In case any of you were unsure, I’m here to tell you that this year, Square Enix came to E3 to do business. Business objective? Blow minds. While some people felt that their first press conference could have been a little better there’s still no disputing that they showed up with the games and in the end that’s the only thing that matters. One such game is Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. We had the opportunity to sit down in a behind closed doors demo with a couple of members from the team at Eidos Montreal. They wanted to show off just how good the game is looking and what we saw was really impressive.
DE:MD is set two years after the events of Human Revolution. Augmented humans (Augs, for short) have essentially been outlawed and are rounded up into settlements. As our host put it ‘picture Deus Ex meets District 9’. Adam Jensen is back and pulling double duty as he works for an organization that keeps tabs on Augs yet he feeds information to other groups due to his lack of trust in his employers.
First and foremost we noticed was just how dynamic the world was; the environment is absolutely alive. In the demo we’re dropped into a train station where Adam meets up with a female companion and it was bustling. Now it’s not like this is the first game to have crowds but in most of them you can easily notice the pre-progmrammed robotic nature of their movements. This was not the case. Every character you saw and interaction they were involved in seemed genuine. Old friends were running into each other and hugging and reminiscing about days of old. The authorities were roaming the crowds hassling citizens and checking identification. I hate to go back to describing it the same way but alive is the best way to explain it. Given this was a scripted run through where you controlled Jensen, but in a limited fashion, I suppose that makes it less impressive but seeing it all in action was very satisfying.
Of course, it’s all well and good if it looks pretty but how does it play, right? Whereas I felt that Human Evolution was a bit slow and limited at times in how you approached things it seems like Mankind Divided is much more open. Now obviously the game isn’t fully open world so much as hub based but the level we were shown had so many options in how you wanted to approach things that you couldn’t help but be impressed.
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“Personally I felt that with Human Revolution, even though I could technically play it anyway I wanted, that there was still always a preferred play style (stealth, almost always) in every situation. What we were shown here at this E3 demo seemed like the possibilities were truly open.”
After an explosion at the train station, Jensen is off to chase down Rucker, a supposed pacifist leader of a group called the Augmented Rights Coalition. High up in a tower it’s up to Adam to get there by any means possible. Personally I felt that with Human Revolution, even though I could technically play it anyway I wanted, that there was still always a preferred play style (stealth, almost always) in every situation. What we were shown here at this E3 demo seemed like the possibilities were truly open. Stealth and force from up high or down low the options were many. At one point, after navigating up the tower, our host panned down to the ground and the sheer verticality of the level became apparent. There are many ways to approach nearly every situation.
In a way it’s a lot more of the same when it comes to the different augmentations at your disposal but from what I saw it all just seemed more fluid. Some of the coolest new additions to Adam’s repertoire are the Icarus Dash which allows you to dart between platforms or, when dropping from above, use it as a devastating ground attack and the Tesla Arm Gun which can be used to take out up to four enemies at once in non-lethal fashion. Also impressive, the Titan mode which turns Adam into an armored tank and looks crazy cool as it spikes and ripples while Adam moves around.Â
 Once Adam makes it to Rucker they get into the dialogue and social gameplay where you can navigate through conversations trying to push the result to one way or another. In the demo presented to us Adam came out on the losing end of the debate and was forced to flee. Fast and chaotic gameplay ended with a flying leap on to a waiting aircraft and a daunting look at our possible antagonist before we faded to black.
All in all the impression I was left with is that Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is a lot more open than its predecessor but is still a lot more of the same. While Human Revolution seemed to skew towards the stealth side of things it looks like the developers pushed to make it so players could navigate the game in any way they prefer. It quite obviously looks stunning running on Eidos’ Dawn Engine too. With a release date sometime in early 2016 (or so we’ve been told) this one should probably be on the list of any sci-fi, shooter junkie’s ‘games to watch’ list. Of course, with only seeing a snippet of the game as a whole we’ll leave our final impressions for the inevitable review.
