![]() These are subtle choices, but taken as a whole they remove most of the guessing and hoping that made Human Revolution’s stealth occasionally frustrating. Additionally, some of the stealth-assistance augs that were optional in Human Revolution, like the ability to see a projection of your last known location or to have enemies appear on the mini-map without having to visually acquire them, are now given to you for free (a nice change from the usual sequel approach of de-powering the hero back to base levels, which Mankind Divided cleverly sidesteps). The UI also does a much better job of informing you when you’ve been seen, who sees you, and how close you are to inciting a gunfight. A new cover-to-cover movement system and the ability to mantle up ledges, for instance, make getting around much smoother. Walking Softly, While Carrying a Big StickNone of this would work if Mankind Divided weren’t enjoyable to actually play, but developer Eidos Montreal has made many smart improvements to the moment-to-moment experience since Human Revolution. Almost every mission is this meticulously designed, like an interlocking matrix of questions with a bevy of interesting answers…and Mankind Divided never stops asking. Nice work! Except, that was just the keypad. Ah, no spare parts, huh? Did you check that lab assistant’s computer? Oh, you’re hacking is THAT bad? No sweat, just start luring in and knocking out guards until you find one that’s got the code for the keypad on him. No multi-tool? Craft one with some spare parts. Don’t have the skills or the software? Bust out a multi-tool - a rare one-time-use item that can hack anything in a jiffy. But with some luck and a healthy stack of the right hacking software, you could pull it off. “That keypad? You could hack it if you’ve put enough points into that aug, though it would be a crazy hack given how much more interesting the expanded hacking mini-game has become. You won’t find any simple hit jobs or fetch quests here these are long-form assignments with lots of moving parts, and they require you to find one of several possible solutions at every step. It’s a little surprising that Eidos Montreal is willing to allow us to overlook these if we don’t search thoroughly enough, because in terms of complexity and design these optional adventures are no less sophisticated than the main quest-line. An innocent-looking curio shop might have a secret passage leading to a storage locker full of valuable items, or sneaking through a neighboring apartment might lead to you stumbling into one of the meaty multi-part sidequests. Being able to leap, sneak, muscle, or hack my way into almost anywhere wouldn’t mean much if there wasn’t anything there worth discovering, but my feats of high-tech infiltration were always rewarded in one way or another. This harmonious relationship between mechanics and environmental design extends to the returning augments as well, lending a sense of value and purpose to even the most basic-seeming of upgrades. “Remote hacking a second-floor window shutter and then Icarus Dashing up to it became my favorite one-two punch of stealthy infiltration, granting me easy access to more than a few places where the front door wasn’t an option. More often, I used it to dash directly from ground level up to a second-story window. I once used it to dash across a series of rafters high above an entire roomful of enemies with none of them the wiser. ![]() But it wasn’t until I started noticing subtle new routes I could take towards objectives that I was sold on it. It’s also a great gap-closer for swiftly knocking out guards from a few paces out. For instance, the Icarus Dash allows you to cover short distances in the blink of an eye, which makes it a fine escape tool. Prague Is Your PlaygroundThese deviously fun gadgets would be good on their own, but it’s the thoughtfully crafted environments that tease out their true potential. They’d almost be too powerful if not for the associated energy and ammo costs that come with them, which are fine-tuned so that I wasn’t too shy to use one, while still feeling a little bit special every time I did. The energy-draining Titan Armor ripples angrily as it shrugs off everything from bullets to grenades, the Tesla Arm attachment locks onto and incapacitates multiple targets at range, and when someone absolutely needs to die immediately, the arm-mounted nanoblade launcher pierces flesh and armor alike - knocking its target clean off their feet and pinning the corpse to the nearest wall with tremendous force. A handful of powerful, sexy new experimental augments that you can wire into grizzled cyborg protagonist Adam Jensen are at least partially to thank for that. Play Even more so than its predecessors, this iteration of Deus Ex succeeds in making me feel like a cybernetically enhanced super agent that no security system can withstand.
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