Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Review

[Julio Franco]

Mankind Divided is a follow-up to 2011’s Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Like its predecessor, it’s a hybrid first/third-person stealth/action game that combines a GTA-ish open world hub with Splinter Cell stealth and Mass Effect dialogue trees, spread over a narrative that branches according to the player’s choices. Every situation can be dealt with in one of a few different ways and every locked door (or proverbial locked door) can be opened with a variety of keys.

Players once again assume the role of a cybernetically enhanced tech-lord named Adam Jensen. Jensen has a pointy beard and a face like a battle-hardened Adam Scott. He’s a cool enough dude that he has sunglasses literally built into his face. He usually wears a futuristic designer trench coat, though occasionally when he’s in the field he’ll take it off. (When Adam Jensen takes off his trenchcoat, shit is about to get real.)

In Deus Ex’s vision of the future, unchecked technological advancement has thrown the world into disarray as multinational corporations have grown as powerful as governments. (I know, I can’t believe it either.) It’s the year 2029 and breakthroughs in bioengineering have allowed humans to augment themselves with cybernetic implants. It’s not unusual to see people walking around with robot legs, robot arms, or even with robot head-chips stamped into their foreheads.

Read the complete review.

 

[yRaz]

You understand that this game was in development before BLM and the developers openly stated that they were working on this before BLM? So any connections you see between Aug Lives Matter and Black Lives Matter are self-imposed. Inconvenient timing, but BLM has been mainstream for about a year and this game has been in development for about 4 years.

 

[BSim500]

Thanks for the review, but given current 40% negative review's and overall "Mixed" status on Steam, any comments on widely reported crashes, floaty mouse acceleration, poor optimization, cr*ppy micro-transactions, etc, (which this and every other "professional critic review" never seem to mention?...)

 

[robb213]

Thanks for the review, but given current 40% negative review's and overall "Mixed" status on Steam, any comments on widely reported crashes, floaty mouse acceleration, poor optimization, cr*ppy micro-transactions, etc, (which this and every other "professional critic review" never seem to mention?...)

Unfortunately a lot of the top negative reviews for the game complain about performance. And then most point out they are using 8xMSAA, ultra Vol. Fog, and other settings that will kill performance in any other game. So I'd hardly pay attention to that myself. What caught my eye is the mouse acceleration problem.

 

[Evernessince]

You understand that this game was in development before BLM and the developers openly stated that they were working on this before BLM? So any connections you see between Aug Lives Matter and Black Lives Matter are self-imposed. Inconvenient timing, but BLM has been mainstream for about a year and this game has been in development for about 4 years.

Kirk, the author of this article over at Kotaku, is a bit of a hipster so it's not at all surprising he would attribute it to BLM. I personally hate it when everything absolutely has to be forced into a modern lense.

 

[Julio Franco]

As for performance, we are testing the game with a boatload of GPUs as usual. Hope to publish our findings this week.

 

[Evernessince]

As for performance, we are testing the game with a boatload of GPUs as usual. Hope to publish our findings this week.

Great, thank you for your hard work! From what I've seen so far it performs very poorly and that it works better on AMD hardware.

 

[davislane1]

"Unlike real-life immigrants and people of color,Deus Ex’s augs really are inherently dangerous."

I lost it at this point. Funniest line in any review this year.

I will say this, though, while the plot was clearly setup in Human Revolution, certain aspects of it seem forced here. For instance, "naturals only" sounds like an ersatz version of "whites only" or "blacks only". "Humans only" would have played better, less awkward and draws more attention to the social psychology dividing the population.

 

[money]

I really don't like the visual style. I'll stop at that cos I really hated HR for numerous reasons.

 

[sac39507]

Why is it that 10 year old games like COD 4 have graphics just as visually pleasing but yet runs smoother and require less hardware muscle? This is what I don't get. This sample video is so laggy and would be unplayable.

 

[Puiu]

Why is it that 10 year old games like COD 4 have graphics just as visually pleasing but yet runs smoother and require less hardware muscle? This is what I don't get. This sample video is so laggy and would be unplayable.

because you play a limited set of maps and locations which are much easier to optimise (let's not forget just how incredibly awful the COD PC ports were at launch). graphics wise, this looks much better than COD4 no questions asked.

 

[Fulltone]

Not sure if it is me, but the graphics seem less quality from the last game? Eliza on the video monitor is not as high quality and the rest seems less. But might be the pallet of colors so far.

 

[Capaill]

I played it yesterday. I think I will like it but I'm not far enough in yet. Also the new cover controls are taking a lot of getting used to. Thankfully it provides tutorials which you are offered when the game mechanic is first introduced and you can replay the tutorials multiple times until it's comfortable. My biggest beef at the moment is that you press Space to leave cover and run out into the open. And you press Space after you die and reload a game. So if you were in cover when you died, pressing Space will both start the gameplay and force you to run out into the open! So you die again and reload and press Space. I haven't found a way around this yet and it's very frustrating.
Unfortunately I only played for about 2 hours as I got a game crash while in the train station (just after the prologue/tutorial section) which is a known bug and is being worked on.