NEWS
by Ewan Wilson
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided shows us what it's all about
Back in April Eidos Montreal revealed the sequel to their much-loved 2011 cyberpunk game. The three-minute long cinematic trailer for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided didn’t give us much to go on – in fact it was thoroughly unrepresentative of the methodical and tactical flow we’ve come to expect from the classic RPG/FPS series. But that’s CGI trailers for you.
A 25 minute long gameplay video has now been shown, and should put most doubts to bed. Mankind Divided looks a lot like Human Revolution. Narrated by Audio Director Steve Szczepkowski, a good portion of the new video shows cutscenes and conversations – all of which I carefully skipped by – but there’s also plenty of stealthy sleuthing, vent-crawling and general gadget tom foolery. A few new gadgets caught my eye, including knuckle-mounted stun darts which can incapacitate up to four people. Slightly more impactful is a blade that returning protagonist Adam Jensen can fire out of his arm to impale people with (physics!). There’s also a retractable P.E.P.S weapon that bowls people over with exploding plasma.
Looking over the vid, notable positives are that there seems to be a good deal of different ways to approach a given problem, as well as meatier gunplay for those who like to play the game wrong! The levels also look remarkably prettier and more open-planned than Human Revolution’s. Things which haven’t changed include the canned knock-out animations and the third-person camera transitions – I’m sure I’ll have more to complain about when the game launches in 2016!