51. Ori and the Blind Forest - Xbox One
52. AM2R - PC
53. Total Annihilation - PC
54. I Am Setsuna - PS4
55. Planetary Annihilation Titans - PC
56. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided - PC
The latest Deus Ex is here! Naturally I'm already finished because I've only put it down for things like sleep and going to work. The one sentence summary is HR but more with an Attack of the Clones ending. I'm predicting a third game that ends on a down note like Revenge of the Sith.
The game starts you off with a much better tutorial level than HR. Mostly because you get to start with a full suite of augs, so you get the ability to try out the various approaches from the get-go. Then, when the sudden but inevitable losing of your powers happens afterwards you know what you want to focus on. The game also gives you a bunch of Praxis Points at that point, so even though you're less than you were at the start you're still more than you were at the start of HR.
The game still has the structure of being in a hub level, doing several quests, then finally getting a story quest that takes you to a "dungeon". This time you get daylight at the start of the game. That gets taken away by midgame, though. The hub city is about the size of Detroit and Hengsha combined. However, there's a bit of frustration because it's split into a small area and a large area, and you need to take a loading screen train between the two. A couple times it gets annoying, as one quest had each step being on the opposite side of the boundary.
That said, the train has another important purpose; sending home the parallels between the anti-Aug sentiment and the expressions of racism we've seen in the past. In the world of Mankind Divided Augs are distrusted thanks to the Incident where they all were forced to go crazy. The average citizen you run into will be distrustful, or make snide comments about you. But when you go use the train things become a bit more real. The entrances are segregated into a side for Naturals and a side for Augs, and the Augs side is fenced off with razor wire. There's even separate trains with signs directing you to the appropriate one. If you take the Natural train the loading screen will have you as the only Aug in the car, with suspicious looks being thrown by the other passengers. And afterwards you'll get hasseled by the police for using the wrong train, and your documentation gets checked. The same thing happens if you take the Natural stairs to/from the train rather than the Aug stairs. It's a little subtle thing, but you quickly find yourself adapting to it and remembering to always go on THIS side and to use THIS train. The overall story of the game is about the Augs pushing back against the general anti-Aug sentiment, but it's little touches like this that really hit things home.
The game has several new augs available (which is a minor but important plot point) to suit the various playstyles. These new augs are experimental, so activating one will Overclock your system which can lead to errors. You can compensate by permanently disabling a regular aug. This ends up being a fine tradeoff, as you're probably not using all your augs anyway; stealth characters rarely use the Typhoon, for example. There's also a quest that lets you remove that penalty (and consequently make the disabled augs available again). It ends up being a bit of a missed opportunity in terms of giving you choices, as most people find a playstyle and stick to it, so you don't miss augs from playstyles you don't use.
The game has a single boss fight at the very end. It can be done non-lethally (and must be to get Pacifist) but the boss takes a lot to go down (multiple tranquilizer clips). You also have options for hacking his security bots and turning them on him; I'm not sure how effective they are overall because they're lethal. It's about on par with the boss fights from the Director's Cut of HR. I still wish it was fully skippable and not quite as much of a bullet sponge.
Overall, a very good entry in the series. Don't pay attention to the mixed Steam user reviews; they're evenly split between people who think they should be able to run the game on Ultra and people who take moral offense to being able to purchase Praxis Points (levels) in game using real money through a store only accessible on the main menu with nary a popup of "by the way, you should give us money" if you don't click it's menu option. Hell, the DLC from Dragon Age Origins was more intrusive than this in game store.
