Developed By: Eidos Montreal
Published By: Square Enix
Release Date: August 23
Platforms: PC [reviewed], PlayStation 4, Xbox One
Price: $60
Social commentary in gaming is a difficult thing to get right. In a television show or movie, many things are in the control of the creator; the camera angles, the lighting, the music. A mood can be carefully built, lending gravity to a sensitive subject. In a videogame, this same effect can be delivered through a mandatory cutscene, but this often subverts the interactive nature of the medium. The bravest developers sometimes attempt a more difficult path, creating allusions to real-world events through scenery and dialogue, building a more organic approach towards inciting an emotional reaction from the player. When done well, this can create unprecedented levels of immersion, but when handled poorly, it can seem heavy-handed and even insensitive.
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is a game about almost every conspiracy being true. In the long-running narrative of the Deus Ex series, the Illuminati are “Actually A Thing”, rich people working in the shadows to destabilize their enemies and invest in their interests. While not an inherently silly concept, previous games established things like little grey men from Area 51 being chased by knights templar from the days of yore. Since being rebooted by 2011’s Human Revolution, Deus Ex has grown somewhat more serious, but unfortunately, too much of that old approach shines through in their latest effort to make relevant allegories to real-world events.
Prague is meticulously detailed.
A bit of backstory first. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and its predecessor are about a man named Adam Jensen and his pursuit of the Illuminati. Adam was once a cop, then a private security advisor at a corporation known as Sarif Industries, which manufactured ‘augments’; high-tech upgrades to the human body ranging from limb prosthetics to neural implants. During an attack on Sarif, Adam was critically wounded, and David Sarif, the company’s founder, approved the use of augments to save his life. Now, Adam is a cyborg badass of the highest caliber, with sweet arm-blades and a hilariously edgy Matrix-style aesthetic that’s both totally too much yet somehow works for him. All is not well, however; near the end of Human Revolution, a wealthy anti-aug extremist manages to essentially hack almost every augment in the world. This is known as the Incident, where a mass of temporarily psychotic augmented individuals killed millions of people.
Six months later, society is split. Augmented people – known colloquially as ‘augs’, or the supposedly offensive ‘hanzers’ and ‘clanks’ – are an oppressed minority, attacked and judged by corrupt police forces and fearful civilians alike. They’re relocated to slums, treated poorly, and often neglected and left to poverty. This might sound familiar, but it’s around here that the allegory starts falling apart. See, Mankind Divided would LOVE for you to compare augs to ethnic minorities. In the city of Prague where the game takes place, there are ‘natural only’ fountains, benches, and even trains. ‘Augs Rights Matters’ (yes, that’s what it says, and yes, that’s terrible grammar) can be seen sprayed on walls as graffiti and plastered across the front of enthusiast magazines. The problem is that it’s kind of an unfortunate comparison. As unfair as the treatment of augs is, the simple fact is that they went completely berserk and murdered millions of people in a brief, but terrifying display of instability and power. While fear of them isn’t terribly sympathetic, it’s understandable, and it’s hard to blame people for being afraid of someone who actually did go violently insane just months before. Comparing them to ethnic minorities – who are in no way more dangerous than anyone else – is a bit awkward. At best, it’s wholly failing at being a strong metaphor for real-world events, and at worst, it’s an unfortunate implication.
I want to get this out of the way, yet I can’t, because Mankind Divided is a really good game that is repeatedly sabotaged by its hamfisted premise. Eidos Montreal’s commitment to their aesthetic is unyielding. It’s one of the most immersive games I’ve ever played, with Prague, the sole primary hub, easily the most dense and exploration-rich of its kind out there. There’s something to see everywhere, and little of it is just for show. You can go just about anywhere, using Jensen’s augments to hack into doors, leap into second-story windows, and punch through weak walls. Side quests and points of interest can often be discovered this way, feeding praxis kits for upgrading Jensen’s abilities in time for tackling the game’s main storyline. While exploring Prague is a lot of fun, it’s somewhat subverted by the presence of the police force. They can be seen in the background harassing augs, and go out of their way to bother Jensen as the game progresses. Once again, the heavy-handed attempt at real world allegory falls short when you realize that as the player, you spend most of your free time breaking and entering, knocking people unconscious – or killing them – and generally being a very suspicious dude.
Subtle, right?
Other environments, such as the ghetto of Golem City where augs are deported to, handle these concepts a little better. Here, the abuse is more blatant. Here, people are attacked in the streets, the police exist solely as a tyrannical abuse of power, and rebel factions very understandably plot to fight back. There are no grossly out-of-place protests, poor attempts at propaganda, or unfortunate comparisons, just ‘us vs. them’, a basic premise that comes to life through gorgeous art design and stellar attention to detail. If the whole game took place in zones like this, I’d have nothing bad to say about it at all.
Mechanically, Mankind Divided is a Deus Ex game through and through, and that’s absolutely not a bad thing. Generally, there are four ways to approach a mission: quietly, loudly, lethally, and non-lethally. You’re free to combine these elements to your heart’s content; if you want to sneak your way through one half of a building, then brutally murder the other half, you can. If you want to run screaming through a facility, covered in nanotech armor and harmlessly throwing soda cans to distract people, you can do that, too. Above all else, the game’s greatest moments are those where it simply drops the player into a location, gives them an objective, and gives them the freedom to solve it. The strong level design and deep character development is a boon here. If you need access past a locked door, sure, you can use your augs to hack it. Alternatively, you can upgrade your strength to move a vending machine out of the way, revealing a hidden vent that you can sneak through. If you’re feeling brave, you can turn invisible and knock someone out to steal their keycard, or you can just say “Screw it” and chop people apart with your nanoblades, cleaving your way to the goal.
Despite my many issues with the game’s tone, the story isn’t without merit, though it never quite goes as far as you’d think. On paper, Adam is every 90s badass fantasy come to life, but in a manner oddly reminiscent of The Witcher’s Geralt of Rivia, he sort of circles around past obnoxious and right back into likable territory again. Part of this is the fact that the game goes out of its way to humanize him. He lounges around his gorgeously rendered apartment in his off time, has a weird obsession with breakfast cereal, and despite being a bit of a hardass, very clearly has a deep core of empathy. In small moments, the narrative can shine, such as Adam trying to investigate the identity of a mole in the Interpol headquarters he’s now working at. Side missions also often have a great plot, leading Adam on adventures where he investigates a strange new designer drug or aids an overly enthusiastic underground reporter in digging up dirt on a bank. (Said bank, by the way, is a masterpiece of level design, very possibly the best single building I’ve ever seen in a game. I’d say more, but I’d hate to spoil even a little of it.) Things kind of fall apart in the second half, unfortunately, with a weakly motivated villain and a rushed conclusion that reeks of budget constraints resulting in an unsatisfying sequel hook.
The persuasion minigame is greatly enhanced by a useful social augment.
A lot of my review is about Mankind Divided’s tone because a lot of the game is about its tone. As a stealth operative playground, it’s fantastic, improving on every aspect of Human Revolution and becoming my personal favorite in the genre. The problem is that the experience as a whole is inextricable from its worst aspects. You can’t play it without having its attempts to be relevant shoved in your face, and the missteps are so aggressively omnipresent that they hamper the experience. I still really like it, but I feel like I could have loved it if it would have just stuck to the silly conspiracy theories.
The Console Difference – By Sean Capri
Let’s not rehash Mr. Clark’s review. I’m here to let you know how Deus Ex: Mankind Divided handles on consoles from a technical standpoint. These add-on reviews are always a bit awkward, particularly going from PC to Console because the hardware simply doesn’t allow for an on-par experience.
Deus Ex has a sharp and hard-edged art style and is good from far but far from great. While framerate was never a problem, textures are a little muddy up close and character models are inconsistent. Adam Jensen’s design is decidedly badass – I always enjoyed popping out of first-person view to hide behind cover in third-person – but the NPCs are distractingly off-putting. Unfortunately, the characters populating Prague more closely resemble animated manikins than living, breathing, politically-charged individuals. The weakness in visual representation is amplified by a particularly bad lip-sync issue. As I’m writing this, rumors are circulating that it has been fixed but I cannot comment further about it.
Without commenting on the quality of the voice acting, I was mostly disappointed with the sound mixing. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided does not take advantage of a 5.1 home theater set up. At all. Voices and dialogue are purposefully mixed with music and background noise and are regularly drowned out. I highly recommend players adjust the in-game volume options to keep dialogue at the maximum volume and the remaining slider bars at about 70%. Even with headphones, I found the sound mixing to be distracting.
I agree completely with John’s overall review and would have awarded a similar score to Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. The technical issues on console don’t overly detract from the terrific foundation and gameplay mechanics – and you may not even notice things like sound mixing – but I’d be remiss to not mention them.
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