If Mankind Divided has any major problems, it’s a difficulty in cashing the checks that its setting and narrative write.
There’s every indication that Mankind Divided will explore a global conspiracy, that it will seek to unravel both the mysterious Illuminati’s plans for the Augmented, and what happened to Jensen in the two years after the events of Human Revolution. Instead, Eidos Montreal is largely content to play in Prague, with minor detours to very limited spaces elsewhere that compose a small fraction of the game.
It’s strange, having played Human Revolution and now Mankind Divided, and being struck with a sense that the former was somehow more grandiose than the latter. The levels in Human Revolution were almost certainly smaller, allowed for somewhat less experimentation and were more segmented. But the game went places, both story-wise and geographically, and Mankind Divided feels like a yo-yo on a considerably shorter string.
But the most frustrating thing about Mankind Divided is how abruptly it’s all over.
I try not to exaggerate in reviews, so believe me when I describe my reaction to Mankind Divided’s conclusion as "stunned." There’s a host of story threads presented that are explored over the game’s 30 hours and dropped without comment or resolution after a fairly anticlimactic boss battle. Very little of the conspiracy Jensen is investigating is revealed, and by the end, there are few answers and a pile of new questions. There’s only a faint whiff of resolution, and the prospect of waiting another five years to see how Eidos Montreal’s mechanical augmentations ultimately give way to the nanotech dystopia of the original Deus Ex left me feeling pretty deflated.
