An Improvement On Human Revolution
Mankind Divded made a horrible first impression. The PC port has a robust featureset (lots of options, FOV adjustment, etc) but it struggles to maintain 60 frames per second even with the high-end features turned off. The load times are long, and the post-processed anti aliasing blurs the screen so much that they had to put in an ugly sharpening filter that makes the game look like a jpeg from 1997. The game crashed on me about 5 times in my 30-hour playtime (possibly because I was using DirectX12). I managed to soft lock the game by pressing Esc while my inventory wheel was up. Tesselation needs to be disabled or it turns everyone's heads semi-transparent. I'd call it a technical nightmare, but since I've played Invisible War I at least know it could be much worse.
Once you get out of the less than ideal tutorial mission in Dubai and step into Prague, however, the game picks up dramatically. Prague is a great hub world with tons of secret passages and multiple ways to access even arbitrary areas. Interiors are not separated by loading screens. In fact, only one loading area exists to separate a small 1/5 of the hub. This creates some fun possibilities, the most simple of which is being able to bypass locked apartment doors by climbing up the side of the building and opening the window. Sewers run underneath the city with, again, no loading. Air ducts and breakable walls connect one storefront to another, so paying attention to their layouts is useful. There are tons of hidden stories (meet a shopkeeper, then find his apartment on the other side of the map and read his emails) as well as official sidequests. All of this is very welcome after Human Revolution, which usually felt like a series of hallways broken up with stealth puzzle box rooms.
Another way Mankind Divided one-ups its predecessor is in its balancing of Jensen's skills and augmentations. Human Revolution leaned very heavily on its stealth and hacking, to the detriment of everything else, especially combat. In Mankind Divided, I very specifically chose not to upgrade my hacking skills (something unthinkable in HR) and came away very satisfied. A vast majority of locked doors can by blown up, and most can by bypassed through exploration or careful examination of the environment. Stealth is also less vital overall, to the point where I rarely found myself using my cloak or even the cover system at all-- although those options still exist. In addition to this re-balancing, there are new augs (which, until halfway through the game, require a trade-off to use). These are fun and useful, but I didn't find them to be strikingly so. I got some use out of the new slow motion aug and the one that is basically a ripoff of the Blink spell from Dishonored. There's also a super armor aug I never bought but it sounded fun.
Some of the other new additions are also welcome. You get a Crysis-style on-the-fly weapon adjustment system that lets you change ammo types, firing modes, and scopes at will. Multi-tools return from the original Deus Ex and offer a free hack if you're willing to expend the resource (and the time, they take a while). There's a new crafting system. I usually see the word 'crafting' as cause for concern, but really all it means is that there is an alternative currency in addition to money. Money buys things, "crafting parts" which are found all over the place can be spent to make certain items or to pump into your weapons for (a very negligible) performance gain. And it's not even tied to microtransactions, either.
One point where Mankind Divided falls short of Human Revolution is in its physics. Despite the addition of a button that lets you rotate items in your hands, which is a great idea and should be in every game with crate-stacking from now on, the physics are kind of a mess to interact with. The crates just don't like to behave or stack properly. If you're standing on a crate, any object you're holding can actually knock what you're standing on out from under you-- and probably directly into whatever electricity or lava floor you were trying to stack crates to avoid. The biggest problem with the physics, and possibly the entire game even counting the crashes are the jumping mechanics. The jumping in this game is outright terrible. See, any time you jump it tries to guess what it is you're jumping to and "helps you out" by automating your trajectory and attempting to 'magnetize' you to that ledge. For anyone who has ever played any video game with jumping since Super Mario Bros, this feels pretty awkward on its own. But then you have to factor in the times that the game guesses incorrectly and tries to adjust your trajectory and magnetize you to ledges you did not intend to jump to at all. There was one instance where this kept happening. I wanted to jump into a vent mounted on the ceiling, but Jensen just refused to do it. It was maddening.
The consensus on Mankind Divided's story is that it's boring when compared to Human Revolution. I disagree, since I found HR's story to be a bit of a mess. It's got holes where massive cuts were made, important information is left hidden in missable emails or left to implication, many of the characters (such as the boss fights) had no substance to them, and I bumbled through most of my first playthrough not really knowing what was going on. Mankind Divided wisely puts more focus on the Illuminati angle, which makes it feel more like a prequel to Deus Ex than Human Revolution did. The theme this time is racism, with augmented people being treated as a flimsy XMen-style stand-in for Muslims since the bigotry is largely based on fear of radicalized violence. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you think about it too much, which isn't helped by it being based off of Human Revolution's ending, which didn't make much sense to begin with. It also seems like a pretty convenient way for a white video-game-protagonist-man to be given oppressed minority status. That being said, it's pretty effective in spite of those things. The game takes pains to make you feel like The System's bitch, with cops muttering things about, "we should just kill em all," as they see you walk past and the game stopping to let them hassle you for your papers whenever you fast travel to a new location. The premise is iffy, but in the moment it works.
In all, I think Mankind Divded is an improvement on Human Revolution in just about every way.
Except the jumping. And the crashes. And the jpeg filter. And the load times.
