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Deus Ex: Mankind Divided review – beautiful if half-baked cyberpunk sequel
Eidos Montreal’s near-future thriller presents a visually impressive dystopian playground, but a wonky narrative and some shoddy touches tarnish its potentialSince its debut 16 years ago, Deus Ex’s primary weapon has been choice: where to go, how to get there, who to speak to and how to speak to them are all up to you in a series where almost every scenario has multiple outcomes. After releasing 2011’s Human Revolution – a lavishly depicted near-future thriller – to widespread critical acclaim, developer Eidos Montreal’s follow up, Mankind Divided, picks up the exact same threads that its predecessor left tantalisingly unanswered five years ago.
This is a tall order and its makers clearly recognise it, front-ending the game’s campaign with an almost laughably long 12-minute recap to bring you up to speed on everything Deus Ex. Protagonist Adam Jensen returns – still half-Lagerfeld, half-Motorola Razr – working as a special agent at Interpol two years after the events of Human Revolution. Like many, he’s coming to terms with the devastating aftereffects of The Incident – a cyber-attack that deliberately caused the bio-technologically “augmented” population to turn violent against their will, leaving millions dead. It was a global catalyst, accelerating the divisions between the human and augmented populations, but as thematically charged a setup as this is, Adam and his world can’t help but feel outdated.
Mankind Divided is undeniably beautiful, soaked in the neon golds and vibrant lights that made its predecessor such a striking spectacle, but its weak opening results in a slow start that never quite gains the momentum it needs. When it does finally get going, some shoddy voice work and awful facial animations make for a game that fails to convey the societal and racial messages that its strong writing attempts to.
After a pre-credits mission in Dubai sets up the game’s central conspiracy, you relocate to Prague.
Worse yet, it offers very few notable opinions on its focal prejudices, and the best it seems to do to force home its messaging is interrupt you with annoying documentation checks between metro stations. There’s racist graffiti on the walls, slurs get shouted as you walk through the streets, but the overall result is a social commentary that feels, at best, lacking conviction.
After a pre-credits mission in Dubai sets up the game’s central conspiracy, you relocate to Prague; a rich, multifaceted hub full of apartment blocks, a bank, abandoned theatre and underground anti-terrorism facility. Prague never imposes the same visual impact as Human Revolution’s depiction of Hengsha or Detroit, but it is explored and revisited several times in different visual states over the game’s 20-25 hours, and it’s a veritable playground of stuff to do. Between the various metro stations that transport you to each corner of the capital, you’ll find multiple side quests that are multi-part branching path adventures in themselves. There’s a bank break-in to dig up dodgy info on one of the game’s main mega-corps, and an investigation into an underground cult – finding every possible side story is a completionist dream, and the game makes pursuing these optional plots worthwhile with some great moments that rival the main story.
There are a couple of mainline departures from the Czech capital; an infiltration into Golem City – a cramped, higgledy-piggledy ghetto for the augmented that is by far the game’s most interesting setting – as well as a recon mission to a facility in the Swiss Alps and a rescue mission in London. Despite these four locations, each far larger than anything in any Deus Ex previously, Mankind Divided doesn’t feel half the grandiose globe-trotter that Human Revolution was. In some ways, this works in the game’s favour, grounding itself to focus its story. In others, it results in a game that’s half-baked, especially after proceedings aren’t so much cut short as they are forcefully cauterised, resulting in the most telegraphed setup for a sequel since 2004’s Halo 2.
Despite an improved control scheme, combat is still the least enjoyable way to play.
But, despite its terrible non-ending and the uninspiring boss fight that triggers it, the game still frequently finds immense strength in its moment-to-moment play. Mankind Divided retains the series’ mechanical tri-force of stealth, hacking and combat, but it does a much better job of blending these different styles – even if you want to play stealthily, for example, you’ll benefit from investing upgrade points into combat and hacking abilities to benefit from different routes that these styles allow.
After setting up a narrative hard-reset of Adam’s abilities, the resulting blank slate lets you experiment with the huge variety of augments and weapons. There’s an invisibility cloak, smart vision for seeing through walls, a set of rebreather lungs for gas immunity, a social enhancer to open up more conversational options at certain points in the game, and lethal and non-lethal weapons aplenty. There are also new “overclock” augments, too, which Jensen uncovers when he undergoes surgery at the beginning of the game, including a gauss wrist attachment that sends enemies flying, a long-range taser, and a remote hacking tool that’s incredibly useful when you’re in a sticky spot. Coupled with your existing playthings, these eight over-clocked augments elevate Mankind Divided’s depth beyond the strong foundations that Human Revolution laid out.
This leads to a more fluid role-playing experience, but one which suffers from many of the same pitfalls as its predecessor. Despite an improved control scheme, combat is still the least enjoyable way to play, and shooting just isn’t as satisfying as it needs to be to become your primary choice. Similarly, hacking is still really empowering, allowing you to turn the tide by sabotaging turrets, controlling cameras remotely and manipulating walker robots to turn on your enemies, but the mini-game with which you hack terminals and computers isn’t fun enough to justify how often you’ll be doing it.
The multitude of options at almost every other stage of the game apart from the ending is impressive.
Regardless of this, the open-ended nature of almost all missions means that you’re rarely punished for whichever way you want to play – you will find that in moments where you have to hack something, for example, it won’t require any upgrades to get past cybersecurity – and this makes for a game that begs to be played, manipulated and re-explored on several occasions, even despite its uneven core mechanics (something that the game’s New Game Plus encourages, too). It’s a disappointment that the game’s biggest moments don’t seem to have the multitude of outcomes that some of its smaller missions do; its grand finale seems to be the same no matter what your endgame decisions might be, but the multitude of options at almost every other stage of the game is impressive.
As a completely separate component from the main story, Breach mode adds time-trial style challenges. It’s by no means a worthy replacement of, you know, the end of the story, but Breach has some cool ideas, online leaderboards and exclusive augmentations that aren’t featured in the main game.
It’s a shame that in a world obsessed with the conflict between man and machine, Mankind Divided’s characters feel more robot than human. Hopefully, Eidos Montreal has strong post-release support planned to fill in the absent third act. Regardless of this, the game’s broad level of creative opportunities, memorable infiltrations and beautiful attention to detail in such a visually interesting world make for a game that’s fun to experiment with again and again, despite its structural cracks.
Guardian