Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

**"I Never Asked For This."** *A review by someone who gave this game 5 days of their life and got a cliffhanger in return.* --- I'm not recommending this game. And before you scroll past — I finished it. Through three crashes, forced resolution drops, a CPU that filed a formal complaint, and loading screens long enough to question my life choices. I earned this review. Let me rewind to 2011. Human Revolution did everything right. Great characters, a conspiracy that built to a satisfying conclusion, mechanics that welcomed every playstyle. It was a complete meal. You left full. Mankind Divided is the same restaurant charging the same price and bringing you half a plate. **The story** is the core wound here. Ninety percent of this game is setup. The last ten percent is the credits rolling right when you think Act II is about to begin. The ending is — no joke — a news anchor reading your choices back to you. Questions that are raised with enormous ceremony are never answered. Who is really behind Jensen's augmentations? What is your partner actually hiding? The cliffhanger character — why do we never confront her? The game doesn't know, or doesn't care to tell you. Human Revolution had conclusions. Character arcs. A story that respected your time. This one has a sequel it forgot to make. **Prague** is beautiful. I'll give it that. But it's one hub you can access almost entirely from the beginning, and the forced back-and-forth travel between its two districts — through loading screens that run forty seconds on hardware that should be eating this game alive — becomes a commute. There are no bars in Prague, by the way. In Prague. Think about that. **The PC port** is an embarrassment. Crashes across all hardware configurations, NVIDIA and AMD alike. I finished the main game. I could not finish the DLC — the game crashed me out every time. I dropped from 1440p to 1080p just for basic stability. This is unacceptable in 2016. It remains unacceptable now. **The gameplay itself** is genuinely good — I want to be fair. The weapon variety, the level design density, the new remote hacking augmentation, the sheer sandbox quality of Prague as a play space. These are real achievements. The bones here are excellent. But the inventory system will make you foam at the mouth, the map navigation will guide you confidently to the wrong location, and there is exactly one boss fight in the entire game. One. **Before launch**, the developers ran the "Augment Your Pre-Order" scheme — a tiered pre-order program where content unlocked based on total pre-orders, with an early release promised if numbers hit a target. It was cancelled after massive backlash. Then promotional art using "Aug Lives Matter" imagery ran alongside active real-world civil rights conversations. Then microtransactions appeared in a full-priced single-player game. The game arrived already on fire. Compared to Human Revolution — which ran forty hours and ended — this runs twenty and stops. Compared to Dishonored, Prey, even Hitman's 2016 reinvention, the narrative ambition here is a fraction of what the genre was delivering at the same time. I held Deus Ex to a high standard because it earned that standard. When a sequel not only fails to meet it but actively regresses in scope, that's not a rough edge. That's a broken promise. **Score: 2/10** Not because the mechanics are worthless. Because a game's most important job — especially a Deus Ex game — is its story, its world, its sense of completion. This one fails that job, shipped broken, and had the audacity to sell the missing half as DLC. Buy Human Revolution instead. It's finished.

[h1]Come for the Cyberpunk Espionage, Stay for the Air Vents[/h1] [h2]Apartheid, Augs, and Really Bad Vibes[/h2] Deus Ex: Mankind Divided puts you back in Adam Jensen’s extremely expensive trench coat and drops you into a world where augmented people are treated like walking security risks, just with better sunglasses. The setting is bleak, paranoid, and politically angry, sometimes intelligently, sometimes with the subtlety of a vending machine falling down stairs. Still, the core setup works like a well-oiled machine. Prague is tense, divided, full of secrets, and apparently built by architects who legally had to include at least seventeen ventilation shafts per building. [h2]Gold Filter, Concrete Depression, Still Gorgeous[/h2] Visually, this game still has style for days. The art direction carries it hard: cold concrete, golden lighting, corporate sci-fi interiors, dirty alleyways, police checkpoints, neon, cables, glass, and enough cyberpunk clutter to make a minimalist cry blood. Prague feels dense and lived-in, even when the NPC faces occasionally look like they’re being puppeteered by a committee. Textures and character animation show their age, and some lip syncing is rough enough to qualify as police harassment, but the overall look is still strong. Technically imperfect, artistically sharp. [h2]Cyberpunk Brooding, Professionally Applied[/h2] The sound design knows exactly what kind of game this is. The soundtrack hums, pulses, and broods in the background like a machine that just read Foucault and got depressed. It gives stealth sections a nice tension without screaming for attention. Elias Toufexis as Jensen is still doing the iconic gravel voiced “I have not emotionally processed anything since 2027” routine, and it works. Some supporting performances are flatter, but the atmosphere is excellent. Doors hiss, drones buzz, guards mutter, terminals beep, and every restricted area sounds like it has three henchmen and a killbot behind it. [h2]Security Systems Hate This One Trench Coated Man[/h2] This is where Mankind Divided actually earns its trench coat. It's an immersive sim in the good old “here's a problem, now go ruin someone’s security budget however you want” sense. You can sneak, hack, punch walls, crawl through vents, talk your way through problems, stack crates like a goblin engineer, go non lethal, or turn into an augmented murder blender if your patience decides to leave the building. The level design is the real star. Apartments have hidden routes, offices have alternate entrances, enemy bases are layered with security systems, and most objectives have multiple solutions. Hacking is simple but satisfying, stealth is strong, and the augmentations give you genuinely fun tools: remote hacking, cloak, smart vision, Icarus landing, punch-through-walls ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, social enhancer, leg upgrades, the whole cybernetic bonanza. Combat is fine, but not the best reason to play. The shooting just works, the weapons are serviceable and loud play is viable, but the game is clearly happier when you’re being a sneaky little techno-bastard. Some upgrades are more exciting than others, the cover system can feel a bit sticky, and the game occasionally fights you with menus or awkward inputs. Also, PC performance can be weird depending on settings. MSAA and DX12 can behave like they were coded during a hostage negotiation, so tweak before judging. [h2]Great Setup, Missing Third Act[/h2] The story is interesting, but it has one enormous problem: it feels like it leaves the party just when the conversation gets good. The worldbuilding is fantastic. The social divide between augmented and non-augmented people gives the setting excellent vibes, and Prague is packed with emails, side stories, overheard conversations, and little bits of environmental storytelling that make the world feel rotten in a believable way. But the main plot? It builds, hints, teases, mutters “conspiracy” in a dark hallway, then abruptly rolls credits like it suddenly remembered it had a dentist appointment. The side quests are often better than the central storyline, with stronger choices and more satisfying payoffs. The game has a great atmosphere and plenty of narrative hooks, but the ending feels less like a conclusion and more like someone cut the final third off with a laser aug and sold the wound separately. [h2]Brilliant Immersive Sim, Somewhat Mugged by Square Enix[/h2] I'm pretty divided [i](see what I did there)[/i] on this, the good stuff is just very good. Excellent hub design, satisfying stealth, flexible mission solutions, strong atmosphere, cool augmentations, great environmental detail, and a world that begs you to snoop through every stranger’s bathroom email. The bad stuff is also very real: the story is undercooked, the ending is abrupt, some facial animation is cursed, performance can be fussy, Breach mode feels like publisher mandated luggage and the old microtransaction stink still lingers around the edges like someone microwaved capitalism. It's not the grand cyberpunk masterpiece it wanted to be, but it's a damn good Deus Ex game trapped inside some slightly unfinished business decisions. [h2]Verdict[/h2] [b]Graphics:[/b] [u]8/10[/u] Aged in places, but the art direction still walks in wearing expensive sunglasses. [b]Sound:[/b] [u]8/10[/u] Moody, tense, stylish, and Jensen sounds like he gargles gravel professionally. [b]Gameplay:[/b] [u]8.5/10[/u] Fantastic stealth sandbox. The vents are basically co-op partners. [b]Story:[/b] [u]7/10[/u] Great world, strong side content, main plot ends like it got tackled by a cop. [b][u]Overall: 7.9/10[/u][/b] I recommend Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, especially on sale. It's flawed, sometimes feels unfinished and clunky, but it also gives you the kind of layered, player driven missions that barely anyone makes anymore. If you enjoy sneaking through corporate hellholes, reading emails you absolutely should not be reading and solving political conspiracies by crawling through air ducts, this is still worth your time. Just don’t expect closure. Jensen didn’t ask for this, and apparently neither did the sequel.

I'm a huge fan of the first Deus Ex game. The story, gameplay, voice acting, and dark dystopian world were all perfect. To this day, it's still one of my favorite games. This game on the other hand... I just cannot force myself to finish it. The story is boring, the dialogue feels unnatural, I don't like the voice acting, I don't sympathize with any of the characters, and the city feels empty. Everything is a boring... Not recommended.

I've heard about Deus Ex a couple of times in the past and I got around to buying a whole bundle, and decided to play this one because it was the newest in the series and also takes place in Prague and I wanted to see how the Czech would be handled in the game (It's pretty good actually in my opinion :) ) for fun I loved Pretty much every minute of the game, wondering what happens next in the story, even doing side quests and points of interests when I saw them appear Unfortunately so the games performance is a bit iffy at times, so your best bet is prolly running it on low, it looks just as good on low anyways though so I don't see a reason to set it on high at the expense of having the chance to see the game above 60 fps :p (I'm a sucker for smoothness) Also Adam Jensen has crazy ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ drip, handsome dude with augmented limbs, cool af

Mankind Divided feels like a spin-off of Human Revolution rather than a sequel. Both in terms of story and gameplay. The in-game, futuristic Prague is a work of art. It's a stunningly beautiful, tightly packed and infinitely explorable maze. Almost every building and apartment are accessible. All of which are unique and have a story to tell. And for an almost 10-years-old game, it still looks fantastic. Unfortunately, this is where the positives end. There are reasons why the game has a way lower rating than HR. Not only does the game has absolutely unnecessary microtransactions, but it also has a general lack of polish. Even on a modern hardware, almost 10 years after the game's release, with optimized settings the game runs just okay. On top of that, it has one of the worst physics implementation. You will constantly stuck on terrain. Objects would fly away at a slightest touch. And the best part is that jumping is part of the physics too. Get ready to quick save before each jump. You would need it. Hacking and inventory management UI are incredibly clunky and designed purely for controllers. Navigating them with a mouse is torture. Then there is the story. Mankind Divided was meant to be a series of games, but the sequel got canceled, so it just ends abruptly. And the story itself is way more grounded, which is probably for the worse. No more over-the-top sci-fi/cyberpunk tropes from HR. Some side quests are still very good, but that's about it. Cutscenes deserve a special mention. Most of them have a comically bad animation. Writing and voice acting are great, but you basically watch stick figures flap their mouths. It's a 2001 level of animation for a game that came out a year after Witcher 3. Shopping cutscenes are incredibly annoying. It's the same long conversation each time. Want to move to another part of the city - cutscene. I understand the technical limitation, but it gets annoying fast, especially later in the game. But my biggest issue is the actual gameplay loop. A typical mission expects you to Jensen your way into a certain area by utilizing your abilities: how well you can hack, how high you can jump, how long you can stay invisible, and so on. Typical stealth, immersive sim stuff. But because of the game's open world and non-linear nature, it doesn't have dead ends. You can finish every mission with any abilities. Meaning that each mission has the "easy mode route" and they are pretty obvious. You rarely have to come up with clever solutions or use certain augmentations. The game balances it by giving you rewards for exploration: lore, ammo and money. But it's a stealth game. You don't need ammo or lethal weapons altogether. In fact, the game actively discourages you from using them. Meaning that in the second half of the game you would have infinite money and your only reward for exploration is some random lore emails... Changes to weapons are in general very confusing. There are way less weapon types compared to HR, which is a good thing. But a stun gun no longer can disable cameras, while a pistol with EMP bullets can. Most enemies have armor now, making the tranquilizer rifle pretty much useless. And if you're expected to get close to enemies for a take-down, then why does the game has weapons to begin with?! Overall, a solid 4/5. Lot's of potential, but a very bad execution.

Excellent game. You'd think that for the number of hours I've played that I'd have more to say, but there's no sense in me waxing lyrical about this.

I can't give this game a thumbs up because it often froze during loading, and the loading times themselves took literally minutes, even though I have a powerful PC. Yes, this game is beautiful and has varied gameplay, although I find it too time-consuming to navigate through dialogue. Perhaps this game isn't compatible with modern systems, which is why I couldn't complete it.