A Mankind Divided – Part 2 – Deus Ex

As promised a few weeks ago, here I am with the second part of Mankind Divided review. I finished the game just a couple of days ago and I’m now going through my second playthrough, while I’m eagerly waiting for other games to come out. Miss Lara Croft is about to knock on my door in two days, so let’s haste into this review while we still can.

Before I delve into the review of the Breach Mode let’s finish the analysis of the main game, starting from the bowels of Prague: the Red Lights District.

During the story, Adam Jensen will have to deal with various kind of enemies, some of which will use part of this district to hide.

That’s why, against my will, I had to enter it and explore every crack and crevice. It was a filthy job, but someone had to do it …..

Jokes aside, I had to admit that the second part of the game did maintain all the promises of the first one, offering a compelling story and very inspired environments. As a matter of fact, the Utulek Complex (aka The Golem), the ghetto outside Prague into which most augmented people where forced to move, as the exact look and feel you would expect from a true cyberpunk product.

The visuals seem to come straight out of a William Gibson book and some corners show a clear resemblance to milestones like Jhonny Mnemonic.

The Golem is a very bad place, whereas rights are often broken by the police, and sickness and misery are behind every corner.

During his quest, Adam Jensen will visit many other places, which I do not show to avoid spoilers, but there is a lot to discover inside the game, if you have the patience to look around for hours, that is. As an example, I did find a copy of Deus Ex: Human Revolution inside a store.

Also, after hacking into a computer, I found a mail referring to a place in town called “Sector TI99-4A”, a clear citation of a computer from the Old Days.

There is also room for romance, and the following picture shows you a nice view of Florence, Tuscany. You may not believe it, but I used to work not very far from that building on the left.

In addition, there is also room for some “proof of concept”. Will this be the look of the PS5?

The following pictures are taken from the “New Game+” save. You’ll be glad to know that, unlike other recent games, starting a new game selecting this mode will give you access to your last inventory so items and enhancements will be there, waiting for you.

As promised, we will now go into the Breach Mode. We are here dealing with a completely different product which, while still preserving the basic gameplay, thrusts you inside the cyberspace as it was imagined by the core cyberpunk inventors.

Your goal is to hack into servers to extract information, but you’ll do it as a “real” entity. Inside the net, firewalls are real walls (which you can disable by using remote hacking) and anti-virus programs are physical entities that will shoot you at first site. Completing the given task will trigger the entire server defences, and will leave you with limited time to escape before being stopped by the servers traceroute program. The following video will show you some real gameplay.

After the game and the Breach Mode, there is other stuff to do in the form of DLC. You will find it under the menu entry “Jensens’ stories”. At present, one DLC is for free while the other costs roughly 12Euros.

In the end, I can safely say that Mankind Divided is a very good game that enhances Human Revolution from every point of view. The graphics, although not using the full spectrum of PS4 capabilities, is very nice and inspired.

The English dub is excellent but, as its predecessor, is occasionally out of synch if you select other languages (at least it is like that in Italian). The difficulty level is, overall, well balanced, mixing stealth and non-stealth action. Just let it be known that, if you are playing at high difficulty settings, you will be severely punished for breaking stealth.

I do have many other games to play, so I don’t know if and when I’ll go back to Deus Ex. This is a real pity since I really liked it and I wish I could play it more even though I already know that I’ll never go for a platinum here. Getting a platinum does mean completing the game in a stealth way from start to finish, which is not my cup of tea. There is only a certain amount of stealth I can take, after which I just unleash Hell …..

Thank you for reading.

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