I've spent the last hour hunting down an elusive black market ID syndicate in the heart of Prague, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided's sprawling city hub. In the aftermath of a devastating worldwide attack, for which augmented humans were responsible, security is tight. Perhaps overly so. Manhandled by a prejudiced police department and endlessly scanned and monitored by robotic drones, augs have been shunned by society, forced into ghettos where resentment runs rampant, and violence becomes the answer. And so, even under the employment of Task Force 29 (an Interpol-led anti-terrorist group), super-aug Adam Jensen can't charm his way past a protected police post. He needs that ID, and I'm going to help him.

Which, when I stop and think about it, is odd, because that wasn't the reason Jensen was in Prague in the first place. Earlier, he'd fought his way through a sandstorm in Dubai, gunning down augmented terrorists on the hunt for weapons, before being caught out by an unfortunate explosion. The convenient result (for the developers in charge of player progression at least) was that Jensen's augmentations stopped working, and the only man who could fix them was a doctor living in Prague. That's the thing about Deus Ex: no matter how hard you try to stick to the mission, no matter how much you want to reveal the next snippet of the story, it's there, pushing and prodding you into one of its many side quests.

I lost an hour and a half to finding a fake ID, scouring the streets of Prague for the criminals that sold them, while getting lost in shabby apartment buildings along the way. Despite its futuristic setting, Deus Ex is, at its heart, a typical RPG, the kind that says it OK to walk into a random apartment and rummage through peoples' drawers for random bits of loot, while at the same time expecting you to ask permission to pass through a police barricade. Following a glowing blip on the mini-map to the next mission checkpoint is fine, but there's always another cupboard to open, another pile of scrap to be found that can be used to fashion new bits for Jensen's growing pile of artillery.

Eventually I found the leader of the gang, positioned outside of a lone courtyard in the centre of city. He offered to craft an ID for an outrageous amount of credits, or at least offer to put one on hold for me for a lesser amount. What to do? Hand over what meagre funds I had in order to secure an ID, or talk my way out of it? The latter seemed like the more sensible option, but as it turns out, diplomacy isn't one of my strong points. Several poorly chosen dialogue tree options later, the gang leader pulled out his gun and aimed it squarely at Jensen's head. In Deus Ex: Human Revolution, this would have been a very bad thing indeed. Sure, you could fire a gun and have a shoot out, but the game was never set up for the action-heavy player. Stealth was always the better option.























Not so in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. Don't get me wrong, Call of Duty it is not, but there's a finer balance to the combat this time, one that, should you want to, lets you go in all guns blazing. Not that I had much choice in my black market ID encounter. Quickly, I armed myself with an assault rifle, taking out the gang leader before hunkering down behind a bullet-riddled car. The gunfire had set off its alarm, and a police drone was rapidly approaching along with several heavily armed officers. I dashed to the doorway of the courtyard, wrestling with the slightly awkward cover system that pulls you from a first-person to third-person viewpoint, and asks you to aim a pointer at where you'd like to go, rather than let you run around freely. The precision is welcome, but it doesn't always come naturally.

What does, however, are the weapons, which have all the bang and bluster of a well-crafted video game arsenal. Of particular import is the shotgun, which is wonderfully overpowered, sending the hired goons that stood between me and the brains behind the black-market IDs flying through the air before sinking into a bloody pile on the floor. As you might imagine, shotgun ammo is not the easiest thing to come by (I had encountered an arms dealer earlier, and rather than pay for weapons and ammo, decided instead to steal them by killing the dealer's compatriots and raiding his stock cupboards). Eventually, after making my way up some rickety stairs to the top of an apartment building, I found a young woman, who (she claimed) had been coerced into producing counterfeit IDs for the gang.

Cue another dialogue tree and another set of side quests to complete. I wondered: would I have time to get to the meat of the game (this was a limited demo session), given that, three hours in, not only had I failed to repair any of Jensen's augmentations, I'd not even left the city centre? So I ploughed on, ignoring the new side quests I'd been given, ignoring the signs that separated augs from naturals, ignoring the brutality of the local police department. My target was Vaclav Koller, a doctor with significant experience in augmentation. I found his apartment surrounded by the Russian Mafia, which—despite my initial efforts with a sniper rifle and some stun darts—I ended up slaughtering mercilessly with a few well placed shotgun shells, and Jensen's signature melee moves.

What came next veers into spoiler territory, so I'll spare you the minutiae. What's important to note, however, is the updated augmentation system that Koller activates. Older augmentations like Invisibility and Icarus Landing (where Jensen can fall from a great height onto the ground and deal area of effect damage to surrounding enemies) make a welcome return, and are levelled up and activated by spending Praxis points like a classic skill tree. What's new are augmentations like Jensen's Titan Shield, a temporary armour that morphs around Jensen in a flashy mass of shiny black shards. Because these augmentations use so much power, they can only be activated by deactivating an existing augmentation. The resulting balancing act is tricky, and while there's a way to potentially avoid it (by completing another side quest, of course), for much of the game you'll have to juggle being uber-powerful or uber-practical.

Given that I wouldn't be able to pick up my save game from the demo build anyway, naturally, I went for uber-powerful. This was a wise move. Jensen's next mission was to pick up some evidence for a crime scene, which was guarded by more less-than-cooperative police officers. I suspect that the idea of this mission was to teach stealth, especially given the numerous air vents and hackable alarm panels scattered around the building. And I did try this, crawling through vents, silently knocking out guards, and deactivating alarm panels before dragging the bodies to secure hiding places in old security offices. Except I forget about the security cameras. At least a dozen officers and a handful of mechs died by shotgun blast to get that evidence. And poor Jensen, fresh from his bloody rampage, was ordered into a psychological exam by his superiors.

This is but a small snippet of what was an eight-hour play through from the very beginning of the game. To mention the Mafia-run casino in the city sewers, the shopkeeper I saved as his store was being ransacked by augs, or the moment I clambered up to very heights of Prague to avoid a police cordon only to fall to my death seconds later would give away too much. That's not to mention the first big mission, where Jensen is tasked with infiltrating an aug ghetto in order to retrieve an imprisoned witness. The latter is a showcase for Mankind Divided, a mission that encompasses sharp dialogue with the ghetto's less than fortunate inhabitants; great stealth and action sections, and the glossy, extraordinarily detailed visuals that impressed me so much when I saw first saw Mankind Divided at E3 2015 (like then, my demo ran on PC).

Those interested in hearing more can check out the video preview above, which captured the mission in glorious 1080p. And in case you're wondering, no, I never did get that black-market ID.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is coming to PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4 on August 23. Read our full review of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.