Inversion Review

What goes up, must come down

Posted by Alex V on August 4, 2012 - 8:59pm EST

Once you’re done with the single player, you can have a go at the campaign with a friend. The game offers the whole story to be played via online play with a buddy, obviously assuming the role of either Davis or Leo. With two human players, things become a little more entertaining and perhaps give the game a better flow. Going down won’t mean instant death, as your coop partner can still revive you, and the game’s difficulty spikes towards the end will be easier to get through with two competent players. Competitive online play is also present in full force, with deathmatch, king of the hill, and horde modes. As you might expect, the mutliplayer takes advantage of various gravity abilities as well, for example allowing you to flip the battlefield if you’ve had a kill streak. But it doesn’t really revolutionize online play, and there already seems to be a distinct lack of opponents to be found.

While Inversion runs great on even moderately powerful PCs, there’s not much design variety to be found. Alongside the repeated bosses, even the regular enemies often use exactly the same textures in multiple locations and cutscenes. They all look a bit like the dudes from RAGE (we’re up to, what, about 3 games that were borrowed from) and speak in an odd language that sometimes can be understood. The visuals look sharp at high resolution, but there is no 16:10 support, and we’ve encountered a couple of audio and input bugs (unable to reassign mouse keys).

There’s nothing wrong with borrowing inspiration and ideas from multiple titles and creatively integrating them into a new world. Inversion attempts this, as much as it may deny it, and the resulting game is somewhat lacklustre. The main hook of controlling gravity is almost as good as it could have been, while the rest of the features go downhill from here. Average shooting, bland characters and dialogue do little to elevate the game. The game is not inherently poor, but there’s little that stands out or makes the experience worthy of recommendation to any specific gamer niche. Thus, never quite reaching excellence with its main feature, Inversion is unable to recover any points elsewhere – except perhaps the lower price tag.

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Our ratings for Inversion on PC out of 100 (Ratings FAQ)

Presentation

Solid visuals are undermined by a lack of artistic touch and generic voice acting.

Gameplay

Gravity manipulation has its moments, but the best are not even controlled by the player and occur too rarely. Otherwise, this is a standard run and gun third person shooter that perhaps borrows too much from other titles.

Single Player

An emotionally intense final twist can't save what is otherwise a bland and very shallow story. Forgettable characters and poor dialogue. Random difficulty spikes.

Multiplayer

A variety of modes that don't quite take full advantage of the potential in controlling gravity. Lack of players online. Being able to play through the campaign in coop is a welcome sight.

Performance

(Show PC Specs)

CPU: Intel Core i7 CPU 930 @ 2.80GHz
GPU: Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 Vapor-X 1GB
RAM: 6GB DDR3
OS: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

Runs smoothly, with a few minor bugs.

Overall

Inversion is a shooter that tries to diversify, but doesn't quite get there. It borrows elements of other games and throws gravity into the mix, but the end result is like a mess of debris in a vacuum. It's cool, but it's still just that.