When I was a kid, my dad loved to rent those cheesy B-movie action flicks. They often had terrible acting, bad special effects and a plot that made no sense, so bad we spent most of the time making fun of them. That is Inversion: the B-movie of the gaming world.
The story is bad and full of plot holes, cheesy dialogue, crazy twists and action-movie clichés. You play Davis Russell, a young Vanguard City cop, who along with your partner Leo Delgado is searching for your missing daughter, gone on her birthday of all days, after an unknown enemy invades the city. It is exactly the kind of setup those rented B-movies ran on, and it is delivered with about as much conviction.
Inversion’s graphics will remind you a lot of Gears of War, from a distance at least. Up close you will notice the low-resolution textures and the constant reuse of the same ones over and over throughout the game. It does look good from far away, but the illusion does not survive scrutiny. There is hardly anything positive to say about the sound: the musical score is nothing to write home about and adds no depth, and the voice acting is overdone and very repetitive. The only encouraging element is the sound effects, which are fairly well done.
Gameplay is like any third-person shooter, with one gimmick meant to set it apart: gravity control. Now, every terrestrial game has gravity, but in Inversion it is all whacked out. There are areas you fight through with no gravity at all, moments where gravity flips and you find yourself walking down a skyscraper trading fire with the enemy, and a gravlink that creates high- or low-gravity fields (think Half-Life 2’s gravity gun) to pick up or crush foes. It all sounds great, and that is the tragedy: the game never uses it to anywhere near its potential. The sections where you walk down buildings or fight on the ceiling are few and far between. The rest gets repetitive and frustrating toward the end of the campaign as it recycles the same bosses over and over and over, while your partner forgets how to stay in cover and constantly cries out for healing.
Once you have beaten, or just given up on, the campaign, you might wander into multiplayer: Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, King of Gravity or Co-op. King of Gravity, the only genuinely unique mode, hands one player gravity powers while everyone else tries to kill them to steal those powers. Great concept, but in practice it is wildly unbalanced, I was never once killed while holding the power. Co-op is fine if you and a friend happen to own the game, but it adds no new features and does not change the story.
Overall, Inversion adds nothing new to the third-person shooter genre. It is a lacklustre game that had great potential and fell way short of the mark. If you are really bored, maybe rent it, but otherwise steer clear.
