After serving as a composer on the original Deus Ex, and contributing some voices, Alexander Brandon was made audio director on its sequel, Deus Ex: Invisible War. The second game in the series has long been divisive, and was Brandon’s first time as an audio director. As he told PC Gamer’s Wes Fenlon in a recent interview, “There was room for improvement, I will just put it that way.”
Brandon remains pleased with a lot of the team’s work, however. “As far as the content goes, I think we did really, really well,” he said. “I’m proud of the main theme. My now ex-wife did the vocals on it, and did an amazing job on that. And I was given a little more freedom to express thematic, melodic stuff, even though it was muted in comparison to the original main theme. It wasn’t this ’90s cyberpunk Johnny Mnemonic cheese fest that everybody reveled in at that time.”
One of Invisible War’s strongest areas is its factions, with players encouraged to join them, betray them, and play them off against each other. Each needed its own mood, and the aim was to tell a more complicated story even if the systems were simpler. “We have more fidelity, and the story is gonna be a lot more intricate,” as Brandon put it, “but it’s going to be a bit darker, even though the art was a little lighter in some ways—a lot of ways really. But it was supposed to have a more serious tone and a more immersive tone. I really like the soundtrack for what it is.”
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Invisible War’s main theme in particular remains a banger. The soundtrack shifts to match your location as well as the factions, with a markedly different soundscape in Cairo compared to Trier, for instance. As annoying as the sliced-up levels were, at least the music we heard as we scurried back and forth across them was amazing. Especially the songs contributed by Kidneythieves, whose lead singer portrayed NG Resonance.
“There’s a lot I would change if I could,” Brandon said. “If we could all go back and do it again, that would be great. But no, I’m proud of it overall.”
