REVIEW Game: Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Developer: Eidos Montreal Genre: Action RPG with stealth focus Platform: PC, Xbox One, Playstation 4 Verdict: A continuation of the cyberpunk series, with improved gameplay but overall weaker story.
By WILL ARNOTT
The world was rocked to its core in the year 2027 when cybernetically enhanced members of society entered into a psychopathic rage. Millions lay dead after the violence stopped and the augmented individuals regained control over their bodies.
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is a direct sequel to Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and sees you playing as Adam Jensen, the cybernetically enhanced ex-cop, two years after he managed to halt the incident.
The overall gameplay remains more or less the same as Human Revolution, with multiple routes and playstyles available to the player.
The game is primarily first person, but switches to a third-person perspective when Adam takes cover. The cover system remains mostly about stealth, with plenty of ways to dart around undetected by patrolling guards.
Traversing the levels has never been such a delight, with more nooks and crannies to sneak around in. The map design is some of the best in the entire series, with plenty of ways to sneak around (or over) guards.
Alternatively, you can mow down anyone that gets in your way. When taking out guards, you can choose to do so lethally or not. The game doesn’t have an arbitrary morality score - it depends on you to make the decisions.
While Jensen never asked for his life-saving augmentations, they are still a treat to play with.
The skill tree allows you to pick and choose “augs” that help you play the way you want to. For example, sneakier players might grab the invisibility augment while players who have a bloodthirstier streak might get enhanced dermal armour to take more punishment.
Jensen also has a few new experimental mods, which offer awesome abilities at a price. The ability to become invulnerable, or slow down time for a brief instance, take their toll on your body, and can cause you to start experiencing glitches.
To cool down your system, you’ll need to permanently disable one of your regular cybernetics.
This sounds like a really cool idea, but immediately after you discover these augments, you are given a side mission to find a chip that lets you ignore this. Purpose defeated, essentially.
Energy to power all your fancy military hardware has undergone a significant improvement since Human Revolution. Adam no longer needs to devour protein bars by the bucketful anymore, with his energy reserves regenerating over time.
Most abilities will drop the maximum energy level, which needs to be reset with an uncommon and somewhat rare healing item. Energy management is no longer a chore, but can still be a hassle, especially if using the intense experimental toys.
Boss fights have also been vastly improved since Human Revolution, which was undoubtedly the weakest point of the predecessor.
Instead of trapping you in a small room with a walking tank with machine gun arms, you can now hide and attack from the shadows and hack turrets and drones to fight for you.
You can also lure them into traps, and if you do your homework, finish the battle within a single sentence. It allows you to use your game brain to its full potential.
The Mankind Divided story does have weaknesses too, unfortunately. It relies on the player’s knowledge of the first game. While it does provide a handy 12-minute recap for those that haven’t played Human Revolution, there are a lot of things a newcomer will be confused about.
The game throws you into the middle of an operation with very little information on who you are working for and why.
The lack of context in the first hour or so makes the story feel rather janky. You will be introduced to some characters Adam seems to know but the player has never seen before.
Adam hasn’t been sitting around twiddling his thumbs for the past two years, and has joined the newly formed Interpol anti-terrorism “Task Force 29”.
Most of the game takes place in Prague, a hotbed for augmented relations after it successfully passed segregation laws for the augmented.
It turns out that after augmented people went into a bloodthirsty rage, unaugmented people or "Naturals" started to fear their superhuman neighbours. This discrimination is all throughout the game, with insults like "Hanzer" (a play on the word "enhancer") or "Clank" being thrown around.
There are mandatory ID checks, anti-rejection drugs for implants becoming scarcer, and forced eviction to aug only ghettos. As Adam is filled to the gills with hi-tech cybernetics, the player gets to witness firsthand how it feels to be a second-class citizen.
It’s no wonder that the augmented terrorist attacks are happening more and more each day.
Human Revolution discussed classic cyberpunk themes of transhumanism and corporate control, with the gap between rich and poor widening with each new person able to afford the ability to literally become superhuman.
Mankind Divided, on the other hand, focuses on an issue closer to home for a lot of people, but lacks the depth of its predecessor.
The Augmented v. Natural divide is an obvious allegory for racism, but it doesn’t offer much in the way of discussing it.
The original Deus Ex released 16 years ago was praised by critics for its complex plot that showed what could happen in the future if certain decisions were made (with some fantastical Illuminati conspiracies thrown in for good fun).
Human Revolution's story showed how a power divide between classes could affect society as a whole.
Mankind Divided seems to just show racism as a terrible thing that separates people, but the discrimination doesn’t come from an internal bias or ideas of superiority. It comes from the fact that millions of people died because the entire augmented population was hacked, preventing it from making an in-depth critique of real-world issues.
Where Mankind Divided really shines are its side quests. Paying attention to your surroundings can lead to really interesting and unique missions from a wide variety of sources.
The biggest issue with them is that they can be very easy to miss. They often disappear if there is too much progression in the main quest line.
The game’s ending is its weakest point. Without spoiling anything, the game abruptly finishes, leaving plot threads completely unanswered and with a massive cliff-hanger that is obviously setting up for a sequel.
None of the Deus Ex games have had great endings, even the original ending was rather bland, but they have all been self-contained stories. It feels as if there is an entire third act just missing, either unfinished or to be held ransom by DLC.
Speaking of DLC, the single player $80 experience also features microtransactions. These include things like upgrade points and credit packs to help progression in the game itself.
Strangely, the game’s progression doesn’t feel altered in any way to accommodate for such a thing, and in fact, buying items to speed up in-game progression just feels redundant or detrimental to the gameplay experience.
Mankind Divided seems to have avoided the trap some other single-player games have fallen into with this kind of strategy. But this just highlights the fact that their inclusion is simply there to get a quick buck.
Alongside the main story is a mini game called Breach mode, which strips away all the cyberpunk aesthetics and puts the player in control of a digital avatar in a sterile white environment.
The player is tasked with completing levels as fast as possible and comparing scores with friends, but it feels so tacked on and irrelevant that it’s not really worth playing.
With that being said, Mankind Divided is still a very immersive action RPG, which will have you falling into conspiracy after conspiracy trying to unravel the truth.
The gameplay is some of the best in the series, with the developers taking criticism from the last game and giving everything a new coat of polish. The stealth, combat and exploration feel intuitive and fun, though fans looking for a better story than Human Revolution or the original will be sorely disappointed.