L.G.C. |Reviews| — Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

This week it’s Team Blue vs Team Red! Deus Ex: Mankind Divided faces the CHAIRQUISITION!

Game: Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
Webzone: http://store.steampowered.com/app/337000/
Devel: Eidos Montreal / Feral Interactive
Engine: Dawn Engine|
Price: €49.99 / US$59.99 / CDN$69.99

Wazzat:The year is 2029, and mechanically augmented humans have now been deemed outcasts, living a life of complete and total segregation from the rest of society.

Now an experienced covert operative, Adam Jensen is forced to operate in a world that has grown to despise his kind. Armed with a new arsenal of state-of-the-art weapons and augmentations, he must choose the right approach, along with who to trust, in order to unravel a vast worldwide conspiracy.

Mandatory Disclosure: They sent us the super keys

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies

Makes with the working

V-

I should note the minimum CPU req is a AMD FX8350.
I’m running the old 8150 clocked @ 4.0.
I’m a little confused on the OS requirements, Brad.
Store page says 16.10 but you didn’t hit me with a nag screen on my 16.04.
ZOMG the game is teh tracking my every move!11!
That initial load time is legit.
Not going to be running this critter on high.
Noms all the RAM.
Alright, I can’t get this fkr to reliably hit 60 on LOW.
Aaaaaand it froze.
- Then it did the 4min load again.
- Aaaand again.
- Oh, this is bullshi*t!
- 6+ minute load times do not make /w the working.
Oh, and it gave me a perpetual loading screen when I hopped on the tube to visit whereeverthefksville.
In conclusion… it technically launches.

J-

Another Feral game that can’t do UHD.
Jeez that load time
Had one cinematic where the dialogue didn’t trigger and just had Mr. Jensen and a Journalist in perpetual shot/reverse shot

P-

Initial load took about 4 minutes
3 freezes in 5 hours.
- The third freeze made the SystemD Coredump module peg one of the threads on the FX 8370E at 100% for a full 3 minutes.
There’s a bottleneck and it seems to be CPU related. It’s almost as if we’re talking about a Feral port… Oh, wait! We are.
There’s also a Benchmark for you to try, but it’s about as useless as Tomb Raider’s was and twice as bottlenecked as F1 and GRiD Autosport. Case in point: http://imgur.com/a/RPdgP
So I just realized I can’t save the game anymore. This is a known bug.
- You can workaround it by going back to the main menu, opening up the Shop (that’s the microtransaction shop) looking at something in detail, you don’t need to buy anything, and then going back in game.
- Hanlon’s Razor tells us not to attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity, but something tells me there’s malice at work here.
And just to put the cherry on top, I ran into an infinite Loading screen.

M-

The download in Steam is displayed as 25GB when it’s actually 57GB so don’t panic if the download seems slow near the end, it’s just Steam being all confused.
I’m running the recommended OS (Ubuntu 16.10) and the recommended driver (367.57) and haven’t experienced any crashes.
The initial load time is quite long and the following ones are slightly less longer but I guess that’s to be expected with a game that size.
I ran the benchmark on medium and was afraid the game wasn’t going to run really good on my machine: 40FPS average, lots of tearing and net very smooth. But while in the game, it’s totally different: between 50 and 70FPS, no tearing and very smooth gameplay.
On Ultra, the game will run at about 20~30FPS, but with a 970, you’ll most probably hit the infamous 3.5GB limit of VRAM and the game will likely crash. Not going to blame either Feral or Eidos for that.
With the correct hardware you’ll have a very good experience with this game and by correct hardware I mean an Intel CPU with lots of Ghz and a good Nvidia GPU.

Total-

Shiny / Sounds

V-

What’s with the Quit button location?
On low Deus Ex: Mankind Divided kinda-sorta looks almost as good at HL2.
Medium setting looks a bit of alright but that knocks my outdoor ferps to the 20s.
It can be a bit jarring going from pre rendered cutscenes to in-game.
The voice acting is alright and it best be since this games makes with the dialogue.
Not really much in the way of background noise outside of the environments themselves.

J-

Does anyone else get that issue where the game will suddenly switch to window mode after you die?
It looks and sounds triple-A-ey
Although Adam Jensen sounds like a really bad Keanu Reeves impersonator. What? Was Keanu too busy working on Bill and Ted 3?
Although some of the cinematics do look a bit xboxy. Maybe my expectations are too high considering Mad Max just seamlessly blended pre rendered and gameplay footage

P-

The visual aesthetics look good, even if they’re very janky.
The lip sync is also slightly out of whack, it could be due to poor performance, but it is very noticeable.
Sound wise, I have no complaints.
In fact, the background music gave me a Metro Last Light vibe at times.
It’s really hard to appreciate the audio-visual acuity when you have lower the settings in order to maintain some semblance of performance, especially on a 1080.

M-

Easily one of the best looking game out there on Linux and even if you run it with Medium settings it will look great, higher settings will only give you minor improvement coming at a great cost in performance.
Regarding the sound, it’s what you’d expect from a AAA production: solid voice acting and sound effects.

Total-

Control

V-

Anyone who plays this /w a controlla should have their hand-organs chopped off.
Standard WASD and everything was logically laid out by default.
Gerbil sensitivity was hella high but it was simple enough to sort.

J-

Boo Feral! Giving me xbox prompts on the playstation 4 controller! And you had such a nice little streak there too!
I will say though, this game is perfect for the steam controller if you want to play it on a couch
Mouse sensitivity is jacked way the fuck up, and they hijack the sensitivity control mouse buttons

P-

Playing first person games with a controller is grounds for get yourself sectioned.
Which I guess is fitting, considering the overall theme of the game.
I will give this game bonus points for not locking me into a play style.
For all the freedom Mad Max gives you, compared to Mankind Divided it’s fucking constrained at least mechanically. In-game spacewise Mad Max still takes the cookie.
Do you want to be the “Ghost in the Shell”? you can!
Do you want to play this like a standard FPS and go in guns blazing? It won’t be easy, but you can!
And on a technical side of the controls, you can rebind ALL the keys and set individual sensitivities for the X and Y axis on the mouse movement.
I will still have to ding it a chair because, even if you do change the controls, the prompts will still show up with the default key. That gets a bit confusing at times!

M-

Controls. There are lots of them. And just like mankind, I’m divided on whether this game is best played with a mouse and keyboard or a controller.
Tried it with the Xbox 360 controller, worked fine but didn’t really enjoy it.
The Steam controller was a much better experience, just make sure to run the game in Big Picture to get the correct mappings otherwise they’ll be all messed up.
For everything except aiming, controller works better in this game and since it’s not really a “shooter” (or at least it doesn’t have to be one), then the Steam controller is highly recommended.
It’s clearly the type of game that if you pick it up in 2 months without having played it you’ll have forgotten half of the controls.

Total-

FUN

V-

Getting past this tutorial is a motherfu*ker.
Alright, two hours in and no idea what’s going on.
Oh I have to juggle my augments? Yeah, no.
This little tin-god motherfu*ker.
- Why are people scared of augments?
- We can apparently be taken out with a pool noodle.
Is this a stealth game?
- Action?
  - Spreadsheet simulator?
The answer to that is a big honking yes.
The amount of crap this game wants me to keep track of is offputting.
That wouldn’t be such a bad thing if I gave two damns about the character or whats going on… I don’t.
Mad Max was a slow burn, it took over an hour before it hooked me.
This? I’m four hours in and fk a duck if I know/care about anything going on in the world.
- In all fairness Truggs is 8 hrs in and is still trying to figure it out.
It’s a bit sad since I was wicked hyped about this game since the announcement even though I didn’t really know what the hell a Deus X was.
If this is what a Deus X is well, no sir, I don’t like it.

J-

I like how this game’s concept of stealth boils down to “you have to kill them, but make sure nobody’s watching”
Seriously, I spent a lot of time examining every square inch of the level to figure out the best way to infiltrate a place. The simplest way sounds a bit like pop pop
Also, very inconsistent falling height limit
Once you get the option to install augments, do yourself a favour and max out your hit points. You’ll thank me later
It’s a pretty dense game with an even denser storyline. I haven’t followed the plot of human revolution, so I have no clue what the fuck is even happening
I’d like to classify this game as a weird hybrid of FPS, RPG and Point and click adventure games
Lots of this game is looking for the right item to give to the right person. WHAR GERBIL IN MICROWAVE
The shooting can get intense, and you really don’t want to look for firefights. Unfortunately, they find you damn quickly
ALSO WHERE THE FUCK IS ALL THE AMMO AT? I started with the tranquilizer rifle and burned through all that ammo. How I get masterbation sucks when there’s nobody to watch umore pew pew?
It’s an interesting game, but I don’t think I’ve hit the part where it’s fun yet.

P-

I love games which don’t lock you into a play style and actively reward you for adopting multiple skill trees.
There’s a reason Fallout 2 is my all time favorite game.
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided has that in spades, more so than Human Revolution did.
For all the complaints I’ve read and heard about the game being atrociously short, it is very densely packed.
But I’m having trouble justifying €50 for what is little more than an expansion pack.
Granted it does improve on Human revolution in several ways, but it also introduces microtransactions on top of the already steep price.
There’s also the issue that, for a game, you don’t spend a lot of time playing it.
Most of your time is spent sitting on your ass looking at a semi-blank slate attempt to have conversations with the characters around him.
I’m all for Narrative in a videogame, if it compliments the gameplay, and Mankind Divided is a perfect example of what happens when the development team had to shove an entire novel’s worth of narrative into a pamphlet.
They didn’t so much summarize it, as they just made the proverbial font small enough for it all to fit in there.
How about instead of taking away my agency as a player to sit through another overlong cutscene/dialog/takedown animation, you let me keep doing my thing?
Half-Life 2 did narrative-gameplay very well. And that game came out in 2004.

M-

Only got the game installed this morning so haven’t had the time to play it as much as I would have for a proper judgment of it’s fun value.
But the little I played, I did enjoy. It’s well done and I will want to play it some more.
I haven’t played other Deus Ex games (except maybe an hour of the first one) so I’m not comparing it to other titles in the series.
Judging from HowLongToBeat.com this game is around 20 to 30 hours long and that’s how long I like my games to be (that’s even a bit long for me) but if the game keeps being as good as what I played, I’ll try to finish it.

Total-

Final –