Not to be confused with Call Of Duty: Black Ops III
TIMEMOVES A little slower in the DeusEx universe.Whilewe’ve been luggingourweak,fleshybodies aroundnot solving any conspiracies for fouryearssinceHumanRevolution’s release, supercopAdamJensen’s story inMankindDivided picksup justameretwoyearsafter theeventsof the lastgame.Likewesaid: life justmeandersalongata slower,more relaxed pace in Jensen’sworld.As slow andrelaxedas itcanbewhenyou’rebeingblownup by terrorists andpunched through wallsby baddies withsteamengines forhands, anyway.
Details onMankindDivided are scarce; everything we knowabout it comesfromthe game’s spangly announcement trailer andafewtantalisingscraps of informationgleaned fromdevelopers,Eidos Montreal.Weknowthatafter (HumanRevolution spoilers) all theworld’s cybernetically augmented citizenswent temporarily insaneat theendof the last game,mankindisnowintwo minds about the benefits of giving everybodypowerful robotic limbs (youmightsay,mankind is…divided).This isbad newsfor the early-adopterswhojumpedonthe augmentationbandwagonfirst, as fromthe trailer, they’re nowallbeing used as trainingdummiesfor theworld’spolice topractice theirbaton skills on.
Naturally,someof the augmentedunderclass take issuewiththis, andrespondbyblowinguppublic buildings and generally giving the roboticmiddle finger to Johnny Lawand theun-augmentedpublic. This is where Jensen comesin. Inthe two years sincesavingtheworldfromashadowycabal of puppetmasters,HumanRevolution’s growly walkingtool shedhasbeenupgradedwithasuiteof newaugmentations and put towork forTask Force 29–aoutfit formedtoroot out the terrorists and punchthemback into line. This is the trailer’smoney shot: Jensencreeps intoanabandonedtheatre in whichthe terrorist leader is giving a stirring speech aboutnot being “herdedintoghettos” and, variously, electrocutes people, stabs themup, and shields himself froma grenade launcher with a surprise barrier of augmentedtriangles.
Noneof the footage is gameplay, butwe can takesomereassuring lessons fromthis scene nevertheless.Foronething, it looks like,onceagain, DeusEx will be putting us inlarge, open-ended levels through whichwe can eitherpick off guards sneakily one at a time, or blow through like spanners in a whirlwind loudly clobbering everyone until the world is safe. For another, Jensen’s shifting allegiances (one minute he’s beating up cops and defending an aug terrorist, the next he’s filleting the terrorist’s buddies with his retractable arm-knives) says to us that picking which side to fight for might be even more of a feature than it was in the last game.
After a lot of pausing and zooming, we’ve also got a few ideas about where Jensen’s next round of conspiracy-hunting might take him. The terrorist attack we see is in Prague – this has been confirmed by the developers. But later in the video we also get a look at holographic map of the world with glowing triangles (what else?) marking out four other locations: London, Minsk, the Swiss-Italian border and, er, Plovdiv in Bulgaria. Furthermore, during a 3D conference call segment in which shadowy figures talk about conspiratorial things like leaders being weak and timings being perfect, we see that the interlocutors are apparently based in Hong Kong, New York and Montreal. Hong Kong and New York have been done in the first game – but Montreal, which was originally designed as a hub for Human Revolution, was stripped down in the last game due to time constraints. We’ve not been big on betting since losing yet another intern to a Chinese gambling syndicate, but if we were, we’d put all our money (and work experience applicants) on Montreal getting a showing this time around.
Naturally, we’re only scratching the surface of Mankind Divided with this sort of trailer analysis, and until we see some gameplay, all we’ve got are developers’ promises and a very pretty marketing video. But if what Eidos Montreal is showing us is representative, Mankind Divided looks like exactly what we’d want from Jensen’s jaunt onto PS4.
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