Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

Deus Ex: is still really fun. The ‘approach a situation the way you want’ formula etched out in 2011’s Human Revoution is a really satisfying approach to first-person action and Mankind Divided makes some additions and improvements to ensure that it doesn’t feel stale, as you shoot, punch, and stab your way through the fifteen-some-odd hours of the game’s campaign. More even, if you’re avid about really exploring the world. While there were some technical hiccups playing through on the Playstation, and the story left less of an overall impact on me than Human Revolution’s, the action in Mankind Divided still feels really slick, and cements it as a solid entry in the series.

Mankind Divided picks up shortly after Human Revolution left off. Which might seem odd considering returning protagonist, Adam Jensen, taking a nap at the bottom of the ocean at the end of the last game. He was scooped out, however, and is now working for Interpol…except not really. Jensen is also working with his friend(?) Alex to get inside Interpol to find out if your CO - James Miller - is, in fact, on the up and up. This is all set against the backdrop of civil unrest in Prague, as people have become disquieted by the idea of what “clanks” (one of the colourful slurs used to describe people with augmentations) are capable of. The story is entertaining and kept me engaged through the duration of the campaign, but dripped of ‘finger-on-the-pulse’ style fiction. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s certainly transparent. I like the idea of Jensen working multiple angles, never really sure who the “good guys” are, but it doesn’t stand up to Human Revolution’s story.

The game works its story into it’s gameplay too. After the inciting incident of an aug attack resulting in a bomb going off at a subway station, Prague goes under complete police lockdown. This leaves some nice restricted areas that you’ll have to creatively work your way through without being seen. It also means that every time you get to a new subway platform, a police officer is going to ask you for your papers while they make some hateful remark about your augments. It’s about as fun as it sounds. I get what Eidos Montréal are trying to convey in these instances, but they happen so frequently that I would pray I wouldn’t have to travel between districts during missions, because I could never be sure if some police officer was going to get fresh with me. On top of this, nothing ever comes from it. In my play-through, at least, there was never a moment where my papers were no longer sufficient, resulting in having to sneak past the cops, or take them all out in a hail of gunfire. It was just an unwelcome interruption every time I moved between the game’s several locations. Luckily once you’re through the checkpoints, you have a good deal of new toys to play with to make sure you’re as efficient as possible.

Thanks, yet again to the bombing, your augs take a hit at the beginning of the game and you have to get them checked out by your less than reputable associate. After attempting to tune you up, he informs you that you’ve got a bunch of hidden augmentations that he was able to unlock while you were under - presumably put there by the people who scooped you up out of the ocean. In addition to the abilities at your disposal in Human Revolution, Jensen is now able to hack things remotely, turn his arm into a Metroid style blaster, slow down time, and perform a quick dash a la Dishonored, among other things. The new abilities are awesome, but they come at a price. Since your body was never meant to work with these new augs, it will begin to overheat and work less efficiently the more points you throw into the new abilities. In order to combat this, you’ll have to permanently disable other potential ability trees. It’s an interesting balancing act and, at least at the beginning, ensures that you’re focusing on skills to inform a particular style of play.

Aside from this the game is, well, more Deus Ex. It’s designed to let you handle situations the way you want to handle them, and I think accomplishes that even more successfully than its predecessor. Secondary paths seemed more apparent in this game, and I never really felt that one way was better than another…just different. That’s the feeling that you want out of these games. There were several times that I had screwed up hacking the lock on someone’s door and instead decided to sidle along the windowsill to break in. There are a scary amount of human-sized ventilation shafts around that you can crawl through if you don’t have a keycard or some other item that’ll let you in the front, and if all else fails, you can always break down the door by force. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m just in a different place than I was when I played through Human Revolution, but I found the option focussed gameplay to be more satisfying in Mankind Divided. This is true of the combat as well.

While it won’t stack up against most first-person shooters, the combat does feel a modicum better than in Human Revolution. This is partly due to the hot-commands that allow you to change weapons quickly or customize guns on the fly. Moving from cover to cover feels snappier than it ever did in Human Revolution, and it seems like some liberties have been taken with how far away enemies have to be before they can no longer hear you taking one of them down with a stealth kill. It seems the team at Eidos Montréal has refined their approach to boss fights too, as I was able to take down one boss in one a single attack and some careful planning, which really adheres to the Deus Ex mission statement more closely than the original bosses of Human Revolution. All of this adds up to a more satisfying gameplay experience that significantly more refined than the last Deus Ex outing.

Mankind Divided is also visually superior to Human Revolution, though this doesn’t mean the game is always a looker. It’s capable of looking nice in spots, but it’s clear that certain elements of the game were favoured over others. Jensen and Alex’s character models, for example, are up there in quality, but there are some rough looking citizens in Prague. Interactions between characters can also come off as stilted. Canned dialogue feels unnatural as characters routinely take just a little too long to answer one another. Still, I found the game’s art style pleasing. While the black and gold, polygonal look of Human Revolution permeates less of Mankind Divided, I found Eidos Montréal’s take on a grim, post-aug future rather poignant. Even if the frame-rate dips every so often. I had some major hiccups on the Playstation 4. The aforementioned frame-rate was less than reliable in spots, and the game completely crashed on me more than once. This bummer was doubled by the fact that I would usually have to pick the game up from a few minutes before the crash and the load times are undesirable. I haven’t seen the game running on a PC yet, but if it’s anything like Human Revolution I would wager that’s probably the place to play it.

I wasn’t completely sold on this game until I started playing it, but once I did I was reminded that I really like this style of game. Being given the options to approach situations a multitude of ways remains really satisfying, and is executed superbly in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. Even through the technical problems, I kept returning to Mankind Divided to try new tactics and strategies on different situations. I’d look for unconventional entrances to buildings, and try to get through entire missions without being seen - often times successfully. Sometimes I’d even just go to a cool cyberpunk nudie club and have a few shots of absinthe at the bar, because that’s an option. And this game is all about options.