Deus Ex Diaries Part Fifty-Six (Mankind Divided)

It’s taken a couple of years longer than I’d have liked (stupid Windows 10), but it’s finally time to cover the most recent Deus Ex title. Sure, I could say it’s the last one, but at time of writing Square Enix have recently sold the IP and developer Eidos Montréal, so there’s always hope.

Developed by Eidos Montréal and published by Square Enix, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided was released in 2016 and sees the return of Alex Jensen despite me blowing him up in the previous game. I reviewed it pretty highly upon release, though that was six years ago so I’ve long forgotten most of the basics.

During my customary look for mods, I came across one called Deus Ex Mankind Divided - Tweaks by BrainDead2013, which tweaks things to make the game “more enjoyable”. Cheaper Praxis Kits, certain things no longer use energy, stack sizes have increased… It won’t make me any stealthier, but I do like things that make games easier.

So, let’s get into the final game in the Square Enix trilogy: Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.

This is my ongoing exploration of the Deus Ex Universe, in release order. Whether you’re a newcomer or an old-goer, I hope to make this something you can read along with and enjoy. This time I begin Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.

We saw the world of 2029, two years after the signal was broadcast from Panchaea which sent the augmented people of the world insane for a short time. Picus News, presented by Eliza Cassan, reported on “yet another” terror attack perpetrated by an augmented person while we saw an abandoned building being cleared of all of its homeless population by augmented individuals.

It transpired that the news report was playing on an aircraft carrying Interpol’s Task Force 29 (TF29), a squad of unaugmented people, as well as one Adam Jensen. A member of the team, Macready, tried to rile up Jensen before the commander, Miller, began his briefing. We were going after a guy called Sheppard, who was ex-Belltower and based at Rifleman Bank Station before Jensen gassed all of the inmates to save an informant.

He’d come out of hiding thanks to our undercover man on the inside Arun Singh, who had set up a weapons deal between Sheppard and the Jinn terrorist group. We were on our way to interrupt said deal at the unfinished Desert Jewel resort hotel in Dubai, abandoned two years ago, and bring Sheppard in. Macready was leading a team to overlook the atrium where the deal would go down, and Jensen was being sent in solo from the roof. I had to prevent the Jinn in the penthouse from going down the one elevator that led to the atrium by disabling it.

Miller recommended that I take some kind of weapon, so I opted for the non-lethal option. I then went for the stun gun rather than the rifle, as I figured it would be more versatile. With me now “fully” equipped, Miller told me about a secondary objective — disable the Wi-Fi. Literally that, since the Jinn were using it to boost communications, and might use it to ruin Singh’s cover if I didn’t get around to deactivating it. Since there was a sandstorm moving in, and we had received this intel at the last minute, we were in a bit of a hurry. Luckily, we were almost there.

Jumping out of the aircraft, I landed on the roof and crawled through some vents to gain entry into the resort. I climbed a ladder, moved some large boxes, then punched through a wall. My Smart Vision augmentation showed a couple of Jinn through a locked door, and turning the power on to activate the keypad also electrified the floor. Luckily, there was a crawl space above the electrified part, so I managed to safely hack the keypad and get through the door.

I took out the two Jinn, noticing a third further down the hallway. Worse, he noticed me dragging the second man behind cover and came to investigate. However, that did make it easier to get the drop on him and knock him out. Smart Vision showed another punchable wall behind a box, so I gained entry to an elevator shaft that way and dropped down.

The radar showed one hostile below, so I opened the hatch on top of the elevator and fell inside. It caused a noise which the Jinn member came in to investigate, so I shot him with my stun gun. I spotted a ventilation shaft high up a wall in the next corridor, so I moved a crate over and used it to jump inside the shaft. Jensen contacted Macready for a status update and the latter expressed his anti-aug views as he had every time he’d spoken to me in the past half an hour.

Exiting the vent I took a chance to knock out a few of the Jinn who were patrolling the area. This turned out to be a huge mistake, as I wound up in a huge firefight and had to use lethal force on most of them… Once the area was clear, I had a quick look around and found a newspaper which had a headline about a U.N. special envoy being welcomed to Tehran. It also had a side piece about billionaire Nathaniel Brown and his “glittering, 3D-printed” city in Oman being created for the augmented named Rabi’ah which needed to get more funding. I also located a gas-filled area which I punched a wall to access; my breathing augmentation helping me survive, but there wasn’t much inside.

I found my way into a ventilation shaft that ended in a room with two guards and what I assumed to be the Wi-Fi secondary objective. I threw in a gas grenade and knocked the two men out as they panicked. Ironically, as I deactivated the transmitter Miller patched us into Singh’s comms. Singh was telling someone that the seller was almost there, so they should move to the atrium.

As I headed for the next area, I decided to use a ventilation shaft to bypass the two men with their backs to the door I needed, not wanting to get into yet another firefight. A third man was patrolling the hallway that the shaft exited into, so I knocked him out before disabling the elevator. I’d gotten there in the nick of time as Sheppard’s helicopter arrived. Everyone confirmed their positions as Singh inspected the shipment — augmented limbs with guns still on the helicopter.

Suddenly, someone in a gold mask decloaked behind Sheppard and snapped his neck. In the confusion, other people in gold masks decloaked and attacked everyone while Singh made himself as small a target as possible. The gold masks began trying to steal the helicopter and TF29 opened fire on them. Since I didn’t bring the rifle, I jumped over the railing and fell down to the ground thanks to my Icarus Landing System augment and began taking down the gold masks.

The sandstorm hit as I approached the helicopter, throwing sand at everyone. I managed to reach the chopper and grab the battery out of a compartment in the front, grounding it. However, the sandstorm grew in strength, pushing me back and allowing the gold masks to escape.

A cutscene began of an Illuminati meeting between Lucius DeBeers, Bob Page, Stanton Dowd, Elizabeth DuClare, Morgan Everett, and Volkard Rand. They talked about what had happened in Dubai, and while Page considered it a success, others lamented losing “all” of their assets. Whether that referred to the weapons and augmented limbs, the Jinn, or the gold masks was unclear. They were pleased that Interpol would be confused for a while, but still displeased with how wrong their projections had proven to be in the shadow of the Aug Incident from two years prior. They mentioned the Human Restoration Act, and two of them were going to exert political and financial pressure to get it passed, then left the meeting. The remaining three talked about Janus and the Juggernaut Collective, and certain “arrangements” made to deal with the mysterious leader. Page was told to “activate the sleeper cell”, and the meeting ended…

A train announcement woke Jensen from his sleep, stating that Růžička Station was next. It was a week after the mission in Dubai and he was heading for the TF29 office in Prague. Stepping onto the train platform things already seemed tense, with heavily armoured police checking people’s papers — and it would soon become apparent that they were only checking the augmented. Someone knocked into a woman and stopped apologising the moment he saw her augmentations, so Jensen went to help her pick up her things.

As it turned out they knew each other, and were seemingly trying to keep that fact on the down low. She was a part of the Juggernaut Collective, and was actually Alex Vega, the one who had taken Ben Saxon to Australia! I hadn’t recognised her as she had dyed her hair in streaks and lost a very obvious mole above her left eye. She questioned why the Prague team had been sent 4,000 miles to Dubai when there was an available team actually in the Middle East. Jensen wondered if they had been sent specifically so that they saw something…

Getting through the checkpoint, Vega gave me a chip from Janus to attach to Miller’s Neural SubNet (NSN), a device used by TF29 directors to ensure utmost secrecy. The chip would allow me to spy on any communications made using the NSN. While she was explaining, multiple explosions went off, destroying most of Růžička Station and killing many… Jensen and Vega only had minor injuries, but despite his best efforts Jensen couldn’t save anyone…