E3 2015 - Deus Ex Mankind Divided - Dev Demo

A few months back, Square Enix and Eidos Montreal announced that another Deus Ex game was coming and it would be a sequel to 2012’s Human Revolution. At E3 they were showing the game behind closed doors to selected media and I was lucky enough to watch the game in action.

The demo started out at a nice leisurely pace, Adam Jensen, returning from the last game, was getting off a train after arriving in Prague. He has a quick chat with a voice about his papers and then we see the world unfold, people are rushing about doing what they do, humans without any augmentations are avoiding anyone with augmentations at all costs and the security is being, let’s say diligent about their task.

The story of the game is that two years have passed since the events of Human Revolution, Jensen no longer works for Serif Industries, in fact he now works for a global anti-terrorist task force, as due to the events of Human Revolution, people without augmentation or augs, now view those with them as lower class citizens, people are now afraid of them and from this an unknown group has risen and is performing terrorist acts. It is Jensen’s task to find out who is causing them and to stop them. But that is not his only agenda, Adam is also working for the task force because he believes there is a secret group that is somehow responsible for everything that happens in the world, including the terrorist incidents.

Back at the train station, Jensen met up with his contact and as they walked around, discussing how things are going for the augs, we see humans panicking to get their passes before they are detained or worse, it becomes a heated discussion, before becoming heated literally as the train behind them explodes and it fades to black. The devs told us that this part of the game is early on, but it highlights that there are many ways to approach things, this one highlighting the social aspect of the game as conversations with characters can change depending on your previous actions and chats.

After that, we were taken to a combat heavy section of the game, this time with Adam having to make his way through a converted shipping container yard, now as barracks to bring the leader of a pro-augmented group in. The dev at the controls took a stealth approach to the area, only engaging directly if spotted or it was needed. Some of Adam’s new abilities came into play here, such as the new Tesla hand, where you can bring down up to 4 enemies at once, with this non-lethal take down. It takes a moment to charge for each shot, so taking down for is a task, but due to it's power it will come in handy.

Remote hacking was the next feature to be shown off, along with the improved hacking itself as Adam used the new and refined abilities to remote control a walkway to allow access to another path. After going this alternate way, a large gap was found to be blocking the way, but with the new Icarus dash, you can now dash forward over gaps and such with ease, or at least it looked easy to do thanks to the dev guy playing it. Up ahead, an enemy impeded the progress so another new weapon was brought out, the Nano blade, this narrow piece of steel shoots out at high speed and can pin enemies to walls, leaving them as a reminder to others.

But that is not all the Nano Blade can do, it also can explode, so if you wanted to do, you can shoot it as a wall and as an enemy passes, you can then trigger them to explode to take them out. We got to see that in action as well, as an enemy was taking cover and the Nano Blade was used to take them out, via the explosion.

We finally got to our destination and after a lengthy chat where we failed to complete our mission, we were surrounded by guards and had to make an escape, there were many ways in which we could do it, but it we ran away from them and made it to the escape point. What the developers were keen to focus on was that you can play through the game as you want, you can stealth through the game if you want or you can go full on combat mode, some fights can be avoided if you use the social approach and talk your way around things.

From everything that the team talked about and showed, if they can get it to work right from the start Deus Ex Mankind Divided could be something special. The story is quite intriguing and could make for some fun surprises and I can’t wait to get some hands on and see how it performs for myself.