Game Info Platform Win, PS4, Xbox One Publisher Square Enix Developer Eidos Montreal Release Date Aug 23, 2016

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided developer Eidos Montreal was a team founded almost exclusively to breathe life into Deus Ex. The series lay more or less defunct after the disappointing reception of 2003's Deus Ex: Invisible War and the sort-of spinoff Project: Snowblind. To revive it, Eidos Montreal rolled back the clock. Deus Ex: Human Revolution was a prequel that took Invisible War's console-friendly ideas and approachability and refined them, and the game tied it all together with a stunning neo-Renaissance aesthetic applied to a cybernetic future. If you'll allow me the cliche, Human Revolution wasn't a perfect game, but it was brave, taking what worked in the series and simplifying along the way to tell an interesting story with breathtaking style and finesse. Now, five years later, Eidos Montreal has resurrected Adam Jensen in a world dealing with the aftermath of Human Revolution's augmented disaster. And, once again, Eidos Montreal seems determined to address the challenges that its predecessor faced. In many ways, the studio has succeeded. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided shines as an exercise in discovery, in presenting players with increasingly complicated problems and a huge amount of ways to solve them. And its fiction holds it up, even as the ambition it suggests never quite manifests. Mankind Divided opens two years after The Incident — where a sudden uncontrolled psychosis in every cybernetically augmented human on the planet was triggered deliberately, causing them to violently lash out at anyone around them. There was bloodshed and unrest all over the planet, and once the dust cleared, the augmented who remained were looked at with distrust by the world around them. In the middle of it all is Adam Jensen, a former Detroit cop turned augmented government agent. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is a (fill in the blank)-action-RPG hybrid, where it’s largely up to you as a player to fill in that blank. As you complete various missions, both critical-path tasks and involved side tasks, you’ll earn experience points that allow you to evolve and upgrade Jensen’s abilities.

If you played Deus Ex: Human Revolution, you may be raising your hand frustratedly, demanding to know how much more evolved (revolved?) Jensen could possibly be after two additional years of experience and refinement in his abilities, and the answer is, you get Metroid’ed — that is to say, Eidos Montreal contrives a series of events to, well, let’s say "factory-reset" Jensen’s firmware. Ordinarily this is a frustrating moment for me in action-adventure games that item-gate their areas, but Mankind Divided does a pretty good job of building a compelling fictional context for it. This reboot forces you to slowly rebuild and prioritize Jensen’s abilities and tailor them around exactly how you want to play the game. There are typically three means of progressing through each area: combat, stealth or hacking. Occasionally you’ll also be able to avert conflict via dialogue. There are abilities to support all of these things — you can make Jensen a nearly indestructible, mirror-shaded robocop; a Gibsonian cybernetic hacker; or a mechanical Sam Fisher, à la Splinter Cell. There are options to improve reflexes, fall from great heights, jump higher, lift almost any object that isn’t nailed down and then some. The Praxis system isn’t as granular as more stats-driven games, but it’s enough to specialize without screwing yourself into an overly specific build if you’re smart. That last part is important, because more so than Human Revolution before it, Mankind Divided isn’t prepared to let you focus only on one kind of play style. Each ability is a solution to a specific problem, and each mission is a collection of problems to solve. Sneaky players who like to circumvent conflict by crawling through ductwork and access tunnels will probably need to upgrade their strength augmentations to move heavy machinery that blocks that kind of access, or to punch through walls in maintenance areas to keep off the grid. Hackers might still want to invest in Adam’s cloaking ability to stay hidden as they access exposed computers and keypads. In this way, Mankind Divided is evocative of the exploration-oriented action-adventure games that use Nintendo’s Metroid series as a foundation — many areas of the game are inaccessible until you possess the appropriate tools to reach them. But Mankind Divided doesn’t make you find them. Instead, you can pick your tools, but it will be late in the game before you can possibly do everything. That choice in how you proceed and succeed — and, in turn, how you screw yourself — becomes a big part of Mankind Divided’s uniquely rewarding progression system. Mankind Divided doles out experience for almost every task, from knocking out a guard nonlethally to finding another vent. I’m sure that for some people, Mankind Divided will provide a cybernetic ass-kicking simulator, where they can be the black-alloy’d superhero killing machine of their dreams. Mankind Divided gives you all the tools to make that happen, and its combat fundamentals are pretty strong, a far cry from the rough basics in Human Revolution. There are even major augment trees dedicated to additional combat options. If you want to play that way — you know, as a monster — you can. But Mankind Divided provides a host of violence-avoidance or, at least, nonfatal options. It isn’t just possible to play through the game without killing anyone; it often seems like the game encourages it. As I got more experience, I gained new ways to explore the world and progress without leaving a trail of blood behind me. Rewarding exploration and learning is the best kind of positive reinforcement for discovery in a game like this, and it scratched at some of my most compulsive habits by dangling information just out of reach practically all the time.