It’s hard to be unbiased when it comes to the subject of Deus Ex. Released in 2000, the cyberpunk title had a huge impact on my expectations of role-playing games and what they were capable of. The first of its kind, this FPS-RPG hybrid had open-world and adventure elements that no game prior had managed to successfully combine. With its dystopian near-future setting steeped in conspiracy theories and a rich lore, Deus Ex was not only memorable, it was revolutionary.
After remaining dormant for more than half a decade, the Deus Ex brand made its way into the hands of Eidos Montreal as the studio’s first game. Given the pedigree of the original, expectations were riding high. With a memorable new protagonist, Adam Jensen, and a setting that was far richer and more vibrant than the original games, Deus Ex: Human Revolution exceeded expectations. Aside from the boss fights and lame ending, that is.
In all its iterations, Deus Ex has always offered gamers a rich variety of solutions to problems—in both combat and exploration. Gamers can choose to shoot their way through corridors and play parts of the game like a straightforward FPS. More methodical gamers can choose stealth by sneaking through alternate pathways.
Both options are fully viable in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. Cybernetic augmentations enhance both playstyles. For my part, I took the violent route and beefed up my reflexes to take down multiple targets at once, often with bloody results. Gamers more inclined towards stealth can cloak their movements with sound-suppressing leg augmentations, hacking, and a few other key abilities. Why bother shooting your way through the front door when you can get turrets to do your dirty work for you?
The game is as much fun to play as a straightforward FPS, or as a Metal Gear Solid-inspired stealth game made by Hideo Kojima.
Deus Ex has always offered a wealth of environmental detail, and Mankind Divided steps it up rather significantly. Every room in the game—from Adam Jensen’s Prague apartment to the many buildings and locations you’ll set foot in—is crafted with meticulous detail. The world feels lived in—cluttered, in a good way. It’s a whole universe away from the empty, procedurally generated worlds of No Man’s Sky.
Beyond how it simply looks, Mankind Divided’s setting is one of substance. With regards to its politics and the senseless, race-baiting outrage surrounding its use of “mechanical apartheid” and other phrases in marketing, the game does remarkably well in conveying a believable sense of oppression—the likes of which no game has ever managed to convincingly portray.
The year is 2029, but it’s not just made up of future cops with high-powered weapons who point their guns at minorities. The dystopian setting actually feels oppressive, and the game manages to impart this feeling in myriad ways: citizens are given warrantless searches, and there are checkpoints everywhere that gamers, playing as Adam Jensen, will be forced to endure as he has his papers checked for the umpteenth time. It might feel like a chore for gamers used to instant gratification—but that’s only because it’s supposed to make you feel that way.
It has culture: there is a cult that worships the concept of human-machine consciousness transfer; an underground culture of artist-hacker-activists; and pro-human racists who both fear and loathe anyone with mechanical augmentations. Given the cataclysmic events at the end of the previous game, it’s easy to see why they’d hold to such views, and Adam Jensen’s views are shaped by the player’s actions and reactions throughout the story. Voiced by Elias Toufexis, Adam Jensen’s words and responses to everyone he meets add necessary impact and emotion to anything you might personally feel.
More so than any previous title in the series, Mankind Divided forces players to make difficult choices along the way that aren’t simply options between good and bad. Decisions are often complicated, some with far-reaching consequences. Without spoiling too much, one of the early decisions you make involves procuring fake identity cards for two augmented humans in Prague. You’re not informed that you’ll have to decide which of them gets to secure their identity while the other is left to the mercy of the city’s authoritarian police and possibly shipped off to a concentration camp. And as for the artist who forged their documentation? You can decide her fate, too. Or you can simply choose to help none of them—inaction is also an option.
Already, members of the games press are outraged over the Mankind Divided’s use of the term “social justice warrior.” A writer at Paste Magazine even expressed upset (spoiler warning) that the game doesn’t tell you who the good guys and bad guys are in infantile, binary terms. Gamers must make decisions on their own—just as any good RPG allows. Without spoiling anything, let’s just say the marginalized aren’t exactly paragons of virtue. It’s not a BioWare game, and that’s a good thing.
The choices the player has to make and their narrative outcomes aren’t simple. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is nothing if not complex.
The only area in Mankind Divided that could be considered weak is its slow-to-burn opening that doesn’t put players into the meat of the game, offering instead a standard, corridor-shooter mission reminiscent of Call of Duty. Though it’s intended to teach the game’s basic combat mechanics, it serves more to mislead players away from the heart of the game: its fully explorable open-world environment.
Playing on the PC, I also experienced a few technical hitches but it’s nothing the developers aren’t already fixing in the day one patch. I was warned by the publisher that I’d experience a few hiccups, so I knew what I was getting into. A DX12 update is also forthcoming in early September to further improve the game’s performance.
Come for the fluid gameplay mechanics, and stay for everything else it has to offer. If you’re a fan of series, then you’ll certainly love everything Deus Ex: Mankind Divided has to offer. And even if you aren’t, there’s a great chance you’ll enjoy it anyway because it’s just a damn good game—if not one of the best games you’ll play this year.
