Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

Great game!!

I consider this the pinnacle of the immersive sim genre. If Human Revolution had the story, this has the gameplay, graphics, and open world agency. Most open world games would recreate a scaled-down city, with 99% of the buildings inaccessible. Here, they recreate only about a dozen city blocks, but with every (EVERY!) single apartment, business mafia front, and hideout not only fully accessible at any time, but interconnected across rooftops, the sewer system, ventilation systems, or secret walls. A game that you can speedrun in 2 hours if you do only what is required becomes 40 if you follow all leads. There are so many locations, loot caches with one-of-a-kind gear, lore info, and hidden quests, only hinted at in dialogue and hidden files, which you can totally miss unless you, the player, pay attention to hints and decide to investigate them, unprompted and of your own free will. The Palisade Bank, a gigantic 5 story bank complex with laser protected elevator shafts, hackable server rooms, vent systems, utility shafts, employee offices with keycards, security rooms with robot and camera controls, VIP corporate vaults containing lore answers from the previous game, and much more is completely off the critical path and unnecessary to the game's completion (depending on certain player choices). You can decide not to visit it throughout your whole playthrough, or you could decide to do so well before the plot "encourages" you to investigate it, and discover things early on. Most players will miss 70% of this game's content on their first playthrough, because they act like the average person would in the dystopian, herd-mentality, mass media-dominated society the game criticizes, investigating only things marked with quest markers, and doing only things they are told to do. There are places you can go that you don't have to, and places you are encouraged to go by characters who will straight up lie to you, and are actually traps - ones that you can discover, avoid, or even counter if you took the initiative to do some extra investigation. The critical thinkers are always rewarded, and feel like the true badasses. The others can still finish the game, but with barely any idea of what is going on. Highly recommended. The fact it ends in a cliffhanger, and that we are unlikely to get any sequels, is one of the greatest disappointments in modern gaming. Adam Jensen is one of my favorite characters of all time. The writing and dialogue is some of the most convincing I have ever seen, worthy of novels. It is one of the games I can still replay, and encounter things I haven't before. Random Notes: - I will never support microtransactions for a primarily single player game (or ever, for that matter). But in this game, I finished my first playthrough without even realizing it was an option until afterwards, and it did not have the slightest impact on my experience. - The game has a discontinuity between the last game (Human Revolution) that is never explained in game. The book Deus Ex: Last Light does it instead - and its pretty good. - The multiplayer mode is lame and boring (And dead, as of 2026)