Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is finally here, and the sequel to one of our favorite immersive sims expands Human Revolution's scope, providing more tools and bigger spaces to play in. How you tackle missions violently, like a ghost, or with a silver tongue can have big consequences. The amount of choice is impressive (as we lauded in our review), but it might leave new players confused about what skills to focus on, the infiltration methods available to them, and whether or not Adam Jensen s facial hair is cool or very, very uncool. Don t fret, keep a few simple tips in mind, and Mankind Divided will feel familiar in no time.

Get these essential augmentations ASAP 

Deus Ex has always been about player choice, but without certain abilities the available options are pretty limited. It can be infuriating to see a ventilation shaft just beyond your reach, the one that will take you exactly where you need to go, but just because you skipped leg day you re stuck weaving through vision cones and land mines. Get these augs and save yourself some grief.Remote Hacking - By far, the most helpful ability in Mankind Divided is Remote Hacking. With it, you can simply look at a device to hack it for a small energy cost (and some well-timed button presses). Maxing out the Remote Hacking stat is ideal since it allows you to temporarily disable robots, turrets, and security cameras, which can come in handy for both stealth and assault builds. At only 3 Praxis points for everything, it s a good deal. And don t worry about overclocking Jensen s cybernetics so long as you re trying to complete all the sidequests (and you should) overclocking won t matter a few hours in. Klipspringer Jump Mod - Without the ability to jump higher, you won t be able to access escape routes or perform mad dunks. Entrances to vents, rooftops, and peace of mind will remain just out of reach, locking out some of the more clever methods for infiltration.Social Enhancer - The Social Enhancer makes pivotal NPC conversations much easier to sway by translating the character s personality type into some basic flashing UI elements. Responding with the right line of dialogue can soothe the character, opening them up to persuasion. You won t need it often, but when you do, it will make a massive difference in terms of how the story plays out.Optimized Musculature - Most levels place a vending machine in front of a particularly convenient ventilation shaft, but without big muscles, you can only ogle it with x-ray vision from afar.

Stack barrels and trash bins  

The environments are littered with physics objects which are great for throwing to distract guards, but best when used to make crude effigies of our true lord and savior, the trash bin. One mission has you infiltrate the headquarters of a cult (aka, non-believers) starting from the first floor. Or you can just go outside and construct a trash and crate tower that takes you straight to heaven. Be sure to stop by the fourth floor window on the way up and complete the mission for some XP before resuming your slow dissolve into the sky.

Do every sidequest you can

Mainlining the game takes about seven hours, but our reviewer did everything he could and finished in just under 30 hours. There s a lot of great extra stuff to see, and without the extra experience, your abilities will be much more limited than if you were to see and play everything. Sidequests dole out experience like candy in a tri-county parade, and you ll want all the abilities you can get. Late game levels are complex spy jungle gyms that test every facet of your cybernetic arsenal, and behind those missions are some great side stories that give slight nuance to Mankind Divided s hands-off cyberpunk representation of civil rights politics. Dig into your past (and get an invaluable reward for it) or help a rogue zine hack the billboards around town to get the truth out or, just do it for the XP.

...Or ignore missions entirely and explore Prague

Prague is no Skyrim, but it s a huge, dense hub area with plenty to see. Nearly every building is hiding something, whether some story tidbits in an email or a hidden stash of weapon mods and scrap. The sewer system is a labyrinth all its own, and while spelunking in its stinky corridors I happened to find a way into the hideout I d been trying to infiltrate unseen for hours. And of course, everything is just pretty to look at. There s more character and minute detail in Prague than any Deus Ex game before, worth admiration for the artistry alone.

Read every email and pocket secretary 

Massive blocks of tiny text can be a strain on the eyes, but in Deus Ex, reading emails and pocket secretaries are vital for expanding your infiltration options. Some contain key codes and computer passwords in their entirety (cyber security in the future is pretty trash, eh?) and others might detail secret alternative routes. I read an email that mentioned untrampled, whole leaves made their way into a secure vault, so I went looking for leaves outside and found a well-hidden entrance I would ve missed otherwise.

Check under desks for secret buttons 

Everyone deserves to find a secret door in their lifetime.

If you like stealth games, avoid the glass-shield cloak ability 

It reduces stealth to energy management, which isn t fun and skips more interesting methods of infiltration (hacking, exploration, intel) for a boring series of bolts between cover while waiting for your energy to recharge. Grab the Icarus Dash, a slightly clumsy approximation of Dishonored s blink dash, and fill out your hacking abilities instead. Do your part to roleplay the ideal stealthy cyberpunk.

Don’t put all your augs into one basket

By the end of Mankind Divided, you ll have plenty of wiggle room when spending ability points, but early on, your core abilities will feel severely limited. It might be tempting to pour everything into hacking or combat trees, and having a maxed-out specialization early on can be immensely helpful, just only in particular situations. No mission in Deus Ex makes exclusive use of one skill set, so while you may be able to hack like Mr. Robot, when it comes to spatial awareness or traversal, you may be backed into a corner. Spread those points out in the early game so you always have a way out of a sticky situation. Be a decent hacker with mad hops and big biceps instead of just a great hacker.

Get messy

This is more of a personal recommendation than anything, but the most fun you can have with Deus Ex is by letting yourself mess up. How you react under pressure and what skills you build out to prep for future screwups is what make it so great. There s room for save-scummed ghost runs, but for a more memorable playthrough, let the systems do their thing. My strongest memory from Human Revolution is from one of the earliest missions where you infiltrate a police station. I was caught almost immediately, and decided to make it easy for myself by knocking out every officer in the building and hiding them in vents. It s a silly way to pivot, but made me laugh and actually worked. Mankind Divided has even more room for experimentation, so get after it and fill those vents with unconscious bodies. It s what PC gaming is all about.

Eidos has finally revealed what's included in the Deus Ex: Mankind Divided season pass we wondered about a couple of weeks ago when a reminder of its existence was quietly slipped into the system requirements. The pass will cover two story DLCs entitled System Rift and A Criminal Pass, set to come out in the fall and winter respectively, and a wack of in-game items that will be available when the game goes live on August 23.

Those bonus in-game items are:

• The Tactical Pack, which features a custom-skinned Tranquilizer Rifle, the Micro Assembler Augmentation, a pack of tranquilizer ammo, three smoke grenades, and two gas grenades
• Four Praxis Kits, which enable further evolution of augmentations
• 5000 credits, with which you will buy stuff
• 1000 weapon parts, for upgrading your firepower
• Five Breach Booster packs, which unlock new weapons, items and other stuff in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided—Breach, the arcade hacking mode announced in June
• 20 Breach chipsets, used to acquire “exclusive items” in Breach, including custom weapons and premium Booster Packs

The Deus Ex: Mankind Divided season pass is included with the Digital Deluxe edition of the game on Steam, which goes for $90/ 65, or can be purchased separately for $30/ 25. And now, the unlock times:

It's so close! Pass a few minutes of these final few hours by joining us in an analysis of Adam Jensen's apartment. His new digs aren't as swanky as his old Detroit home, but man, that's one hell of a TV set. Those wood beam ceiling arches are pretty sweet, too.

Deus Ex hero Adam Jensen is a closed book. You never really know what's going on in that cyborg brain of his. But by studying his apartment in Human Revolution and now Mankind Divided, you get a glimpse of what lies beneath his moody exterior. His new place isn't as big or opulent as his old Detroit apartment, but it still gives us some valuable insight into his daily life and personality: arguably more than his dialogue ever does. I spent some time carefully exploring his new Prague digs, and here's what I discovered.

Bed

It's clear Jensen hasn't skimped on his bed. It may have come with the place, but I don't think so. That style is so him. Black, antique styling, but with a modern edge. His elasticated under-sheet has come loose at one corner revealing a very plump, comfortable-looking mattress. Probably memory foam, or some futuristic equivalent. A definite highlight of the apartment.

Bedside tables

On one table there's a copy of a National Geographic-style magazine called Xplore. The cover story is about the real-life HAARP research program, which was a target of conspiracy theorists before it was shut down in 2015. Is this an old magazine, or has the program been revived in Deus Ex's future?

On the other there's some assorted mail, a stylish cyberpunk candelabrum that some of you may remember from his old apartment, and a copy of a self-help book about learning how to let it go. Jensen is clearly still haunted by the events of the previous game two years earlier, and is trying to deal with it.

Bin

This bin is filled entirely with paper, suggesting Jensen is a keen recycler. Among the debris is a note from an M. Durocher requesting all perishable food items be removed from a mysterious fridge before 5pm. It's the kind of thing you find in a shared office kitchen, which makes me wonder why it's in Jensen's bin. There's also a TPP report, which could be a nod to Office Space.

Desk

The mess on Jensen's cluttered bedroom desk includes a PC that looks suspiciously like AMD's Project Quantum and a motherboard. Is he building his own gaming PC? He doesn't seem the type to play games, but I guess even cyborg super-agents need to relax sometimes.

The desk is also covered in broken watches, spare parts, and tools. He seems to be obsessed with dismantling and/or repairing old watches. It could just be a hobby, but is also probably some symbolic manifestation of his struggles with his own mechanical body. Eidos Montreal loves symbolism.

Toilet

Jensen's futuristic toilet is clean and well-stocked with spare paper. Curiously, he's using a plunger as a paper holder. Or perhaps it's a holder designed to look like a plunger? We may never know. There's also a large stack of reading material including Cabled magazine an obvious parody of Wired and the latest issue of the Picus Daily Standard electronic newspaper.

Bathroom shelves

There are plenty of cleaning products in Jensen's bathroom, including a few bottles of 'Ocean's Freshness' spray cleaner. Maybe he likes the smell. And if you've ever wondered how his hair always looks so good, the bottles of Hairgenius '50 in 1' shampoo/conditioner might be the secret.

There are some drugs too including VersaLife paracetamol and something called Strokioxx, which combats a skin condition called hyperpigmentation. Is this a side effect of his augmentations? And I'm impressed by his stack of clean, neatly folded towels. I bet they're made of Egyptian cotton.

Bathroom sink

Perched on Jensen's elegant, modern sink, which offers a pleasant view of Prague's tiled rooftops, is a bottle of Skin Shield hand lotion. Now, maybe I'm reading too much into this, but why does a man with metal hands need hand lotion? Maybe it's for guests. Or another part of his body.

Postcards

In the hall there are a few postcards from Detroit pinned up on a wooden beam. 'How are you doing?' one reads. 'I wish you were here'. All of them seem to be signed by the same person, although I can't quite make out the name. It seems Jensen is somewhat sentimental about his past in America.

Notes

Some notes and papers are stuck up above Jensen's desk, a few of which are written in Czech. One reads 'koupit vice pap rov ', which means 'buy more paper' according to Google Translate. Another reminds Jensen to bring credits somewhere at 7:45am. Not many revelations here.

Kitchen counters

Jensen's stylish kitchen gives us an insight into his diet. He has a bowl filled with fresh-looking oranges, a coffee machine, a can of Dai-Taga premium beer, and a bag of burger buns. There's also a baseball signed by some unknown player, and a bat nearby, so Jensen is clearly a fan of the sport.

On the island there's another bowl of oranges. Maybe augmentations deprive you of vitamin C? And there's a Czech cookery book too. Jensen doesn't seem like much of a cook, so I think this is a housewarming gift from someone. And, interestingly, there's a second copy of the 'learning to let go' book.

TV

TV screens are pretty big in the future, it seems. This massive holographic display endlessly cycles adverts and Picus news bulletins, although Jensen can also use it to make video calls. He must watch a lot of TV when he's off duty, otherwise why would he have such an enormous screen?

Coffee table

There's a lot to take in here. A bowl and spoon confirms Jensen's love of cereal, including a box with a cheery gnome on the front described as 'suspiciously delicious'. Hmmm. There's also what appears to be a movie script, titled Nuclear Snake, written by Frank Pritchard the obnoxious, pony-tailed Sarif Industries tech expert you might remember from Human Revolution.

There's also a photo of Kubrick, the dog he used to own with ex-girlfriend Megan Reed. The pooch was put down when Jensen and Reed were believed to have died, and it's clear he still misses him. Lastly, a pair of books on learning Czech shows he's attempting to learn the local language.

Books

Jensen is an avid reader, if the piles of books in his apartment are anything to go by. Or maybe he's just one of those people who buys and never reads them. His collection includes 'Super Electro Magnetic Fields, 'The Miracle of Life', 'The Science Behind Augmentation', 'Life and Regrets', 'Orpheus Slain', 'A Detailed History of Cybernetics', and 'The Art of Gratuitous Violence'.

Telescope

Either Jensen is big into star-gazing or he's been using this to spy on the neighbours. It's a fairly high-tech piece of kit and looks expensive, so he takes whichever one it is pretty seriously. I can definitely imagine Jensen spending his evenings gazing moodily at the stars and pondering life.

In conclusion

Jensen's Detroit apartment was a much more impressive space, with high ceilings and more square inches to brood in. But his Prague home has its own distinctive charms, and the stylish, tasteful modern furnishings throughout indicate Jensen is clearly an aesthete at heart.

The postcards from Detroit and photo of his deceased dog suggest he has some sentimentality under his hard exterior, and it seems there's nothing he likes more than repairing old watches and eating cereal. I feel like I learned more about him exploring his apartment than finishing the game.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is out soon. It's very good, as Andy will tell you in our Deus Ex: Mankind Divided review, but how's the PC port?

The PC version was tended to by Nixxes, who did a decent job with Human Revolution. We'll be looking at performance tweaks and settings in more detail next week once we've had chance to play with the latest build with the most up-to-date drivers, but for now we thought you might be interested to know how customisable Mankind Divided is on PC. There's a pretty good suite of options, and I'm particularly happy with the UI customisation, in particular the option to allow certain UI elements to fade when not in use. The UI is designed for PC players as well, with a customisable taskbar for your weapons and gadgets.

In addition to the options listed below, Mankind Divided lets you rebind commands on keyboard. On pad, you have access to four preset control schemes.

I have also added some pictures of Jensen punching goons, just to spice things up.

Display options

DirectX 12 - off/on (disabled for now, but support is currently due for the week beginning September 5)

Exclusive fullscreen - off/on (on gives you access to refresh rate settings)

Display - choose your monitor

Resolution

MSAA - off, 2x, 4x, 6x, 8x

Refresh rate - 60, 100, 110, 120Hz

VSync - off/on

Field of view - 0% to 100%

Brightness - sliding scale

Also, 3D settings for Stereoscopic Separation and Stereoscopic popout

Graphics options

Preset - low, medium, high, very high, ultra (a popup recommends you have at least 4GB of video memory at top setting)

Texture quality - low, medium, high, very high, ultra

Texture filtering - off, 2x, 4x, 8x anisotropic filtering

Shadow quality - medium, high, very high

Contact hardening shadows - off/on (the effect creates "a more realistic shadow falloff, resulting in soft shadows that are further away from the source")

Temporal anti-aliasing - off/on (a substitute for anti-aliasing that kinda blurs edges to get rid of jaggies. This in combination with the 'sharpen' effect seems to offer a less intensive anti-aliasing solution)

Motion blur - off/on

Depth of field - off, on, very high, ultra

Bloom - off/on

Volumetric lighting - off, on, ultra

Subsurface scattering - off/on

Cloth physics - off/on

Ambient occlusion off/on

Tesselation - off/on

Parralax occlusion mapping - off, on, high ("adds additional depth to select surfaces", for walls and the like)

Screenspace reflections - off, on, ultra

Sharpen - off, on

Chromatic aberration - off/on

Level of detail - low, medium, high, very high

UI options

Pickup outline - off/on

Threat indicator - off/on

Grenade warning - off/on

Radar - off/on

Objective display (Breach) - off/on

Automatic inventory management - off/on

Health bar - always on, timed fade out, always off

Energy bar - always on, timed fade out, always off

Ammo counter - always on, timed fade out, always off

Weapon bar - always on, timed fade out, always off

Assigned augmentation shortcuts - always on, timed fade out, always off

Scale - 0 to 100

One more for good luck:

First, an apology: the audio quality of this episode is rough. Oh, sure, it starts off fine, but as we go along, Andy and Phil get quieter, while Tom gets louder and louder. We blame GamesRadar, who pinched all the good microphones for their Gamescom coverage. Still, please do suffer through this audio catastrophe for some mild takes on Metal Gear Survive, plus some more informed views on No Man s Sky and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. We ll do better next time.

You can get Episode 21: Oculus Sniffed here. You can also subscribe on iTunes or keep up with new releases using our RSS feed.

Discussed: Metal Gear Survive, No Man s Sky, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

This week: Phil Savage, Andy Kelly, Tom Senior

The PC Gamer UK Podcast is a weekly podcast about PC gaming. Thoughts? Feedback? Requests? Get in touch at pcgamer@futurenet.com and use the subject line Podcast , or tweet us with #pcgpodcast.

This week s music is from Deus Ex.

We're sorry.

While moody protagonist Adam Jensen is fitted with military-grade mechanical implants that let him turn invisible, punch through walls, and hack computers, most of his peers in this high-tech future just have advanced prosthetics. Cybernetic replacements for a missing limb or eye. But the ordinary citizens don t see the distinction. To them, every augmented person is equally dangerous.

It s a paranoia born of the so-called Aug Event, in which augmented people around the world were driven violently insane, killing millions. The truth behind this disaster is revealed in the previous game, Human Revolution, which an optional 12-minute recap video recounts in convoluted detail. Set just two years later, Mankind Divided is a direct continuation of this story.

Augmented people are now second-class citizens, harassed by the police, viewed with suspicion wherever they go, and sent to live in slums. The city of Prague is at the heart of this anti-aug upswell, which just so happens to be Jensen s new home. It s a weird place for someone like him to relocate to, but he has no choice: it s where his latest employer, counter-terrorist agency Task Force 29, is based.

Prague is the only major city hub in Mankind Divided, which is slightly disappointing. I kept waiting for Jensen to fly to the next one, but it never happened. However, by focusing on a single location the artists have managed to pack in an incredible amount of detail. As you walk the streets your eyes are bombarded by holographic billboards, buzzing police drones, strange sculptures, and fascinating futuretech. It s an impressively dense, hand-crafted space, making Human Revolution s cities feel pretty lifeless and cardboard in comparison.

It s clear more time was spent on the streets than the interiors of the pubs and shops, however, which all look vaguely the same, bar a few more detailed locations like the Red Queen club. The narrow, traffic-free streets don t quite give the impression that you re in a bustling urban sprawl, either. It s the best Deus Ex city yet, but it s still missing something. Thankfully, the character models have been vastly improved. The dead-eyed mannequins of the last game are a distant memory, but there s still a marked difference between the high-poly main characters and the slightly doughy NPCs.

The police presence in Prague is never a real obstacle, but there are certain situations where they ll bother you. For example, entering a metro station through the naturals-only entrance, or getting on the wrong train carriage. A scene will play where they demand to see your papers, but that s it. Although they will react to any crimes you commit. I had a strange moment where I tasered a guy robbing a store at gunpoint, thinking I was doing a good deed, and a cop saw me. Seconds later the entire police force was hunting me down and trying to kill me. The AI can be weird like that.

To make up for the single hub, Prague is remixed several times over the course of the game. Jensen will embark on a mission, returning home to find a different spin on the city. In the first act you explore it during daylight hours, but later you get to see it at night. This gives it a very different look and feel. A new district opens up, and extra missions become available. It takes the sting out of there only being one city, but I would still have liked to see more of this world. Perhaps they just didn t have the time or resources to create another location as detailed as Prague, which is understandable.

Jensen briefly visits Golem City, a ghetto built on the outskirts of the Czech capital to house augmented people. It s one of my favourite locations in the Deus Ex series so far, inspired by Hong Kong s infamous Kowloon Walled City, but it s not a proper hub. When I first arrived I thought I d be spending a lot more time there, that it would be much bigger, but it s really just an elaborate introduction to one of the main story missions. Even so, it s a remarkable feat of world-building, evocatively illustrating just how hard and hopeless life is for augmented people in this grim vision of the future.

I love Task Force 29 s HQ as well, which is Mankind Divided s equivalent of UNATCO or Sarif Industries, and looks like CTU from 24. I spent a good hour in here sneaking through vents into people s offices, reading their emails, stealing credit chips off their desks and talking to my colleagues. But no one told me off for going into the ladies bathroom. What gives? That s a series tradition! It makes no sense, of course, for Jensen to wander around his office nicking stuff and crawling around in the ventilation system unchallenged. But hey, it s a Deus Ex game. That s what you do.

In Prague Jensen is caught up in a terrorist bombing at a train station and his augmentations are damaged. Before the Aug Event he could have strolled into a LIMB clinic for repairs, but there aren t any in Prague for obvious reasons. You can see the remains of one in the city, but it s boarded up and covered in anti-aug graffiti. So he has to visit a new ally called V clav Koller, an eccentric underground augmentation expert, to get himself fixed. Getting to him is your first real test, as his lab which is hidden under a bookshop is crawling with gangsters who you need to either take out or sneak past.

It s during your repairs that a range of experimental new augs are found lying dormant in Jensen s body. Koller activates them, which is a neat way of giving you a bunch of new toys to play with. He also performs a convenient factory reset, giving you a generous pool of Praxis points to spend on reconfiguring your augmentations from scratch. I like this because it gives you the opportunity to recreate your character from Human Revolution, even though there s no save transfer option, or create a new one. But there s a catch: to activate one of these new augs you have to sacrifice an existing one, otherwise Jensen s systems will become unstable. At least until you find a certain item in an optional mission.

There are seven new augmentations to play with. Players who like to solve problems by shooting them can use Focus Enhancement to briefly slow time, or Titan to cover themselves in thick armour for a few seconds. But I don t play Deus Ex that way, and you probably don t either. For stealth fans, the new Remote Hacking tool (which has been lifted straight from BioShock 2) is a must-have. Point the crosshair at a camera, tripwire, mine, turret, or drone, and a simple timing-based minigame pops up. Complete it and the thing you re aiming at will stop working for a short while.

The Icarus Dash is a Deus Ex-style take on Dishonored s Blink, letting you essentially teleport by charging it up and pointing at something like a distant ledge or an out of reach window. It s not as responsive or satisfying to use as Blink, because finding the sweet spot to make it work can be tricky, but it gives Jensen a lot more mobility and freedom. I mapped it to the middle mouse button and found myself using it constantly.

I ll let you discover the rest for yourself. The important thing is that there are now a lot more tools to complement your play style, which makes Jensen an even more effective Swiss Army knife. I still don t like the way he moves, though. The first-person movement always felt slightly weightless to me in Human Revolution, and the same applies here. There are some sections where a bit of light platforming is required, and it feels annoyingly twitchy. And when you haul yourself up a ledge, the camera violently lurches forward to show your hands grabbing it, which can be disorientating to watch.

While on a counter-terrorism mission in Dubai, which serves as the game s tutorial level, Jensen and his squad are ambushed by augmented mercenaries wearing creepy gold masks. This sets the main story in motion, and he soon finds himself tangled up in a sinister conspiracy involving the Illuminati. Who else? The story takes place mostly in Prague, with a few stops in other countries that I won t spoil for you. And, honestly, it s the weakest part of the game. I never felt that invested in what was going on, and by the end I didn t feel like I d learned anything about Jensen as a character.

The writing is inconsistent throughout, with some fun characters (I enjoyed spending time with the jumpy Lone Gunmenesque editor of an anarchist newspaper), and a lot of forgettable ones including an antagonist who says We re not so different you and I completely unironically. The use of real-world history to give context to the segregation and prejudice in this world is heavy-handed from Augmented Lives Matter slogans on posters to drinking fountains marked augs and naturals . It s like the writers are constantly poking you in the arm and saying Get it?

I do get it, yes. And I get that science fiction, particularly cyberpunk, should hold a mirror up to our own society to reveal something about it. But Mankind Divided doesn t have anything interesting to say, and its political and social commentary is about as entry-level as it gets. It has no message other than, perhaps, prejudice is bad and it reveals no hidden truth about, well, anything. And that s a shame, because I feel like this setting is fertile ground for a great story. I just don t think Eidos Montreal knows how to tell one yet.

But what the game lacks in narrative depth it makes up for with some genuinely brilliant level design. The game is at its best when it presents you with a big, interesting space full of obstacles, enemies, and things to discover and sets you loose. One mission in particular sees you breaking into a high-security bank, and it s some of the most fun I ve ever had in an immersive sim. Everywhere you look there are sentry turrets, security bots, criss-crossed laser tripwires, and patrolling guards. Getting inside, stealing the particular item you re looking for, and escaping unseen was hugely satisfying.

Experimenting with cool augmentations and manipulating the AI and systems is exactly what I want from a Deus Ex game, and Mankind Divided frequently delivers. The sheer variety of ways to tackle an objective is impressive, and almost everything is designed with your augs in mind. And if you don t have a particular aug to get through one way, there s always an alternative. And don t worry: Eidos Montreal has learned its lesson when it comes to boss battles. I only encountered one in my playthrough (there may be others depending on the choices you make), and I was able to beat him with a Jensen I d tuned for stealth, armed only with a stun gun.

Some of the game s most dramatic missions are, naturally, found in the main story. But the optional side missions are great too, and in many instances much more interesting. You can skip them, but the bonus XP they yield which unlocks additional aug-boosting Praxis points is invaluable. And some of them are essential to learning more about the main story, including one that explains how Jensen ended up with all those experimental augs hidden in his body, and others that give valuable context to a few key events.

One of the most memorable side missions sees you sneaking into an apartment complex filled with tattooed gangsters, knocking one of them unconscious, then dragging his body back out unseen. It s a brilliant test of your stealth skills, and delightfully absurd. In another you help that editor I mentioned earlier find a scoop for his anti-government newspaper. I actually found the self-contained stories these missions tell much more interesting than the main arc in most cases, and they have a variety of outcomes depending on the choices you make some of which can be quite dark.

It took me just under 30 hours to finish Mankind Divided, and that included taking the time to do every side mission I could find. I m sure I missed a few. A decent length, but the final act felt rushed, and the story ended somewhat abruptly. I was left thinking Is that it? when the credits rolled, which is never good. Mostly, though, I just wanted more. Another city hub, another bank to rob, more missions to perform. But I guess I ll have to wait for the next game. I would also like to have seen more explicit connections to the original Deus Ex, but this still feels very much like a distant prequel.

Mankind Divided is a great immersive sim with some of the best level design in the series, a wonderfully rich setting, and an enjoyably diverse range of augmentations to experiment with. I just wish there was a better story holding it all together. And even though the developers clearly worked hard on Prague, the lack of a second city hub was a big disappointment for me. I would have been happy with Prague being smaller if it meant getting to see another corner of this fascinating futuristic society. The original Deus Ex is still the high watermark, but Eidos Montreal is closer than ever to reaching it. The worlds it builds are incredible: it just need to tell better stories in them.