REVIEW

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Review

by Ford James, September 18th, 2016

Deus Ex has always taken pride in giving the player choice throughout every aspect of the experience; the routes you take to the objective you choose, the responses you make to who you give the privilege of conversing with you. Every step you take, every word you utter can impact the outcome of each scenario and the game as a whole. Deus Ex is one of the finer games of 2016 so far, but it comes with its fair share of flaws too.

Set two years after the ‘Aug Incident’ in Human Revolution, Mankind Divided sees players return to the shoes of Adam Jensen; ex-Chief of Security at Sarif Industries, current member of anti-terrorism group Task Force 29. What sets Adam apart from everyone else at TF29 is his augmentations. They’re fairly commonplace in the Deus Ex universe, although Adam’s are military grade enhancements whereas the people you’ll walk past on the streets of Prague have simple limb replacements at best. To the ‘normal’ people though, there is no difference. The Aug Incident has led a large portion of the world to believe that all augmented beings are dangerous and that’s the pre-conception Adam is working to defeat.

After the tutorial mission, set in a large hotel in Dubai where Adam and the TF29 crew are to prevent an illegal deal from going down but get ambushed by some fellas with fancy gold masks, the majority of the game is set in Prague, Czech Republic. A busy train station is bombed by a terrorist group, causing widespread panic and blame falls upon the Augmented Rights Coalition (ARC). Jensen sets out to discover the real culprits, helping as many individuals as he can along the way. He’s a Good Samaritan, if you ignore his tendency to break into every single locked property, hack every computer and steal every bottle of Neuropozyne he finds for his own financial gain.

The juxtaposition of the game enticing you to commit all these comparably petty crimes in the grand scheme of things means the first few times you read somebody’s private emails, you try to mentally justify your actions despite there often being no reason at all other than you’re a nosey bugger. Combined with having to fling refrigerators and cardboard boxes around the room to find hidden paths and items, it’s a mystery the citizens of Prague aren’t frightened of an elusive menace trashing everybody’s apartments.

It’s not just Jensen’s inquisitive nature that spurs his trespassing and criminal nature. A lot of information about various characters, both key and minor, can be found, which can give you the edge in conversations. Codes and passwords for laptops, doors, and security terminals are plentiful too, saving you the effort of hacking or using a multi tool which automatically bypasses locks for you, although they’re not difficult to acquire. The abundance of multi tools means you don’t need to upgrade the hacking skill tree past level three, as there aren’t a lot of level four or five terminals so simply save your multi tools for those and the world becomes your oyster.

Most of the beloved augmentations from Human Revolution make a return, with a few new ones and a new mechanic with so called “experimental” augs. Early on in the game Jensen visits his black market augmentation specialist, Koller. He puts Jensen to sleep and takes a look inside and discovers a bunch of augments that were added without Jensen’s knowledge – proper high end stuff. Investing points into these augments can cause Jensen’s system to be unstable, meaning you have to manage what upgrades you have active at any one time. Nothing particularly difficult or taxing, just something to keep an eye on that prevents you from being too powerful.

Two types of play style become very clear from the get go; you have the option of stealth or assault. You’re coerced into one or the other in the tutorial by choosing either a tranquiliser or sniper rifle, and a stun gun or 10mm pistol. The thing is, stealth has always felt like the “right” option, given Jensen’s occupation. It’s not in his interest to mow down every police offer, cause chaos in the centre of Prague. He needs to stay discrete due to his occupation and the whole game revolves around putting other people first, saving lives and solving the mystery of the Ruzicka train station bombing. So while there’s shotgun shells and frag grenades littered in drawers and weapon cabinets, it feels like the game was built around the idea of stealth. Especially since there’s a specific achievement for not killing anyone during a single play through.

Prague is undoubtedly a unique and diverse city to be in, even more so given the tense relations and hostile atmosphere amongst civilians and law enforcement. The city consists of four different suburbs; the area where Jensen’s flat is, then three interlinking areas you need to travel to via subway. Disappointingly, for a free roam game, Prague is nowhere near as big or expansive as you’d expect. You can get from one side to the other of the largest area in less than a few minutes. Prague is a world famous city with a lot of world renowned landmarks, but the only indication that you’re in Prague is the language and accents of the civilians, and the signs and place names.

What is lacking in actual area is made up for with the verticality and amount of detail, in terms of both the number of routes and areas to explore, and visual fidelity. Each room often has multiple access points, through air vents, locked doors or simply shooting your way through anyone who will try to prevent you from gaining access. Most buildings you gain access too will often have a basement, with adjoining rooms downstairs and then more air vents to traverse, along with some having an upstairs. If you truly take the time to explore, you’ll be making a lot of trips back and forth to the black market dealer who will happily buy your unwanted acquisitions.

Exploring too much can have drawbacks though. While you get flown off to a few locations outside of Prague for main missions, a lot of them take place inside the city and it’s possible to accidentally stumble into places you’re not supposed to be yet. A prime example of this is when I was in the compound of the Dvali, the main enemy faction in the game, for a mission midway through the game. I continued exploring due to my own curiosity slightly past where the mission took me, and stumbled upon the headquarters for the Dvali boss himself. I stunned him and his associates so I could steal all his valuables then got out of there like a bat out of hell. You’d think that he’d remember the encounter or tell his crew to be on the lookout for me during future missions, but it was like it never even happened to him. When I did have to revisit that area, I was able to speed run through it because I’d already taken everything worth stealing and knew my way to his location as I’d been there before.

One augmentation essentially gives you x-ray vision, highlighting everything you can interact with such as crafting parts which are used for things like ammo and multi tools, hidden doors behind boxes, and things you can pick up. It’s the last one that becomes a nuisance; it’s not necessary to highlight every single fridge, box and stool. It’s easy to mistake them as things you can equip or actually put in your inventory, so the screen often becomes quite cluttered when in buildings. It’s still a worthy augmentation to upgrade but it does drain your energy quite fast at the start of the game, meaning you can’t have it active for very long.

The augmentation system is unfortunately favoured quite heavily for a lethal play through. There aren’t many upgrades you can get that massively enhance a stealthy play through bar the invisibility and hacking. There’s quite a few that affect things like your radar, meaning you know how much noise you’re making, the vision cone for enemies etc, but they’re by no means required and I soon found myself unsure what to invest my praxis points in simply because there wasn’t anything else important that I needed.

Key characters like Jensen, Miller, Vega and Marchenko look simply fantastic in cutscenes. Elias Toufexis does another outstanding job as Jensen while Peter Sefaranowicz is a great Duncan MacReady, but they’re the only two that really stand out. The other voice actors are average at best, while the facial animations for non-key characters are shoddily done and poorly captured.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided’s strongest point by far is the story and the narrative, but at the same time it’s also weak compared to other games of a similar genre. It tries to tackle current political events, for example #AugLivesMatter is a trend pushed by the developers and while it’s refreshing to see such a huge title try to represent such an issue, it also misses the mark somewhat. It’s unfair to count this as a black mark against the game since Deus Ex is obviously a completely fictional universe and it can be represented however the developers like, but it’s a point worth mentioning. The ending after the final boss fight is also quite the let-down, leaving players on a huge cliff-hanger. It gives the impression, as many games these days do, that there was a lot more planned but they didn’t get round to implementing it. It also shows in the length of the story, as my playthrough took 30 hours with every single side mission completed, nearly all locations explored and all points of interest visited. I was fairly surprised that was the end when I got there, so hopefully the planned DLC will add some substantial content to what should’ve been a considerably longer game.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is one of the finest games of 2016, but with the impending release schedule, I don’t expect it to hold that title for long. After the immense success of Human Revolution, Mankind Divided falls a little shorter than expected despite still being an enjoyable game. It’s not a title worth sprinting to the shop for unless you’re a huge Deus Ex fan but even then, you’ll likely still be let down. Human Revolution’s legacy is a tough one to live up to and it gave it a go but unfortunately fell short.