Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (Video Game)
Ted Hentschke
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Developed by Eidos Montreal
Published by Square Enix
Available on PC, Xbox One, and PS4
Rated M for Mature
As a critic, I’m really not supposed to get super excited about stuff. It’s too easy to wildly skew your perspective, coloring a game as either crushingly disappointing or disproportionately satisfactory. To my credit, I’ve mostly inoculated myself to the hype-monster. With Deus Ex however, I really can’t help it. Released in 2000, the original is one of the best games of all time. It’s a shining example of ingenious design and genuine talent. It’s certainly a product of another age, which makes the fact that I can still enjoy the shit out of it truly stunning. Booting up my old disk, I have to rebind my A and D keys to strafe instead of turn. It has nothing to do with nostalgia. The game is just magnificent.
Which is why it sucked when Deus Ex: Invisible War came around and thoroughly let everyone down. Though well received at the time, it’s remembered as falling far short of its predecessor in both design and narrative. Augment choices were simplistic, with the black market option near unilaterally better. The combat was solid, but a lot of the more creative paths and options were gone. It felt more like a shooter than an RPG. Visually, the game was stunning. I remember having to buy a new graphics card just to run it. It’s a hauntingly prophetic reflection of how gaming has evolved.
Eight years later, Deus Ex: Human Revolution released and reminded us why we like more RPG in our shooter hybrids. In a market being dominated by titles like Halo and CoD, it offered a more tactical and thoughtful experience. Players could customize their Adam Jensen, loading out to go stealth, lethal, nonlethal, combat, or various other in-between options. The world it created meshed with the original, but felt unique enough that it wasn’t a rehash. There were some problems with the boss fights, but overall the game was an excellent example of how to integrate the old with the new.
I most certainly did ask for this.
So with Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, here we are again looking at a Deus Ex sequel that fails more than it delivers. I’m not going to waste time building any more: Mankind Divided is the most disappointing game I’ve played since Duke Nukem Forever. Mechanically solid and polished to a shine, it ultimately fails to deliver on the most fundamental promise of content, length, real complexity, and satisfying conclusion.
I’ll start with the few things that Mankind Divided really got right. First and foremost is the level design. Each area and quest is built with enough diversity to satisfy just about every fan. This is where the game most resembles the original Deus Ex. Want to get into a guarded drug factory? Well, you can either go through the front door, or around the back. Going around the back, you can use either a leg augment to get you over a number of barricades, or a strength augment to build a staircase. There’s a turret in the way, so you can either sneak around it to turn it off, remotely disable it, stealth augment past it, or just blow it up. Once past that, there’s the option to either go through an electrical trap to try to get in through a second side entrance, or once again jump/stack your way up to yet another entrance. And this is just the back door. The entire game is built like this.
Can you spot the hidden path in this picture?
What’s really phenomenal is how certain pathways are blocked off without certain augments, but it doesn’t prevent you from finding a creative way in. It’s kind of like how swimming was a skill in the original Deus Ex. Entirely pointless outside of finding alternate entrances, it was far from your only way in. However, those who did choose it were rewarded with some pretty spectacular shortcuts.
As a Berkeley Liberal SJW, I also loved the game’s tone. The themes of racial prejudice and police brutality are front and center here. Taking place two years after the “Augment Incident” of the first game, augmented humans have become second class citizens. Referred to as “Augs” (or more derisively, “Clanks”), they are routinely beaten in the street, harassed for identification papers, and even sent to ghettos. They even have their own section at the back of the train. The gameplay integration of this theme is seamless. Adam, being part of the super hardcore TF29, is given a pass that allows him to move freely as a normal human. That doesn’t stop police from hounding him at every corner. Distrusted by his own kind and hated by everyone else, he is out of place in a world increasingly divided. I would have loved it, if it actually ever went anywhere.
“Nowhere on this fancy paperwork says that I don’t have to act like racist dickcheese.”
My biggest gripe with Mankind Divided is that the plot fundamentally fails to deliver. Very early on, we are introduced to the Illuminati council, with vague hints at a much larger and more insidious plot. These machinations take a back seat to the very real terror attack in Prague, with Adam investigating who could be behind it. Lo and behold, it was the very same Illuminati, and thread by thread a conspiracy begins to reveal itself.
And then it just stops. At a part of the story where most would have just been reaching their first act climax, Mankind Divided just ends. A bad guy is introduced, definitively presented as a lower cog tier in a much greater machine. Once defeated, Adam resolves to take the fight even higher up the Illuminati ladder. Cool, let’s go do it! Nope, credits roll. Are you fucking kidding me? That’s Halo 2 “Finish this fight!” level bullshit. When the cutscene ended and the “New Game+” option appeared on my screen, I was stunned. I couldn’t actually believe they had ended the game so poorly. By the time the credits were done, I was furious.
When you rely on a static camera news broadcast to fill you in on why you should give a fuck about what you did the whole game, your storytelling sucks.
This is not a complete game. Further inspection of the various non-story elements just reeks of a product that is far from completed. Aside from the great level design, almost every element is far from fully baked. There’s a weapon modification system that promises to give you greater customization options for your arsenal, but never gets past basic statistical upgrades and maybe a scope or silencer. The new augments are initially flashy, but grant absolutely no additional functionality outside of new ways to zap people. There’s initially a mechanic where the new “experimental” augs overload your system, requiring you to permanently disable a previous aug to access your new abilities. Halfway through the game, they go “eh, too confusing,” and give you all your powers back.
I cannot possibly fathom a universe where I will need all four of my exploding arm cannons.
At the point of the game where it just ends, it seems like you are getting to the good part. The conspiracy is coming closer into full view, you’ve unlocked some cooler powers, and you finally can make a move against one of the bad guys. I was just unlocking the second tier of guns, including a badass automatic shotgun and a sniper rifle that fired bullets forged by Vulcan himself. You honestly pick up guns in the last level that you never get to use for more than 5 minutes because the game just ends. That doesn’t sound like a finished game to me.
Remember how everyone was bitching that Human Revolution had poorly designed boss fights that broke the flow of stealth playthroughs? Welp, Mankind Divided has those too, but only one of them. No, not one poorly designed bad boss fight and the rest are great. It has only one real boss fight. What the shit, Eidos? You promised me you had learned from your mistakes! You came out with a revamped director’s cut just to prove it! You were supposed to bring balance to the boss fights, not delete them!
Instead, there is a greater emphasis on these dialogue trees. It should be interesting, but it all boils down to remembering which of three lights flashed the most. It’s the conversational equivalent of Simon Says.
It’s clear that Mankind Divided is supposed to be part of a larger series that ties Jensen’s story with that of the original Deus Ex. We’re introduced to the current gen incarnations of series staples such as Manderley, Page, and Everette, and given more hints about Adam’s link to the future of augmentation. Oh hell, yes, this is the Deus Ex I love! Before it even gets to its first twist, double cross, or betrayal, it ends. At one point, Adam is infected with a new super virus, but miraculously survives. Does it have something to do with his genetic code? Maybe his new augments? Is he an Illuminati double secret experiment to undermine the rest of the Illuminati and establish a cyborg master race? Who the fuck knows! Find out in the next game! Or maybe the one after?! No one knows how many there will be before it ends!
On the bright side, they use the same voice actor for Bob Page, and he sounds like he’s still in a game from 2000.
What makes all this so unbearable is that the reasons behind Mankind Divided’s flaws are so transparent. There’s only so much narrative space left until they hit the timeline of Deus Ex, so they want to fit in as many games as they can. Games take money, so as much money as they can make when getting from point A to point B is just good business. As a consumer, there’s only so much bullshit between start and finish that I can take. Mankind Divided thoroughly crossed that line. Say what you will about Human Revolution’s “pick an ending” system, but at least it told a full story.
Mankind Divided gets credit where it’s due. It explores a mature theme elegantly, painting a real picture of shame, discrimination, and oppression that explodes in equal parts prejudice and rage. The layered level design is great, allowing you to actually play as you want to play. It makes what’s actually there pretty damn good. There’s just far too little of it. If this were Deus Ex, it would be like ending the game after the Gunther fight. It’s just absolutely unacceptable that a game coming out today is less robust than a predecessor now 16 years old. It’s the first third of an amazing game, that in no way stands on its own.
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