To its credit Mankind Divided takes advantage of nearly all of them there’s a huge number of snarls that have been either eliminated completely or streamlined away into something much better. This approach provides many, many opportunities to iteratively improve on the worst mechanics from Human Revolution. This creates both problems and opportunities for Mankind Divided, since it’s built using technology that, if not a direct descendent of HR’s, then at least is driven by much the same philosophy. HR’s world remained vibrant and interesting to me, but many of the mechanics and the underlying technology comes across as extremely decrepit. It got worse when the new console generation enabled a rapid evolution of what it was possible to achieve on console tech, and when you put it up against modern heavy hitters such as The Witcher, MGS V, and even slightly more unusual fare such as Alien Isolation it feels like a game that’s a good five years older than it actually is.
Unfortunately the gaming landscape almost immediately started to shift under Human Revolution’s feet with titles like Dishonored demonstrating a far better mechanical grasp of how to execute on the concept of freeform first-person gameplay. It had that in common with the first game, in that it adequately captured something of the prevailing cultural zeitgeist at the time it was released (“It is a time of great innovation…” indeed). It would be equally fair to say that Human Revolution is a game that has not aged well at all both attempts I’ve made to replay it since its original release have ground to a halt just a few hours in, and this is despite my love of HR’s world, visual design and general atmosphere. Despite a fairly protracted development period it felt like a game that did a decent job of blending the incredible freeform style of the original Deus Ex with the dominant console FPS gameplay of the period. It would be fair to say I enjoyed Human Revolution very much at the time it was released. Otherwise its claim to the title of “Worst Deus Ex game” 1 would be completely undisputed, and I think that’d be kind of a shame given how much it tries to improve on Human Revolution. It’s a really good thing for Mankind Divided that Invisible War exists.
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