What makes Deus Ex special is how it blends traditional first-person shooter gameplay with stealth and player choice.
Wraparound shades that retract with a thought. Cybernetic arms that are strong enough to pick up a truck. Piston-powered legs and X-ray vision. Deus Ex’s Adam Jensen is a throwback action hero from the Arnie era – a gravel-voiced hardman with switchblades on his arms.
Despite him not having much of a personality outside of being a human tin opener, there’s something likeable about Jensen, which can be mostly attributed to the brilliant performance by The Expanse’s Elias Toufexis. He’s got an edge to him, but there’s just enough blank space there to transplant yourself onto the character like a biomechanical upgrade.
If you’ve never played the two Deus Ex games from Eidos Montreal – Human Revolution and Mankind Divided – they’re first-person role-playing games set in a cyberpunk world where mechanical body modifications have become normalised. In this world, people lop off healthy limbs to replace them with something that makes them more than human.
Jensen ends up being more machine than man after doctors perform lifesaving surgery against his will. While working as a security guard for one of the main augmentation manufacturers, he goes on a mission to track down the people who broke in, stole a prototype, and almost killed him. He unravels a series of conspiracies along the way.
What makes Deus Ex special is how it blends traditional first-person shooter gameplay with stealth and player choice. While you can shoot your way through most encounters, there’s always an air vent to crawl through or a guard to sweet talk your way past.
Even your choice of augmentations impacts how you play, opening up new routes and options. For example, extra strong legs might allow you to get in through the roof, but you could always do the same with stronger arms, by stacking up crates to create makeshift steps.
Once while playing, I came upon an apartment building that was locked with a high-security keycard, which made me wonder what was inside. But my hacking skill wasn’t high enough to open the door. Instead, I walked down the street, used my strong arms to carry an explosive barrel, placed it next to the door, stepped back, and shot it, blowing the door off its hinges. The games constantly reward your creativity like this.
While Human Revolution is showing its age these days, Mankind Divided still looks beautiful and is way ahead of some newer games in some key ways. Its small open world set in the Prague city streets puts most big open-world games to shame. It’s packed full of things to see and do around every corner of the cobbled streets. If there’s a door, you can usually enter (or blow it off its hinges, naturally). None of the space goes to waste.
Unfortunately, the games didn’t hit the lofty sales targets set by publisher Square Enix, and developer Eidos Montreal would go on to work on the (admittedly very good) Guardians of the Galaxy game instead.
Infamously, Mankind Divided feels unfinished. When you get to the end credits, the game is picking up steam and seemingly preparing to take you to a new location, but it just ends instead. The developer had to scale back its ambitions, and Adam Jensen’s story was never finished as a result.
Luckily for us, Embracer Group acquired a bunch of Square Enix developers earlier this year, with Eidos Montreal among them. Now the dust has settled on the deal, the developer has announced that it controls the rights to Deus Ex, giving us a small glimmer of hope that we’ll be back behind Adam Jensen’s retractable shades again at some point in the future.
Written by Kirk McKeand on behalf of GLHF.
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