My introduction to the Deus Ex franchise began with the popular meme that spawned from the previous entry Human Revolution where Adam Jensen, our main protagonist says "I never asked for this," in response to an NPC asking about his augmentations after an attack that left him critically injured. I didn't get to play Human Revolution but the world interested me a lot because I enjoy cyberpunk settings and cyborgs and humans interacting with technology much closer than today's world. It also reminded me a lot of the classic anime Ghost in the Shell and if anything can bring me back to that, there's got to be something worth looking at in it.
Mankind Divided takes place two years after the events of Human Revolution that ended with the Aug Incident constructed by the Illuminati, where augmented people lost control of their minds and became lethally violent and thus has sparked racial tension between humans and the augmented. You once again step into the shoes of Adam Jensen who has now been working for the Interpol under Task Force 29 to stop a group of augmented terrorists. He also secretly works with the Juggernaut Collective, a hacker group helping him expose the Illuminati. The opening mission of the game is really strong, I felt immediate freedom in how I could go about tackling the mission. I could go in guns blazing and armed to the teeth or armed with a tranquilizer gun and knocking enemies out silently and ghosting the place. I prefer the silent approach and it felt immensely satisfying to dip and duck through the enemy ranks using Jensen's augmented abilities of cloaking and hacking and leaping to the ceiling to avoid being seen. What helps add to that freedom is that there is no one linear path to my objective as well as secondary objectives to complete which offer more XP to level up and get praxis points to purchase new augment upgrades. There's ventilation shafts to crawl in and windows to climb through and back doors and any other nook and cranny available.
The augmentations available to you are really fun as well. The old return as well as new ones such as the P.E.P.S. which is a kinetic cannon within Jensen's arm that when fired blows enemies away or knocks them out. That's my personal favorite because it works great as a last resort tool to knock enemies on their feet so that I can make a getaway to hide. Not every problem can be resolved with force though, Jensen can make use of his augmentations to gauge people's social interactions and engage in debate that can sway them to one side or another which is very helpful to complete secondary objectives or gain access to areas or items.
I do enjoy that the game is played open world where you find side missions and interactions with characters. What I don't like about it is the inability to place my own markers on the map and I can only follow the game ones placed by story and side missions. It made it too hard to find stores to buy and sell and equipment and made my already terrible map reading skills worse. The game is pretty short too, I'm more than halfway through the game and I've put in about 5 or 6 hours including doing most of the side missions.
Despite the god awful pre order system it had in the beginning and the inclusion of microtransactions, Mankind Divided still makes for a pretty fun game. I suggest picking it up during a sale.
