Crunchyroll was recently invited to a press event hosted by Eidos Montreal and Square Enix Montreal to showcase Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and Deus Ex Go. We were given six whole hours to sit down and comprehensively try out each title as well as speak with some of the developers who were on site to answer questions. You may have already read my interview with Oliver Proulx and Fleur Marty about what went into creating Mankind Divided and Breach. Here I offer my thoughts and experiences from the generous amount of time I spent with each game.
Mankind Divided
The most immediate thing that I noticed playing Mankind Divided is just how much it felt like Human Revolution. The controls felt much the same, which is to say generally good but still with a bit of the restrictive tightness of the previous title. Keeping the same feel was something of an accomplishment given the number of additions that have been made to the game. Easily the most dramatic change to the game was an upgrade to the stealth system, allowing you to more strategically move between hiding places and quietly vault over low objects. Menus have also been tidied up and more easily to hope into and out of, which keeps you in the moment where games like this usually involve a lot of browsing.
Disposing with a great deal of passive augments, Mankind Divided has opted for abilities that must be activated. While, on occasion, an inconvenience, it’s hard to feel like this was anything but a tremendous improvement. Equipping certain augments forces you to decide on what sort of approach you want to take in advance and specialize in certain areas without absolutely railroading you. Pushing augments into activatable abilities with energy requirements make Mankind Divided much more strategic by forcing you to choose windows based on the ability and its energy requirements rather than running around with persistent benefits.
Overall, the entire game has become more tactical by providing you with a number of new abilities that give you unique options not available in Human Revolution. Smart vision allows you to see enemy loadouts which can inform your decisions on how to deal with them and also remotely hack devices so you can take better advantage of whatever distraction that causes from a better position. Icarus dash is a flexible tool acting as both a damaging dash that brings you into melee range and a repositioning tool for exploring and stealth play. Titan is a huge defensive bonus that allows you to absorb fire for a brief period to reposition or lay down some serious damage during its window. Many new proximity and area of effect equipment also allow you to take advantage of the environment by leading enemies into traps.
For all the improvements to gameplay, the most impressive portion of the game to me was the story. Mankind Divided has kept the same subdued, conspiratorial atmosphere of Human Revolution which always gave me the feeling that I was playing the Ghost in The Shell game that never was. Eidos Montreal has taken the story even further by changing the landscape of the world based on the events of Human Revolution. Like any great work of science fiction, they explore modern and historic issues through a futuristic lense and aren’t afraid to tackle some darker themes with such as the mechanical apartheid that has been brought about by widespread distrust of augments after the conclusion of Human Revolution.
Adam Jensen, in particular, is a breath of fresh air as an acting protagonist. During the two year timeskip, he has grown from his origins as the mopey, unwilling subject of a cybernetics experiment to no-nonsense veteran. You get the feeling that being part of an ostracized population has both empowered and embittered him right from the start after a back and forth with another member of his squad in the first mission. It’s actually pretty refreshing to navigating through social interactions knowing Jensen can switch to some seriously biting verbal abuse at a moments notice if you get tired of an NPC’s attitude. His dialogue has some pretty clever writing keep make social options like open mockery of authority, rank pulling, and insults of various amonts of subtlety on the menu.
Breach
On a conceptual level, I couldn’t be happier with the addition of Breach to Mankind Divided. As an alternative to the usual tedium of obligatory multiplayer modes in 1st and 3rd-person shooters, a competitive infiltrating time attack mode making use of Deus Ex’s unique gameplay is a tremendous idea. Breach also takes advantage of the cyberpunk roots of the series by staging the subgame in a Gibsonian virtual reality “matrix” used for hacktivism and corporate espionage, going so far as to create its own narrative and characters gives it the extra flavor it needs to create some enthusiasm for less competitively minded single-player enthusiasts.
That said, the gameplay was certainly fun and an nice analogue to the play of Mankind Divided, but it felt like there were missed opportunities given theoretically limitless environments of VR. The environments and enemies had an interest Tron-meet-SUPERHOT sort of feel, but I found myself wondering what they might have been able to do with something more ambitious like the floating, geometric environments in the original Mirror’s Edge DLC. The same is true for gameplay. While the improved flexibility and customization offered by the tools you’re provided in Breach are a cool enhancements on the base gameplay, the controls and abilities still feel like Adam Jensen navigating hallways rather than a virtual avatar taking down a digital construct. Many of these items on my individual wishlist may be included in the later levels of Breach, but I didn’t see them within the time allotted.
Deus Ex Go
It feels strange that my most glowingly positive experience of the night was on a mobile tie-in, but I just can’t stop being impressed with the new and interesting ways Square Enix Montreal continues to improve on such an simple design. The Go series is beginning to feel like a work of art just as much as it is a franchise of elegantly designed video games. It’s difficult to describe how satisfying not only each of these games have been individually, but how the franchise has evolved with each title. Every title choice and advancement in the engine feels very deliberate and perfectly appropriate to the time and setting upon which it is being released.
With Deus Ex Go, the complexity of their puzzles has once again increased, taking on a hexagonal aesthetic and adding more sophisticated and situationally invulnerable enemies along with a simple hacking mechanic. Deux Ex Go will be the first title in the series to include a plot featuring dialogue, with a story bridging the gap between the events of Human Revolution and Mankind Divided. It feels like the timing and the franchise are just right for these additions, just as the meditative minimalist plot and 3D elements were perfect for Lara Croft Go. As always, the gameplay was minimalist and intuitive, free of tutorials, and an extremely satisfying pick-up-and-play experience.
While I’ve always considered the Go titles to well worth their pricetag, Deus Ex Go promises even more bang for your buck. Square Enix Montreal will be including more periodic content in the form of weekly puzzles and, probably the most exciting news about the launch, a custom puzzle maker. The specifics of the launch time for these add-ons and how available community creations will be weren’t covered in specifics but promise essentially unlimited content.
Conclusion
One last thing worth mentioning is the holistic approach to the launch of these three titles. Multi-platform releases have become more common for extremely popular franchises such as Kingdom Hearts and Assassin’s Creed, which have come with the positive of providing more opportunities for story and the negative of making it easier to miss portions of the story. Deus Ex has taken an excellent approach by giving each of these three(?) games an individual story which contributes to a greater narrative without obligating the player to touch on each. Also having two of the titles come on the same disk and the other be on what is perhaps the most available platform in mobile makes it difficult to miss out. With such a developed setting it’s great to see the developer looking for more opportunities to generate content and the way the three teams folded them together for this iteration of Deus Ex feels just right.
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Peter Fobian is an Associate Features Editor for Crunchyroll, author of Monthly Mangaka Spotlight, and streams on Crunchyroll's official Twitch channel. You can follow him on Twitter at @PeterFobian.
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