Take on the role of a young father and husband, David Russel, who finds
himself thrust into war when his peaceful city is invaded by an unknown
enemy. With his daughter missing and conventional weapons and tactics
all but useless, this ordinary cop and his partner Leo Delgado will rise
up to heed the call of duty, master the fundamental forces of gravity
and save the world.
Inversion is a third-person shooter with a difference, or
at least that’s what it would like you to think. The difference being
that on the streets of Vanguard City the normal laws of gravity no
longer apply. Down is up, and occasionally it’s left or even right.
While this undoubtedly has the potential for exciting gameplay – think
of the rotating hallway scene from Inception, for instance – it’s a
conceit that is never fully explored. And so it remains little more than
a flimsy gimmick, one hopelessly incapable of hiding the fact that Inversion is a middling third-person shooter.
You play as Davis Russel, a young police officer, whose daughter is kidnapped following a bloody invasion led by a race of thuggish aliens known as the Lutadore. You must find her with the help of Leo Delgado, your partner on the force. But the arrival of these intergalactic savages coincides with a series of strange phenomena witnessed across the city. In isolated pockets, the laws of gravity no longer obtain. And despite their feral appearance, the Lutadore seem able to manipulate gravitational field using advanced technology.
And it’s this meddling with physics where Inversion
attempts to distinguish itself from the herd. Early on in the story,
Russell manages to pilfer a Gravlink – a weird contraption, comprising
of a chrome harness and arterial pipe containing pulsating fluid.
(Something from Doctor Freeze’s summer collection, perhaps). Initially,
you can only create pockets of zero gravity. But once you start to play
around with it you realise it’s nothing really new. When you hoist
enemies out of cover, you’ll be reminded of Mass Effect’s Singularity
biotic, and when you use the Gravlink to hurl floating object across the
screen, you’ll have flashbacks to Dead Space’s stasis ability. While
this isn’t a bad thing – both are fun gameplay mechanics – Inversion
executes neither very well. Firstly, the accuracy of creating a pocket
of zero gravity around a desired object is hit-and-miss. And in the time
it takes you to elevate the right object and select it, you’re likely
to get shot. It’s frustrating, as it ultimately forces you to play the
game as a straightforward shooter.
And if you do manage to select the right object – you can wield anything from cars to dimpled spheres of gasoline which ignite on impact – you don’t even have to be all that accurate with where you lob it. Throw a car vaguely in the direction of an enemy, and they’ll burst into a shower of blood. Instead of it being a fine tool, allowing for interesting gameplay possibilities to unfold, the Gravlink a blunt instrument, which is at its most effective, unsurprisingly, when throwing things.
Later on in the game, the Gravlink is upgraded allowing players to create localised fields of heavy gravity, which can be used both offensively – enemies can be pinned to the floor – and defensively – containers suspended in the air can be pulled down to create makeshift cover. The latter has potential, but again it’s never realised. There’s a couple of sections in the campaign when you’re encouraged to make your own cover. But it’s neither spontaneous nor creative: you're not at liberty to reshape the environment at will to gain an advantage over your opponent, which would be interesting within the context of a cover-based shooter. Instead, you simply pull down a series of highlighted objects suspended above you, creating a shielded pathway. It’s all too rigidly staged to be rewarding.
Inversion also boasts combat within zero gravity, in which you can
take cover behind floating debris. It sounds exhilarating – combat
across multiple planes of space – but again, the execution kills the
mind-bending promise. Moving between cover isn’t as fluid as it should
be. You can propel yourself to nearby cover if it is highlighted, but
selecting the right piece of cover is tricky. It won’t always let you
select the one you want – and during those moments of irritating
indecision, while tussling with the temperamental controls, you’re
likely to get killed. The saddest thing is it encourages you to adopt a
conservative style of play: you won’t be backflipping between cover,
since it’s more beneficial to stay where you are and pick off enemies as
they come to you. Which all kind of defeats the point of it being in
zero gravity.
There are moments, however, when Inversion almost realises the potential of its central conceit. But they’re fleeting. They come when your centre of gravity shifts – known as ‘Vector Shifts’ – and the battlefield is turned on its side. The floor suddenly becomes the side of a building, from which you can shoot Lutadore on the street below – but it’s not below, it’s at 90 degrees to the wall you’re standing on. Following me? Imagine that M.C. Escher had specialised in level design, not lithographs, and you’d get close. But the game never fully explores the strange possibilities this could have on level design. And so, most of Inversion unfolds along a singular plane where the mind is bored, not bent.
For the most part, Inversion plays like a straightforward third-person cover-based shooter. And in this capacity, it’s decent enough. Yes, the guns and characters are frightfully generic, and the world itself feels all too familiar – broken cityscapes and parched badlands where savages run amok. It’s all strongly redolent of Gears of War, but lacks the polish or distinctive arsenal. In fact, Inversion’s weapons brazenly defy the laws of physics in other ways. The shotgun has the range of an assault rifle, and an assault rifle that of a sniper rifle. It’s baffling, and underscores the game’s lack of fine tuning. Saying that, as with Gears, Inversion is best tackled in co-op with a friend: the camaraderie will not only see you through the game’s duller sections but pay off towards the end when the game experiences one or two severe difficulty spikes. If you’re playing solo, however, be prepared to play medic frequently to your formerly-competent AI buddy.
What’s more unforgivable than it’s insipid presentation and these
baffling inconsistencies, is the way in which Inversion heavily recycles
it’s mini-boss battles. One enemy you’ll face multiple times is the
Slave Driver – a grotesquely-deformed slob who summons legions of
devoted crazies to attack you – multiple times. And he’s not the only
recurrent foe. It’s not that these encounters are inherently bad, but
with each iteration they feel more and more like padding, a cheap way to
protract Inversion’s 7-8 hour campaign time.
To atone for the relatively short single-player, there’s an abundance of multiplayer modes, as you’d imagine. In addition to the staples – deathmatch, king of the hill – there’s a Horde-like survival mode wittily titled ‘Survival’. It’s rickety but enjoyable enough, especially if played alongside friends. Additional modes take advantage of Inversion’s gravity hook in various ways – you can trigger vector changes, turning the map upside down, if you put together a kill streak. Or earn more points for killing using gravity powers. It’s not an unpleasant way to pass a couple of hours, but it doesn’t have enough quality or depth to really reward a heavy investment of time.
You play as Davis Russel, a young police officer, whose daughter is kidnapped following a bloody invasion led by a race of thuggish aliens known as the Lutadore. You must find her with the help of Leo Delgado, your partner on the force. But the arrival of these intergalactic savages coincides with a series of strange phenomena witnessed across the city. In isolated pockets, the laws of gravity no longer obtain. And despite their feral appearance, the Lutadore seem able to manipulate gravitational field using advanced technology.
And if you do manage to select the right object – you can wield anything from cars to dimpled spheres of gasoline which ignite on impact – you don’t even have to be all that accurate with where you lob it. Throw a car vaguely in the direction of an enemy, and they’ll burst into a shower of blood. Instead of it being a fine tool, allowing for interesting gameplay possibilities to unfold, the Gravlink a blunt instrument, which is at its most effective, unsurprisingly, when throwing things.
Later on in the game, the Gravlink is upgraded allowing players to create localised fields of heavy gravity, which can be used both offensively – enemies can be pinned to the floor – and defensively – containers suspended in the air can be pulled down to create makeshift cover. The latter has potential, but again it’s never realised. There’s a couple of sections in the campaign when you’re encouraged to make your own cover. But it’s neither spontaneous nor creative: you're not at liberty to reshape the environment at will to gain an advantage over your opponent, which would be interesting within the context of a cover-based shooter. Instead, you simply pull down a series of highlighted objects suspended above you, creating a shielded pathway. It’s all too rigidly staged to be rewarding.
There are moments, however, when Inversion almost realises the potential of its central conceit. But they’re fleeting. They come when your centre of gravity shifts – known as ‘Vector Shifts’ – and the battlefield is turned on its side. The floor suddenly becomes the side of a building, from which you can shoot Lutadore on the street below – but it’s not below, it’s at 90 degrees to the wall you’re standing on. Following me? Imagine that M.C. Escher had specialised in level design, not lithographs, and you’d get close. But the game never fully explores the strange possibilities this could have on level design. And so, most of Inversion unfolds along a singular plane where the mind is bored, not bent.
For the most part, Inversion plays like a straightforward third-person cover-based shooter. And in this capacity, it’s decent enough. Yes, the guns and characters are frightfully generic, and the world itself feels all too familiar – broken cityscapes and parched badlands where savages run amok. It’s all strongly redolent of Gears of War, but lacks the polish or distinctive arsenal. In fact, Inversion’s weapons brazenly defy the laws of physics in other ways. The shotgun has the range of an assault rifle, and an assault rifle that of a sniper rifle. It’s baffling, and underscores the game’s lack of fine tuning. Saying that, as with Gears, Inversion is best tackled in co-op with a friend: the camaraderie will not only see you through the game’s duller sections but pay off towards the end when the game experiences one or two severe difficulty spikes. If you’re playing solo, however, be prepared to play medic frequently to your formerly-competent AI buddy.
To atone for the relatively short single-player, there’s an abundance of multiplayer modes, as you’d imagine. In addition to the staples – deathmatch, king of the hill – there’s a Horde-like survival mode wittily titled ‘Survival’. It’s rickety but enjoyable enough, especially if played alongside friends. Additional modes take advantage of Inversion’s gravity hook in various ways – you can trigger vector changes, turning the map upside down, if you put together a kill streak. Or earn more points for killing using gravity powers. It’s not an unpleasant way to pass a couple of hours, but it doesn’t have enough quality or depth to really reward a heavy investment of time.
The Verdict
Inversion is a disparate collection of ideas
grouped around the conceit of gravity. Some are more fleshed out than
others, but none are executed to their fullest potential. You’ll use
them when you have to, but more often than not Inversion
is more satisfying when played as a straightforward shooter. It’s not a
terrible game, but it’s in those moments in which you glimpse it’s
unrealised potential that really brings it down.
| Minimum System Requirements: | Recommended System Requirements: |
| CPU: | Intel Core2 Duo, AMD Athlon 64 X2, 2GHz | CPU: | Intel Core2 Quad, AMD Phenom X4 9950, 2.6GHz |
| RAM: | 2 GB RAM | RAM: | 3 GB RAM |
| VGA: | NVIDIA Geforce 8800, ATI Radeon 2900 XT, 512 mb Graphics Memory | VGA: | NVIDIA Geforce GTX 460, ATI Radeon 5850, 1gb Graphics Memory |
| DX: | 9.0c | DX: | 11 |
| OS: | Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 | OS: | Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 |
| http://gamesystemrequirements.com/ |
| HDD: | 5 GB HD space | HDD: | 5 GB HD space |
| Network: | Internet connection required for online matchmaking. | Network: | Internet connection required for online matchmaking. |
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