Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Review

The First 15

I choose the “Give Me a Challenge” difficulty, which is the equivalent of Normal. There’s a hardcore mode as well where once you die your game ends, but you have to beat the game once before you’re allowed to choose that. What is it with games these says renaming their difficulties from the standard Easy/Normal/Hard?

At the start you have the option to watch a recap video of the first game. I wish more games would do this. Even having beaten the first game, the video was extremely helpful in identifying the major events and players from the first game.

On the ride to the first mission you’re given the option of lethal/non-lethal and close combat/sniper. I choose non-lethal sniper which earns me a tranquilizer rifle.

The game provides me with a few tutorials on the different game systems.

I’m noticing that even though things seem linear, if I start poking around in corners I can usually find an alternate path to the next room. And usually that alternative path puts me in a great place to snipe people from.

I ran out of sniper tranquilizer ammo. It took me a few missteps, but I finally figured out that I could sneak up behind someone and do a takedown. Why wasn’t there a tutorial on this?

Story

The story in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is about society following the Aug Incident from the first game. What follows is how humanity has become divided (hence the name of the game) between Augs and Naturals. There seem to be more Naturals than Augs, and more importantly the whole of the military seems to be made up of all Naturals. As a result, prejudice against Augs is rampant leading to violence and exploitation. The game is plenty obvious about this, but it also expresses this divide in more subtle ways. For instance, every time you take the subway, you get stopped by the police who want to look over your papers since you’re a “clank”. They always let you through, but just the fact that they singled you out for being an aug forces you to acknowledge society’s prejudice since part of that prejudice is being directed at you specifically. Then of course there are other more subtle reminders such as graffiti on the walls stating that “A wrench is a tool, not a person,” or separate bathrooms for Augs or shopkeepers who won’t sell to you because you’re an Aug. The train is also divided into Naturals and Augs, and the police will yell at you if you take the Naturals train. There’s no one thing that makes the story feel real, rather it’s a series of little things that all work together to form a whole narrative.

The main story is an exploration of what it means to be human, especially as someone like you who is more metal than flesh. You can keep strictly to the main storyline or branch out and follow a series of side quests that have you doing everything from investigating a murder to working with the criminal underworld. Or you can forgo both and just break into a bank (not that I got distracted doing exactly that for a few hours). I want to commend the storywriters for creating a series of narratives that feel completely at home within the world they built. I won’t go too much more into the story to avoid spoilers, but I found the events and conversations both interesting and compelling.

Interface and Controls

The basic controls for the game work well enough. The game uses a fairly standard cover system. Combat felt fluid enough (though admittedly I did almost everything stealth). It’s all of the non-combat interacts that cause problems. For instance, pressing TAB (on the PC) will open the player’s inventory, but pressing it again does nothing (like closing the inventory).

The controls during the hacking mini-game are fine except for one glaring exception. When you click on a node, it pops out a radial menu that provides you with options on how to interact with that node (hack, fortify, nuke). The problem is, the boxes have a tendency to cover up other nodes around the currently highlighted node. Often times I had to click in empty space to make the radial menu go away so I could see what I was doing. Sometimes when going fast I’d accidentally fortify the node I was currently on when I meant to hack the next node, and the act of fortifying the node would alert the system to my presence and then I’d fail the hack. I don’t understand why this is such an issue when the fix is so simple. Just bring the radial menu in so that it’s only half as far away from the highlighted node as it is currently. I’m surprised that this made it past all of their QA testing given how glaringly problematic it makes the system to use.

While in the sell items menu you can’t examine an item. There are some items that only exist to be sold, but to check which ones those are I have to close out of the shop menu completely so I can examine the item. My advice would be that when players mouse over an item it displays the information that would normally display when examining an item in the player’s inventory.

Something that really bothered me is that the main character clips through his own outfit. Most of these problems involve the tall collar of his jacket. The back of his head clips through the back of the collar and his chin/beard clips through the sides of the collar when he turns his head. This is happening constantly during conversations (which are in 3rd person). Even late into the game it’s still awkward to see and distracts from what else is happening on screen. Either pull back his collar so that it doesn’t clip, or just get rid of it entirely. The constant clipping is sloppy and awkward.

One extremely annoying bug is if you load a save file in which your character was pressed up against cover, the game will immediately have your character move as if you’d told Jensen to vault over or around the cover. This could potentially put you in a permanently bad spot if you saved too close to enemy soldiers since you can’t cancel the movement before they’ll spot you.

Small pet peeve, but if you’re going to put mirrors in the game than they should reflect the main character. If you’re not going to do that, then don’t put mirrors in your game. It’s jarring as a player to stand in front of a mirror and only see the room behind you.

Gameplay

The thing I want to highlight most about Deus Ex is the sheer brilliance of the level design. If you’re studying to be a level designer, then this is the game you want to learn from. Every objective has at least three different ways to reach it. Whether you choose to fight your way through the front door, hack your way through a side door, punch yourself a new door through a weakened wall, search around for the pass code, go around through the air vents, or maybe climb up the side of the building and go in through the window, you really do have the freedom to feel clever in how they approach a mission. When you first enter a new area things seem almost impossible with too many enemies, cameras, turrets, and drones. But if you spend some time poking around you’ll find that you have a lot more freedom of movement than you initially thought and lots of options provided you have the right augments to take advantage of them. All in all the level design is beautifully done and easily the game’s biggest selling point.

Now, having sung the praises of the level design team, there are some parts of the game where you spend too much time just getting through the level. There’s a portion of the game where you have to talk to an important leader (no spoilers, I promise) and you spend forever navigating your way first to his compound and then through his compound and then out again after your conversation. The level layout maintained a high standard throughout, but the developers needed to do something to help change up the gameplay a bit.

The augment system is very well done. Upon gaining access to it, I immediately wanted almost all of them. Fortunately the game starts you off with 7 Praxis (ability points) to invest however you want. There are some advanced augment trees that require you to permanently disable another augment tree in order to use, which creates an interesting give and take. In a lot of games you tend to get the few skills you want early on and then the rest you just sort of take because you might as well spend the points, but Deus Ex does a great job of providing lots of attractive options so you’re constantly looking forward to when you’ll finally have that ability or get that upgrade. As mentioned above, the more augments you unlock, the more options are available to you in moving through the levels.

One of the augments you can unlock allows you to see important items through walls and containers (such as lockers). This really helps to take the tedium out of searching every room you come across for all of the things you want to collect.

There is one augment that I absolutely don’t like. There is an augment that allows your character to become invisible. This completely trivializes the stealth aspect of the game and causes players to simply ignore the stellar level design since they can walk right past everything without being seen. Stealth is simply a matter of watching your energy level and ignoring everything else. I honestly think the developers should have just removed this augment from the game entirely. I personally didn’t use it and my advice is if you want to actually experience the game then pretend this augment doesn’t exist.

The hacking minigame is a lot of fun (minus the interface issue explained above). At first you try sneaking through the network until you’re discovered at which point it becomes a frantic race to finish the hack before the system manages to trace you back to your starting node. You have some on use items that can make it easier to remain undetected or buy you a few precious seconds at the end to finish the hack. All nodes rank 1 or higher have a base chance of 15% for the network to detect your presence no matter what level your hacking skill is. I feel like 15% is a little too high. If I’ve maxed out my hacking skills (which was one of the first things I did) then I want to feel like I can dance around in low level networks. With a 15% base chance, I’m mostly just hoping I don’t get caught due to extremely bad luck. Personally I would like to see the base chance lowered to 5%.

If you’re going the stealth route, then you will be doing a lot of takedowns. Unfortunately, takedowns are one of the most jarring experiences in the game. When you press the button, the screen goes black for a few seconds, and then you watch a scripted scene (in 3rd person) of your character delivering a quick beatdown. I suspect the blackscreen is trying to cover up the fact that the system does not handle going from a physics based system to a script based system very well. Mechanically the takedown system works just fine, but from the player’s perspective switching from 1st to 3rd person removes them from what’s happening. I would much prefer if the game remained in 1st person during the takedown so players actually got a sense that they were the ones doing the takedown. Also, physics in this game is very wonky (more on that later) and half the time when I knocked an enemy to the ground to deliver the knockout blow, they would end up in the completely wrong place and my character would showcase his amazing talents at punching the ground.

The physics engine in this game is awful. Objects and people are constantly clipping into one another. During a couple cutscenes someone would walk right through the camera and so I would get a nice view of the inside of their head. Bodies especially tend to clip into, and get stuck in, everything. Once I had a mission become impossible when the person I was supposed to drag around got stuck inside of a door and nothing I did could get him out of it. Fortunately for me I could just reload from a minute or so back and try again, but the game does have a hardcore mode where you can’t reload a previous save. If I’d been playing hardcore than the physics engine would have completely screwed me over. Pedestrians will shove objects out of their way just by walking into them, including super heavy dumpsters.

There are a lot of televisions and radios in the game, and for some reason they all seem to be turned on. After a while you get really sick of hearing the same 4 or 5 news stories repeated over and over again. I wish the vast majority of them would start in the off position.

The game comes with another gameplay mode outside of the main story called Breach. In Breach you play a master hacker who, using your avatar, must sneak/fight your way through various “networks” (basically custom levels) to steal data. It’s a clever repurposing of the game’s systems and I actually enjoyed it quite a bit. It reminded me a lot of Mirror’s Edge given that each level has an optional score and time to beat for true mastery. Another point in its favor is the inclusion of mini-storylines in each level where you are hacking different networks in the pursuit of certain information to help someone innocent or to take down someone evil.

Conclusion

You will enjoy this game if you like finding alternate passages to reach your objective and a story that makes you stop and consider what it truly means to be human.

You will not like this game if you can’t stand a messy control scheme or if a bad physics engine will distract you from the game too much.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is a mastery of level design with a strong story to go with it. There are a lot of small things that enhance the game, but there are also a lot of small things that distract from it. But if you can overlook them, then you’ll find a world worth experiencing.