Yes, great video games should be more than just graphical eye candy, but in the case of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, it's hard to ignore its aesthetic charms. The Dawn engine demo shown at the first annual PC Gaming Show—which included a list of flashy effects like depth of field, global illumination, volumetric lighting, air density, and exquisitely rendered cucumbers—was but a tease for what the actual game looks like in motion. Mankind Divided was easily the best-looking thing I saw at this year's E3—and in a show filled with graphical heavyweights like Dice's Star Wars: Battlefront, Sony's Uncharted 4, and Ubisoft's Ghost Recon Wildlands, that's high praise indeed.

For the moment, let's assume that Mankind Divided actually ends up looking like its E3 demo (see the ruckus caused by SEGA's Colonial Marines for an example of when that doesn't happen), and take what Eidos Montreal has done at face value. The developer has crafted a world that's both futuristic and believable, and rendered it with the gloss and lighting of a movie (and running on a PC, naturally). In the train station at the start of the demo, people were going about their daily business, or as best they could under the rule of an oppressive government. Police drones hovered menacingly around the platform—stopping random passers by for impromptu scans and inspections—while police officers asked to see papers, punishing those who failed to comply with a swift strike of a baton.

Like in Human Revolution, Mankind Divided's world is one grounded in the scientific advancements and technology currently being developed in laboratories around the world. Eidos Montreal has again consulted with renowned bioinformatics and neuroscience researcher Will Rosellini to make sure that the technology in the game is as realistic as possible. But this time around in the story, those with mechanical and electrical augmentations ("mech-augs") are no long the envy of society. Mech-augs are outcasts, people to be feared because of their physical superiority over the rest of the human race. In what Eidos Montreal is calling "Mechanical Apartheid," they are kept at arm's length and treated harshly by the authorities, who are quite happy to dole out physical punishment at the slightest provocation.

Deus Ex as a series has never shied away from social commentary, and with its "Mechanical Apartheid" theme, it perhaps makes its strongest statement yet about the world and where our technological aspirations might lead us. There's a narrative that drives Mankind Divided, but players always have a choice—be it a moral one, a strategic one, or a projection of your own character on returning protagonist Adam Jensen though dialogue options. This choice, as executive narrative director Mary DeMarle told me, is what represents the greatest challenge during development.

"When you're writing a story, you're trying to create an emotional experience that goes in one direction. A lot of times as a writer, when you're writing a linear story, you really choose the moments that make that emotional arc for you. But here you have to be willing to realise that the player is making those choices, and what are the various possibilities that can stem from those choices... so a scene in a game you might experience as a two minute conversation, is often made with a 20-page script. If you figure that's a minute a page, that's how much dialogue there is to just make it flow back and forth. But it's one of the challenges I like the most, to make sure we're maintaining that emotional intensity no matter what."

There are scripted moments, of course. In the opening of the demo, Jensen and his contact in the station are thrown to the ground by an explosion that's pinned on the leader of the Augmented Rights Coalition (ARC). Cue a mission to infiltrate ARC's base of operations and question its leader. ARC, it turns out, is located in a ramshackle part of the city, one that's part Blade Runner-style sheen and part Brazilian-style favela. What's most impressive is just how well realised this area was. You could see right out into the distance of the city, with towering, smoke-billowing metallic blocks rising out of the ground and filling the landscape.

The city itself, a futuristic mass of run-down tech and glowing neon signs, was a sandbox-like playground for Jensen's cybernetic abilities and weaponry, all of which have been given an update. Invisibility and the electromagnetic parachute make a welcome return, as do powers like Icarus fall, where Jensen can fall from a great high onto the ground and deal area of effect damage to surrounding enemies. New abilities include remote hacking, which features a small timing-based minigame, and Icarus dash, which lets Jensen teleport swiftly from one area to another, both horizontally and vertically. Then there are Jensen's iconic wrist blades, which now let you launch projectiles to stealthily kill enemies, or explode when fired into the environment.

Stealth is still very much a part of Deus Ex, but this time around combat is a more viable option, especially with the inclusion of things like the Titan Shield, temporary armour that morphs around Jensen in a wonderfully showy mass of piano-black particles. There are now as many offensive powers and weapons as there are stealthy ones, and you're free to use them as you wish to complete each mission. You can, apparently, go through the entire game without killing a single person, and your actions—humanitarian or otherwise—are recognised by key characters. Moral choices in games tend to be a little black or white, instead of the shades of grey more common in the real world, so it's nice to see Mankind Divided is doing something other than just offering players up scripted situations in order to determine moral outcomes.

Mankind Divided is an interesting beast. It's a game that features the high-end visual fidelity associated with the biggest of development budgets, and a story that’s more akin to the esoteric and ambitious narratives commonly deployed in smaller games. Those are the same features that impressed me most about Human Revolution, and I hope that Mankind Divided can pull off the same trick. And while Adam Jensen’s latest adventure might not be one borne out of narrative necessity—“I was insistent that [Jensen’s] story was over, it was done,” Demarle told me, “the marketing department said 'no, you've created such a fantastic character, you have to bring him back!'”—I’m so very glad he’s returned.

Read our full review of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.