Recent reviews by FrostyCaveman

I love this game! I played the snot out of Human Revolution a few years ago and was excited to get around to this one. Having played the original Deus Ex in 2009 as well, I'm pretty comfortably a DX veteran by now. It's pretty much impossible for me to review this game without establishing the context of how I felt about Human Revolution, to which Mankind Divided is definitely the most similar, so forgive me for that.

I'm a huge fan of Human Revolution's aesthetics and atmosphere, and found the story quite compelling. Compared to that, Mankind Divided's world is immediately noticeable as stark, cold and bright, and kinda uncomfortable. After a nice little set piece intro level in Dubai, being thrust into the streets of Prague is a lot like walking to work in the morning with a hangover, having forgotten your sunglasses, before realising they're built into your face. Czechia, 2029, in the wake of the Aug Incident, is a harrowing and authoritarian setting. And - I won't spoil what happens later, but lets just say the atmosphere returns in absolute FORCE. To be honest, I felt the art direction in this game to be a little bit lacking compared to the magical Human Revolution, but perhaps that was inevitable.

Personally, I'm always here for the cool cyberpunk conspiracy fantasy, but I found that stuff unfortunately took even more of a back seat than it did in Human Revolution. The themes beat me over the head at times, I'm not sure why the side mission writing in particular beleaguered the point SO hard to the exclusion of everything else, and I can only conclude that it is due to the game's production being a tad rushed. A certain mid-game main mission section was however confronting and well-executed - perhaps it's a case of "show, don't tell" not always being followed.

Mankind Divided expands on the series' trend to alternate large open levels with smaller, tighter ones; Prague is easily the largest Deus Ex level so far and many have referred to it as "open world" - I'm not sure I'd go that far, to be honest. But, you will be there a lot, and there is a hell of a lot to find.

With Mankind Divided as it is sold now (there's no Director's Cut edition etc), there are three separate DLC missions in addition to the main campaign (one of these is pretty short though). All together, I think the game is slightly longer than Human Revolution. Don't take my played hours as an accurate value here, I'm infamous for leaving games running while I get distracted doing something else. I'm not a "100%"er, more like a "80%"er, but I think there's a fair bit of replayability here owing to the enormous variety of ways you can take on the challenges the game presents to you. No seriously, it's ridiculous how many options you have. The story elements (hacking computers to read emails, digging around for random bits of plot) will get stale long before the gameplay will.

I played the campaign and all three DLCs on "Give Me Deus Ex" mode, also known as Hard difficulty. Much like Human Revolution, this isn't a very hard game. You can play it stealthily or not: if you opt for stealth, being seen is often times a binary pass/fail mechanic which means you'll save scum (which I did). If you go in guns blazing (as it were.. since you can take out foes in many ways aside from just guns), you probably won't have the save scum problem. The game is balanced around mouse+keyboard, whereas I play with a controller (and I'm pretty bad at aiming with analog sticks), which means gunfights were just about impossible for me. Yeah, I know I said the game isn't very hard, but if I were to switch over to mouse+keyboard gunfights would be a cakewalk. This mouse+keyboard versus controller gun aim balance problem affects a lot of games on PC, I've noticed. As far as I know, the difficulty setting doesn't affect the level layout "puzzles" in any material way; they're fun to explore and deeper than in Human Revolution - especially Prague - but I still found myself wanting more complexity.

Anyway - the primary, and overwhelming, reason I found this game easy is that augmentations are overpowered. Early in the game, unlocking new augs feels awesome and very useful; every single unlock feels great. The problem is it doesn't stay like that, eventually you figure out some augs are way more powerful than others and you'll have to deliberately avoid using them in order to enjoy yourself - well, if you're anything like me. I'm guessing the balance curve is just not tuned for the kind of player I am, and that's fine. I've seen other games limit your player power based on how far progressed you are through the story, and I think quite possibly would've been a good design decision here too. Don't get me wrong, though, the augs are cool as fug and there's way more of them than in HR too (because literally everything from that game returns, plus the new ones).

Eidos Montreal is clearly aware of the augmentation power problem though, as the final DLC, "A Criminal Past", starts with your augs disabled and about 10 minutes in offers you the choice to enable them again. I chose to keep them disabled and it was an absolute blast - yeah, it was a bit weird not being Super Cyberpunk Man, but it was challenging the whole way through.

Regarding graphics - let's get one thing out of the way: this isn't as good looking as Cyberpunk 2077. BUT that said, it's still a very nice looking game indeed, particularly the environments. My least favourite was the aforementioned "morning hangover Prague" but largely it was all great. I had a "wtf" moment when I noticed how beautiful some of the real time lighting was despite this game pre-dating RTX support. The music and sound design were fantastic as well, just like Human Revolution there.

Having played this on two gaming rigs but using the same graphics card both times, the venerable GTX 1080 Ti with 11GB of VRAM, the performance was the same, so I'll not mention specific PC stats. Playing on Windows 10 or Linux with Proton made no difference either. For testing, first I tried my 1440p 155hz monitor - with the Medium preset, and MSAA set to 2x, I got about 50-65fps; choppy but playable. However, I ended up playing the game exclusively on my old 1080p 60hz TV - MSAA also on 2x and the Very High preset: solid 60fps that way, beautiful AND responsive. I tried with and without DirectX12 and noticed that DX12 provides a significant performance boost.

So yeah, overall, I love this game. Random arbitrary numbers are weird but lets say 89/100.

If you're reading this review, you probably already know about the game. I bought it because I had the shareware version (with the first planet only) as a kid and I'm here to finish kicking Kreton behind.

I played on Andradite for ~85 hours. By no means a leet player, just my first impressions. (85 hours is not very long for this kind of game)

Pros:
- Pretty stable and efficient communication to server (crashes have been pretty rare)
- Complex ship building and combat systems
- Satisfying planet building
- No pay to win elements

Cons:
- UI sucks, really badly (micromanagement is of course a time-honoured tradition in space 4x)
- Hard to stay competitive without constant monitoring (this is again not the fault of the game per se, but of the genre)

My initial review compared this to a combination of Master of Orion 2 and Travian. I stand by that comparison. Just like Travian, I find it impossible to devote enough time on a regular basis to stay competitive, which makes my interest in the game dwindle. Also just like Travian the initial 72 hours or so were incredibly addicting. But sadly, I just don't have enough time in my life to play games like this anymore.

I've been meaning to play through this since TotalBiscuit's "WTF is" back in 2011 (rest in peace ya legend). Never really been one for single player RPGs until more recently. Did play the original game back in 2009 - so taking about nine years is my average with the DX series.

The trailer has been in my YouTube favourites for years because of how ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ epic it is. I can confirm that this incredibly well constructed blending of story, atmosphere, themes and gameplay mechanics carries through to the game's story. From start to finish, the story and atmosphere of the game kept me very much interested. It's far less "political" than the original, and has far fewer conspiracy theory references, but there's actually a personal story worth a damn since the character wasn't literally grown in a tank so I suppose there's that.

My first full run-through took about 100 hours, but I have a tendency to take for-♥♥♥♥♥♥♥-ever doing things in single player RPGs (when I finish or even play them at all). For about the first half of the game I read every email, hacked every door, explored everything I could - afterwards that dropped to about 80% of them as I found the experience to be dragging on a little. The game's environment enthralled me, but it did get samey (my fault for taking so long, I suppose).

I started playing the game on medium difficulty but switched to hard at the beginning of the DLC section. In retrospect I should've played on hard the whole way through. In either case, it's not a terribly difficult game to be honest. I think the lack of complexity in the level design puzzles as well as the hacking minigame is probably the biggest gripe I can find with this game. Even the conversation battles I was able to intuit about 90% of the time. After finding my legs with my xbox 360 controller (as this is the first game I've played extensively with it) I had very little issue getting into shooting wars with enemies, although it'd probably have been even easier to the point of ridiculously so if I'd used a mouse and keyboard.

The augmentations are very cool, the guns are decently cool as well, although I'd have liked to see more gun mods (both in terms of how available they were in-game as well as in terms of what they could do).

The graphics hold up pretty decently for a xbox 360 era game on my low budget TV, however the FMV cutscenes are a little janky. But according to TotalBiscuit, they even were so in 2011. The soundtrack is stellar, definitely among my favourite game soundtracks!

Would wait 9 years to play through again but if I knew about it earlier I wouldn't have taken so long 92/100

I recommend this game if you like strategy games, specifically space 4x games. It will last you a good couple hundred hours.

That said, in the genre of space 4x games, that's not a very long time. Consider this game the "sugar rush" of space 4x. You're going to get a hell of a lot more hours of satisfying gameplay out of something like Master of Orion 2 (or even Master of Orion 3 with the Chocolate mod) or Space Empires 4, although those games won't be anywhere near as fascinating and feel-good up front.

The Anomaly system (story-based stuff, each event will only be new to you once) playing such a heavy role in the game is the primary culprit. A close second is, as you will eventually discover, that ship composition design system. The tech/equipment decisions mean f*ing nothing to gameplay, basically more tech = more gooder. Somehow they've managed to make tech choices matter even less as time goes on, in the game's 1.0 version tech choices between lasers/missiles/guns and wormhole/warp/hyperdrive actually had a fairly sizable impact in the early game.

To make the "sugar rush" analogy more complete is the fact that the performance of the game's engine is ridiculously bad at midgame and beyond. I built my current computer FOR Stellaris, in mid 2017. My CPU is a 7700k I overclocked to 5GHz, I have a 1080Ti and 32GB of RAM, with a NVME solid state drive. In 2.2 on a Tiny (200 star) galaxy I will *STILL* get 30fps on Fastest speed by year 2400. More stars? Say, 1000? Hell, that'll be sub-60fps on Fastest game start and who bloody knows what you'll get later! This is ridiculous! It's actually gotten worse since release!

In summary, you'll be able to ignore the bs for a good long while, but if you're a lifelong space 4x veteran you'll come to the conclusion that this is just another "almost great" entry into the genre. In general I consider it worth the money as far as most games go, but consider this "yes" recommendation tenuous and disappointed.