Dubai, 2029. The skyline is littered with half-built hotels that look unlikely to be finished. In one of those failed construction projects – the forlorn Desert Jewel Hotel – a trade is about to take place between Iraqi smuggling cartel The Jinn and an arms dealer known as Sheppard. We’re flying overhead as returning cyborg Adam Jensen, who’s now part of Interpol in the covert Task Force 29, in a swish jet that doubles as a command centre. A pop-up message gives us a stark choice: play lethally or non-lethally? It’s never that simple, of course, with Deus Ex – so over the course of the game’s first eight hours, we push Jensen to his limits to find out if Mankind Divided can really be played any way we want.
Stealth
Dubai is Mankind Divided’s tutorial city, a relatively linear way to reintroduce yourself to its fractured future. Jensen skydives without a ’chute, the big show-off using his Icarus Landing Augmentation for a pain-free touchdown on the hotel’s roof. Scanning with the Smart Vision Aug reveals two Jinn members milling about. Their positions noted, we punch through a brick wall and head their way.
The pair is patrolling a room filled with abandoned construction equipment – a click of sees us sliding into cover against the gear. The first guard walks towards us and we easily knock him out from behind cover with a tap of e. The elaborate takedown animations return, with Jensen grabbing the unlucky sod, punching him into a sleep that’ll last for days and then yanking him back behind the cover.
Next, we silently dispatch his buddy with a shot from our tranq rifle, taking him out non-lethally. Moving on through a glass walkway (gawping at the unrestricted view of Dubai’s sprawling, decaying skyline on the way) we find dozens more roaming Jinn. We pick our way through the crowds, finding a healthy rhythm between seeking cover and knocking out guards – holding q lets us quickly transition from cover to cover so fluidly we’re practically liquid. And then, disaster: a lookout spots a KO’d guard’s body.
Dubai in The Sky
With the alarm raised, but Jensen still undetected, we start our escape as the Jinn soldiers begin to converge on the downed guard. Despite this only being a tutorial, there’s an impressive breadth to our encounter. We discover a vent that allows us to bypass an entire hall of armed guards without us having to worry about timed cover dashes. That hall could have taken 20 minutes of sneaking to clear headon; instead, we skip it in seconds and rush forwards to the arms deal.
Just as we’re ready to seize arms dealer Sheppard, a mysterious third party formed of Augmented soldiers wearing golden masks crashes the meeting. They shoot at anything that moves but, using a brewing sandstorm as cover, we manage to remain stealthy. We slink beneath the gunfire, slowly creeping up behind them and eliminating the men one-by-one with Jensen’s arm blade, their remaining buddies none the wiser. It’s a superb set-piece that uses the environment to great effect, letting us stay hidden in even the most chaotic of scenes.
Force
A week on from the Dubai mission, Jensen’s back in his new home of Prague and recuperating after getting caught up in a bombing incident at Ruzicka Station. Groggily waking in his apartment, Jensen discovers the blast has made his HUD go haywire – he needs a trip to Vaclav Koller’s house of cyborg tinkering to sort him out. The bad news? Koller informs Jensen that said house is under siege from Dvali crime family thugs – you won’t miss the implication of who he wants to sort out that little problem.
Our first steps into Prague are overwhelming as we take in the sheer scope and detail of the hub city. Anti-Aug graffiti is sprayed just about everywhere, and police officers spit “Clank” at modified citizens they don’t like the look of. We would soak it in, but frankly, we want to get our abilities back in functioning order. We’re weaponless when we discover the entrance to Koller’s hideout is guarded by a shotgun-wielding gangster who doesn’t care for the cut of our jib, so a new route is in order. An open window does the trick.
Czeching In
Clambering up means we’ve enough height to drop down on the unaccommodating bozo and unleash our Icarus Strike, in which Jensen lets loose a wave of energy as he hits the floor. We pluck the goon’s weapon and a few extra shells from his hands in a follow-up move. It doesn’t go unnoticed, so we greet the investigating guards with a few shotty blasts. Aiming is quicker and crisper than in Human Revolution, a reactive COD-esque target snap helpful, but not patronising.
We’re no closer to getting inside, though, and four more heavies pour out of the door we’re aiming for. Lobbing a smoke grenade at their feet buys a few extra seconds to scramble away and launch another Icarus Strike, quickly followed by a Typhoon blast – this bad boy hurls tiny explosives at our foes, proving that our Augs are just as handy at ramping up the violence as they are at facilitating stealth.
Instead of strolling through the door, we hop in via a window on the left side of the building, thinking that gives us the element of surprise. We’re immediately proved wrong as bullets head our way, and jump into cover before our final slivers of health deplete. A full-on gun battle ensues. The pop-out-and-shoot systems lack the slickness of, say, Call Of Duty, but gunfights are much punchier than expected, convincing us that we’d happily play it as straight shooter.
Tech
Once Koller’s done fixing Jensen – and discovering new, experimental Augs buried within him that we’ll test out later – it’s time to head off on our next mission where Jensen’s asked to investigate the train station bombing he witnessed after the tutorial. Once there, we discover the heavily armed local police aren’t too keen on having Interpol muck up their crime scene, meaning there are plenty of obstacles between us and the evidence we need…
We saunter up to the cop and hope to sweet-talk our way through. No dice. After a tense put-down, a change of tack is needed – an easily hackable door out of sight provides just that. The node-capturing hacking mini-game returns from Human Revolution, along with its varying degrees of difficulty, so we drop a few Praxis points (gained by levelling up throughout the game) on upgrading our hacking skill to attempt it. It’s easy enough at this early stage, though we cut it a little too fine with just two seconds to spare. Expect sweaty palms galore on the harder locks, deeper in.
The room behind the door may only be a supply cupboard, but there’s a handy vent hidden behind a moveable box. Making our way through it and into a corridor, we spy two police officers yabbering away. Keen to utilise our new tech Augs, we fire up a Glass Shield Coating that effectively makes us invisible, allowing us to sneak past without catching anybody’s eye.
Reaction Stations
It works, but it’s also a massive drain on our Biocell energy. These batteries limit our Aug usage, so once we’re past the cops and safely into the circular entrance of the bombed station, we turn off our coating. The crucial evidence tent is directly opposite us, but so are eight guards and minimal cover, meaning we can’t risk a mad dash. The LiDar Mark Tracker is the answer to our problems. This Aug handily marks all of our foes with on-screen icons, letting us observe their movements across the level to spy the perfect path between their vision cones.
We’re almost safe, but a few steps away from the prize we’re nearly spotted by a cop in robot gear who looks like Iron Man’s Hulkbuster armour. Using tech is the only safe way out of this one: jabbing o reactivates the Glass Shield Coating, letting us pilfer the evidence before scarpering whence we came.
Jensen’s electronic toys will be invaluable to any style of play, but we deduce that it’s going to be a bit too challenging to rely on absolutely nothing but these tech gizmos.
Diplomacy
We’re sent out of Prague and towards Golem City, a squalid, futuristic ghetto for Aug-folk that’s brutally monitored by non-Augmented police. Here you can’t tell where the shipping containers end and the buildings begin. We’re seeking out Talos Rucker, a charismatic, supposedly non-violent leader of the Augmented Rights Coalition, the main suspects for the train station bombing. An informant promises to help Interpol, but when we set our first foot in the city, all we find is his seething sister-in-law.
We try to cajole his whereabouts from her, but initially, she doesn’t want to know. We opt for kinder word and eventually get some information we can use – the Golem Police have set up various cells through the slums and it’s there that we find our snitch. This ARC mole then points us in the right direction to find Rucker.
Moving further into ARC territory, we’re forced into restricted areas. Diplomacy won’t cut it here and we quickly discover that a shoot-on-sight policy is in full effect. We play as sneakily as possible, but are rumbled early on and dash towards a grubby control room. It’s time to utilise a new, experimental Aug as a platoon of ARC fighters descend – we plump for Focus Enhancement, allowing us to effectively slow down time. We trigger it and pop from cover, hitting three headshots and forcing the sea of angry soldiers to retreat, buying us enough time to sprint towards a lift that will take us to Rucker.
Precious Talk
Fortunately, he’s very open to a conversation and we revert to diplomacy again. Thanks to the Social Enhancer Aug, we see hints of what personality type Rucker will respond to best, so play to his ego. He warms to our approach, an indicator in the top-left rising as his responses become more positive.
With an assertive assurance that violence will come if the ARC leader refuses to leave, he finally agrees to come with us. Even with the helping hand, these interrogations are nervy as we try to get a read on the other person – it’s not quite LA Noire levels of bad-copping, but it’s close.
As we make our Deus Exit, we’re thrilled with how eight hours have skipped by like eight minutes thanks to the scope of available tactics. Mankind Divided’s proving to be a much smarter, broader game than Human Revolution – whatever way you eventually choose to play it.
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