It may be a polarizing decision, but focusing so much on Prague lends Mankind Divided some much needed grounding for all the sci-fi conspiracy elements. Wisely, Eidos Montreal prioritized depth over scale, ensuring that this all is enmeshed into a cohesive sandbox rather than spread thin across multiple locations. Your choices impact not only all of these groups, but the civilians caught in the crossfire. Playing a double agent this time round, Adam is inserted into Interpol’s Task Force 29, while really serving as an operative for the hacktivist Juggernaut Collective.īesides those two dueling allegiances, he also has to navigate an anti-aug state police force, the pro-aug ARC group (who may or may not be harboring augmented terrorists), the local Dvali crime family, two rival news organizations, and operatives straight from the Illuminati. Taking place primarily in Prague, Mankind Divided is like one giant crime scene where you can tip the scales any number of ways. Adam is taking the fight to them through their own favorite methods of deception and manipulation. With a new villainous council set on wiping out augmented people from the shadows, the time has come for a more proactive tact. Despite protagonist Adam Jensen having done everything in his power to undo the machinations of the Illuminati, all he’s accomplished is changing the faces of the world’s oppressors. Set two years after the events of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Mankind Divided is a world worse than you left it, which is saying something. This describes Deus Ex: Mankind Divided fully, though none of that diminishes the accomplishments of Eidos Montreal here.īack when Mankind Divided released, a lot of its themes about prejudice against minorities and corruption of justice were contested as ingenuine, but after the last five years, it’s unnerving how hard the game hits. It wasn’t a wholly new ride, but it had just enough to keep things fresh. You got something meaty, meaningful, and experimental.
They weren’t quite full games, but they also weren’t $10 hour-and-a-half epilogues. For the youngins, back before the days of DLC, we got standalone expansion packs. In fact, I’d say it’s a damn good one, and better for it. I was able to find the joy in Mankind Divided by acknowledging it’s not a full-blown sequel - it’s a modern take on the expansion pack. However, I took delight in voraciously exploring every sidequest and point of interest and fiddled with some of the divergent outcomes for a few narrative branches. It’s a midpoint cliffhanger in a trilogy that clearly wasn’t originally planned as a trilogy. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is perhaps one of the most contentious “sequels” of its console generation.