Wow. What a great direction to take the series, and what a great story for replayability (to an extent, of course.)

First things first, lets get the obvious out of the way. This is 1/2 of Deus Ex 2. Due to SQEnix's decisions and the developers own mismanagement, we did get shorted on story and shaggled for a little extra money. Because of this, little things like Breach Mode feel a little odd and to be honest, out of place in the game. I don't really see why we go from Adam Jensen to... breach hacker...? The concept is fine, the execution is alright enough, the location is odd.

Alright that sums up the extra content not related to the Deus Ex story.

The game and story itself has a compelling continuation of the events that take place after Human Revolution. There's quite a few allusions, some that take place outright throughout the course of the story. Then, others like how Mankind Divided's Adam Jensen is a clone. specifically a sleeper cell to find Janus. These subtleties actually begin from the title screen! On the left half you have Jensen's profile with gold glasses. On the right half is a fully gray profile, not unlike the new armor that Jensen's been given. These instances continue with things like the Palisade vault where you are able to find a dead body inside the Tai Yong Medical Vault. These events alone give you enough reason to want to replay the story, solely for playing it again with this perspective in mind.

The gameplay and map-design is a little cyclical. Playing on the hardest difficulty will be confusing for you, as there's no indicators for where you are supposed to go. Having a hard time finding your place of work or area of residence? Good luck! Better pull up your map. Note: This is only for Give Me Deus Ex as far as I know. Playing through the game once should give you enough familiarity with the map to get to each general area unless you're particularly spatially challenged.

While not open-world, the map and progression of time gives you some sense of ability to do everything you want to quest wise while keeping the suspense. In a similar vein, this game punishes you for rushing through things and rewards you for doing things early. It's quite the paradox, essentially you are limited as a player in the linear story while being given the opportunity to go beyond those limits.

Speaking of going beyond your limits, how far will you get into the game before you remove your own limitations? Personally I got through Chapter 5 or 6, right before I left Prague to go to the Cyberslums (I forget the name). I kinda kicked myself as I was expecting to lose all my abilities that I finally regained, but was pleasantly surprised to find that they didn't pull a Spider-Man on us. On the second playthrough I went ahead and got rid of it almost first thing, leaving me with only 6 praxis points until I was fully upgraded. Playing through with the full set of powers is almost overwhelming, trying to decide your own playstyle in tandem with achievements or the roleplay of that save.

The additional powers feel like they are core features and are well designed. Finding blueprints throughout the game for our body parts adds some dimensionality as well, but ultimately the fun comes from when you make the decision to be a powerhouse. Coming down with the P.E.P.S or the Tesla? Deciding that cloaking is the better choice? Even if you're the type of player to always generally play in the same style (lots of action or lots of stealth), the game allows you to step out of your comfort zone while rewarding you for playing how you want to play.

That may not always be what's best for everyone in the end, but that is still your decision, or maybe just a matter of how capable you are.

All in all - Part of this games reception came from a poor launch with not the best optimization and some microtransations in a single player game. While they are valid criticisms, one of them has been fixed. Very few crashes playing through the game on a med-high spec PC (1660+R5 2600 @ 4.00GHz+32GB RAM). However, there are valid criticisms for the game.

Breach Mode, while conceptually good, does not feel like part of Mankind Divided. It takes one segment of the story mode and adapts in into a hackers espionage mission, progression feels a lot like a mobile game. Talk talk talk talk talk (mind you, not necessarily interesting conversation either. Just some repetitive exposition and a lot of waiting.) Complete the mission and you move onto the next breach, good job hacker! Talk talk talk talk talk talk... Repeat...

Granted, I only played the initial introduction + 1 afterwards and it took a long 25 minutes (unsure if it was actually 25. Felt like 45.) After each mission there's some menu on things to buy or upgrade, all of which can have real money spent on them. Hm...

The map design is pretty good, however it is pretty hard to differentiate between sections of the city. I still don't really know how I know what the difference between Preschecka and Czerta are. They look different, but moving around them feels fairly samey. This rings true for the sewers as well, for me at least. However, the one-off maps work well for their purpose. Cyberpunk Slums (Golem City, I remembered!) and the Snow area are have some enthralling aspects to their design. There's more verticality in Golem City than anywhere else in the game and it's still more manageable moving through it than it is through parts of the other cities. So much so that on my first playthrough I completely forgot to do one of the quests. Ironically, it didn't seem to matter, the antagonist never showed up meaningfully for me. If he did show up, I don't remember him and it was not a problem, ha!

With those downsides fleshed out, I just want to reiterate how much I really did like the direction of the story. The exposition and the payoffs are almost overwhelming. Here's hoping that Mankind Divided gets its part 2, followed with a fully fleshed out game in a single go, rather than split between two parts that we only get half of.

The closest thing to a FPS bullet hell game I can find.

Oh, the early enemies *are* the bullets.

Edit:

♥♥♥♥.

My best time is about 142 seconds and boy, I've only started getting close to averaging 90 to 120 seconds by reading a comprehensive guide, taking notes on it and mantra-ing "DAGGERS ♥♥♥♥♥" every time I hear and approach a spider, or "figure 8, circle, bunnyhop" to make it instinctive.

♥♥♥♥.

That achievement is going to be hard.