Not to be confused with Call Of Duty: Black Ops III
Time Moves a little slower in the Deus Ex universe. While we've been lugging our weak, fleshy bodies around not solving any conspiracies for four years since Human Revolution's release, supercop Adam Jensen's story in Mankind Divided picks up just a mere two years after the events of the last game. Like we said: life just meanders along at a slower, more relaxed pace in Jensen's world. As slow and relaxed as it can be when you're being blown up by terrorists and punched through walls by baddies with steam engines for hands, anyway.
Details on Mankind Divided are scarce: everything we know about it comes from the game's spangly announcement trailer and a few tantalising scraps of information gleaned from developers, Eidos Montreal. We know that after (Human Revolution spoilers) all the world's cybernetically augmented citizens went temporarily insane at the end of the last game, mankind is now in two minds about the benefits of giving everybody powerful robotic limbs (you might say, mankind is... divided). This is bad news for the early-adopters who jumped on the augmentation bandwagon first, as from the trailer, they're now all being used as training dummies for the world's police to practice their baton skill son. Naturally, some of the augmented underclass take issue with this, and respond by blowing up public buildings and generally giving the robotic middle finger to Johnny Law and the un-augmented public.
This is where Jensen comes in. In the two years since saving the world from a shadowy cabal of puppet masters, Human Revolutions growly walking tool shed has been upgraded with a suite of new augmentations and put to work for Task Force 29 - a outfit formed to root out the terrorists and punch them back into line. This is the trailer's money shot: Jensen creeps into an abandoned theatre in which the terrorist leader is giving a stirring speech about not being “herded into ghettos” and, variously, electrocutes people, stabs them up, and shields himself from a grenade launcher with a surprise barrier of augmented triangles.
None of the footage is gameplay, but we can take some reassuring lessons from this scene nevertheless. For one thing, it looks like, once again, Deus Ex will be putting us in large, open-ended levels through which we can either pick 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-ltalian 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. Rich Wordsworth