Releasing a game during E3 can be a bad decision. Even during a particularly weak show, most gamers’ eyes will be on the press conferences and announcements of future games, not the games that are being released that week. However, on rare occasions, such as the release of Infamous 2, a game can fight the odds and still pull in the sales and critical acclaim to bring glory and wealth to a developer. Inversion, by the makers of Timeshift, is not one of those games.

Inversion tells the story of Davis Russell, a cop who was on his way to his daughter’s birthday party when a call comes in about some shots being fired. Responding to the call, he encounters a strange alien race who quickly conquers his hometown and enslaves him and his partner, Lou. Now Davis must try and escape the slave camp with Lou, find his daughter, and save the human race while discovering the secret behind the Lutadores, the aliens who have invaded. To be fair, the story actually starts off pretty strong by telling itself in flash back and letting you jump to a couple of points later in the game so you can get wowed by the destructible environments and gravity play. Even when the story starts proper it is pretty good, with the characters slowly realizing how screwed they are as huge swaths of energy cut through their city and alter the gravity. I even found myself interested in what the Lutadores really were since they speak in a half English dialect and were clearly too primitive to develop the gravity technology they are using.

Davis Russel… kind of an unlikable guy.

However, this all falls apart in the second and third act due to the writing taking a severe plunge in quality, the voice acting being weak, and the main character becoming extremely unlikable. What do I mean? Well, towards the third act of the game, several mysteries pop up about how the Lutadores invaded and took over so quickly and why they seem afraid of some alien tech. These mysteries are all quickly wrapped up in either a completely nonsensical twist or offscreen, culminating in a final boss fight against a character you don’t know who has knowledge and abilities he really shouldn’t have.

Meanwhile, Davis is so obsessed with finding his daughter that he is one straightjacket away from being insane. There is a scene where he finds a child who has escaped the Lutadores and he all but assaults the terrified child asking about his daughter without even trying to comfort him. He also goes through extremely swift mood swings to the point where it becomes unintentionally hilarious when he threatens to kill someone who very logically suggests that his daughter might be dead and then happily volunteers his services to take out a mortar. Admittedly, I could buy that his daughter’s safety and his torture by the Lutadores was a big enough factor in making him into this very unlikable character but his voice actor isn’t nearly talented enough to pull of the emotions necessary to make this work, so he comes off as disingenuous about wanting to save his daughter as well as extremely wooden. This isn’t helped by the script, which has a scene or two where Davis is saying Lou’s lines. To be blunt, the final act had several face-palming moments, and most of them involved Davis.

BY THE END OF THIS GAME YOU WILL GROAN AT The MERE SITE OF THIS THING

Another problem with the plot is its pacing. Even though the game is only about 7-8 hours, it constantly tries to pad itself by throwing in repeated boss fights. While this may seem like a gameplay issue, it really hurts the game’s immersion when yet another slave driver (a boss who is perfectly designed for wasting your time) is tossed at you or you’re fighting a boss in the middle of the Lutadores’ headquarters and the Lutadores make sure you have plenty of burned out cars to fling at it. It also breaks the immersion when you realize that there are very few boss types and none of them are very unique.

On the aesthetic side, Inversion really seems to crib from games like Gears of War and Halo 2… but not their better parts. Through the game, you will mostly be roaming through ruined cityscapes, caves, and gray metal corridors. There aren’t really any memorable levels and only one money shot that ties in with one of the more face-palming moments in the plot, so it’s not a positive. The enemy design seems like it came from tossed out character designs from Rage, Gears of War, and Quake 4. To be fair, the game does toss in a couple interesting minibosses and the gravity does allow some interesting visuals, like lava being pulled up into the air or cars floating in the middle of a torn-up street, but combine this with a completely forgettable score and graphics that look like they came from the start of this console generation and overall this aspect of Inversion is pretty lackluster.