Occasionally you’ll also be able to avert conflict via dialogue. There are typically three means of progressing through each area: combat, stealth or hacking. This reboot forces you to slowly rebuild and prioritize Jensen’s abilities and tailor them around exactly how you want to play the game. Ordinarily this is a frustrating moment for me in action-adventure games that item-gate their areas, but Mankind Divided does a pretty good job of building a compelling fictional context for it.
If you played Deus Ex: Human Revolution, you may be raising your hand frustratedly, demanding to know how much more evolved (revolved?) Jensen could possibly be after two additional years of experience and refinement in his abilities, and the answer is, you get Metroid’ed - that is to say, Eidos Montreal contrives a series of events to, well, let’s say "factory-reset" Jensen’s firmware.
As you complete various missions, both critical-path tasks and involved side tasks, you’ll earn experience points that allow you to evolve and upgrade Jensen’s abilities. In the middle of it all is Adam Jensen, a former Detroit cop turned augmented government agent.ĭeus Ex: Mankind Divided is a (fill in the blank)-action-RPG hybrid, where it’s largely up to you as a player to fill in that blank. There was bloodshed and unrest all over the planet, and once the dust cleared, the augmented who remained were looked at with distrust by the world around them. Mankind Divided opens two years after The Incident - where a sudden uncontrolled psychosis in every cybernetically augmented human on the planet was triggered deliberately, causing them to violently lash out at anyone around them.
And its fiction holds it up, even as the ambition it suggests never quite manifests. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided shines as an exercise in discovery, in presenting players with increasingly complicated problems and a huge amount of ways to solve them. And, once again, Eidos Montreal seems determined to address the challenges that its predecessor faced. Now, five years later, Eidos Montreal has resurrected Adam Jensen in a world dealing with the aftermath of Human Revolution's augmented disaster. If you'll allow me the cliche, Human Revolution wasn't a perfect game, but it was brave, taking what worked in the series and simplifying along the way to tell an interesting story with breathtaking style and finesse.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution was a prequel that took Invisible War's console-friendly ideas and approachability and refined them, and the game tied it all together with a stunning neo-Renaissance aesthetic applied to a cybernetic future. To revive it, Eidos Montreal rolled back the clock. The series lay more or less defunct after the disappointing reception of 2003's Deus Ex: Invisible War and the sort-of spinoff Project: Snowblind. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided developer Eidos Montreal was a team founded almost exclusively to breathe life into Deus Ex.