Deus Ex: Mankind Divided – Overview/ Review (with Spoilers)

Overview

Adam Jensen is back and on a new case. One in which he is trying to investigate one terrorist attack and stop a forthcoming one.

Trigger Warning(s)
Everything you’d normally expect from an M rated game

Play Through Time
Approximately 48 Hours

Storyline

After around 2 years since the events of Human Evolution, Adam finds himself now working for Interpol as Serif Industries has fallen thanks to what is universally called “The Incident.” The historic moment when all Augs became murderous and has since led to distrust of the augmented and high levels of prejudice across the world. But specifically in Prague, where the game primarily takes place, the distrust has reached new levels as a segregated ghetto of a city has been built for the augmented and a train station bombing happens. All of which is blamed on the pro-Aug rights group ARC. Thus leading to Adam to take part in a multitude of missions to investigate the bombing, an incident that happens in Dubai, which serves as the tutorial level, and an investigation into the accusations of ARC being responsible for multiple terrorist attacks.

Review Summary

-Rental-

Highlights

Let me begin by saying, being that I have never been necessarily good at shooters, even on what could be considered Normal difficulty, I struggled. But thankfully the game isn’t a straight forward shooter. With the ability to hack, hide, cloak, and other means of avoiding combat, for those of us who don’t have the patience to duck, cover, and shoot, or aren’t the type who like to run in guns blazing, there are options. In fact, playing a non-lethal game is entirely possible. Granted, it is a bit difficult, but even the final, if not the only boss in the game, can be taken down without firing a bullet. A quite neat option considering video games have come to a point where there is an increased desire to give the player options. Though while most game simply provides dialog choices, which this game offers and to a certain degree makes important, it seems almost revolutionary to offer the ability to simply knock out everyone and press on with your objective.

But I would be remiss if I didn’t note how enjoyable both the story and side quests were. Now, I don’t believe, even with around 2 days of gameplay, I found and played every last side quest and found every last item. I did try, but for reasons below I eventually came to a point where I just wanted to finish this game. With that said, be it doing a murder investigation, in which every clue mattered, to convincing people to trust Adam, much less the main plot in which I was led around to investigate ARC and the plans of some of its members, I did ultimately enjoy myself. Though what I especially enjoyed was the hacking mini-game which I almost wish was a mobile game in of itself.

Low Points

I played this game on a Steam controller and, as usual, at this point, the game wasn’t necessarily optimized for it. But besides that control issue, perhaps the main problem of this game is as vast as it sometimes seems, you feel so restricted. Though that is the problem of any game which tries to be open world. It has all these buildings, alleyways, and NPCs, but most of it is an illusion, something to be seen but not fully interacted with. But that is a general issue, my specific issue is how the game will have you travel all the way over here, take a train, and continue your journey, only to go back to where you original was. That was annoying as hell and without a quick travel feature, I often found myself more so interested in exploring the sewers or the few buildings I could walk into vs. continuing the story.

But, in general, I wouldn’t say there are any real major issues with this game. It did stutter on me sometimes, the load times between locations seemed a bit longer than I would like, and sometimes subtitles didn’t show up, but there aren’t any major issues.

On The Fence

As many already know, and I mention, part of the game’s, for a lack of a better term, atmosphere is about the rights of Augs and this has led to many bringing up the Black Lives Matter movement. To me, I would say the issues Augs are facing more correlates to the plight of Muslims across the world. But that little tidbit is an article I haven’t the mind to write.

Overall

Perhaps what has me feeling this is a rental is that outside of the option to play non-lethal, and the fun hacking mini-game, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided feels like any other open-ended action/adventure/shooter game. Yes, it tries to be political, but that aspect of the game isn’t something strongly done. It is like Square-Enix wanted to use those hot topics for advertisement but not for serious exploration. Hence the rental label for while, I’m sure, DLC will extend many people’s play times, this just doesn’t have the replay value to really put down $60.