idea, the gravity, ends up feeling more like an underused gimmick. The moments when you’re fighting on the side of a building, or on the ceiling of a cave, while shooting at enemies below you feel cool but only show up a few times throughout an already short game and end too quickly before you can even care. The game also claims you can use gravity to make your own cover, but most things you pick up are just way too small to use as cover and you can’t even shoot while holding up the object so what’s the point? You have better luck with just hiding behind your waist high wall. There are two moments in the game when you’re being attacked by turreted enemies and you have to use the high gravity function to force some hanging canisters to fall so that you can make a path of cover to get around the turrets. These are the only parts of the game where I sort of felt like I was creating my own cover, but I would hardly call it that. There is some destructibility in the environment, but the only noteworthy moments are scripted segments where you have to shoot something for something else to fall on some guys.

What’s up with me having to review all the games with no multiplayer community recently? As usual, I checked multiple times a day and only managed to get into 2 games which didn’t even fill up the lobby. From what little I got to play I noticed that most people just tend to search for gravity fuel, hide in cover, and then blast you with some gravity to get a kill. It just wasn’t as fun as it should be in a game that’s main gimmick is the control of gravity. You can customize how your human and lutadore look at least so that’s a plus I guess. Saber Interactive dropped the ball HARD when they made the game friend only co-op which means that since all of my friends have the common sense to not pick this up I have nobody to play through the story in co-op; I’ll never understand why developers choose to not have matchmaking co-op in their games. They even removed split-screen co-op which is obvious since they’ve mentioned before that it would be in the game and the press sheet I received even mentions local offline singleplayer co-op as a feature.

The graphics are pretty uninspired and just pretty much ass all around. There is one part of the game during the twist showing you were in space the whole time gave you a look at all the domes and the ships which was pretty neat to look at; it’s a shame that the moment lasts a minute before you continue through the door. The game does have a serious frame-rate issue constantly, even when there’s no action, tons of texture pop-in, screen tearing, and these weird white rays that flicker around the place. I was able to install the game on the Xbox and it did help a bit, but not by much.

The Final Word
The sad thing about Inversion is that it’s just so boring and the gravity mechanic isn’t interesting enough to make me use it, especially the high gravity function. It’s also plagued by a desolate multiplayer community, the co-op function requires a friend to own the game with split-screen being taken out, and a story so full of plot holes it makes The Room jealous.