Deus Ex: Mankind Divided – Can you play it like Call of Duty?

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided has, on the whole, been well received by critics. The game is sitting with a Metacritic in the mid 80s, with a lot of praise being given to the stealth gameplay. But what if you hate stealth? Deus Ex: Mankind Divided includes a control preset that’s designed for traditional FPS fans, so I chose to play the game like I’d play Call of Duty (‘badly – ho ho ho ho, very funny). Is Mankind Divided still a good game if you don’t care about being a pacifist? Is it still fun if you’d rather shoot first and think about hiding later? Can I shout offensive expletive-riddled cusses at people because it’s the internet and I can do anything on the internet? I was going to find out.

I almost lost interest and abandoned the idea while watching the opening recap movie, but I stuck with it in order to bring you this report (it was probably skippable, but I didn’t look and had I skipped it I’d have had nothing to moan about to start this paragraph). I used the time to come up with some rules. I’d kill everyone who I deemed an enemy, using whatever means I had available – ideally a gun or grenade or knife attack, but a cone or large box if it came to it. I would never sneak through areas. Taking cover is fine, but no ghosting or whatever stealth aficionados like to call it.

I scoffed at the initial option to go into battle with a non-lethal weapon and then jumped out of a combat chopper to reach my target zone. So far, so Call of Duty. Armed with a Combat Rifle that fires proper bullets, I was ready to shoot everything. Within seconds I was crawling through a ventilation shaft. I got flashbacks to the time I found myself stuck inside a toilet in Human Revolution, hidden in a vent blocked at both ends by an army of enemies. After countless save reloads and years later, I’m still stuck in that vent.

It’s not long before I’m clear of the vent (although something tells me it won’t be the last time I enter one) and smashing a hole in a wall using my augmented fist. It’s a small hole, though; to my eyes too small for a big man like Jensen to fit through. No worries, he just jumps through it. I can’t see how due to the first-person perspective, but I imagine it was something similar to how sprinters tackle hurdles in the 110 metres while also ducking. There’s no reason to be pondering this so much, but Eidos Montreal should have made the hole bigger so this line of thinking never occurred. You play the game, look at that hole, then try to picture Jensen’s body position as he jumps through it. Tweet pictures of your imaginations to @vgtomo.

A hacking mini-game prevented me from assaulting two guards I’d spotted through my Aug Vision. Even early on it was starting to feel like the game didn’t want me to run through, all guns blazing, but I bumble through the hack and open the door. Sights up, Blam, Blam, Blam… Blam Blam Blam, the two men are now dead. Another appeared and he went down too. Good job Jensen. You might fit in with INSERT CALL OF DUTY SQUAD NAME HERE after all.

A brief lift ride later and a stealth tutorial popped up, baiting me to abandon my mission, but I’d managed to fend off the pull of the biscuit jar all morning so this wasn’t going to stop me (full disclosure: later in the day I did eat a biscuit). I closed it with a sharp jab of the circle button and immediately launched into a vicious attack on an unsuspecting guard – quite why he was so clueless is beyond me, as the lift’s arrival should have alerted him. Anyway, he’s dead, and so is his mate (assumption on my part, I know), although not as I planned.

After shooting what looked like a fire extinguisher I expected it to explode and take the goon with it. It didn’t. Instead it spewed grey smoke. I took this as the game deliberately trying to sabotage me with unexpected stealth tactics. I wasn’t to be defeated by a cheap trick, so I yelled loudly at the man, screaming something about his mum’s ability to please people he wouldn’t want her pleasing, then quickly targeted his face and rattled off a couple of bullets. It felt a bit like CoD, but if CoD had been made by nerds for nerds who play tabletop board games.

Progress was swift and effortless until I ran headfirst into a room filled with guards. I panicked, missed my first shot, reacted by firing wildly until my ammo ran out, then came under heavy fire myself. This was my first real test, so I naturally turned around and ran to cover behind a pillar. While messing around in the inventory wheel to see if my other weapon had ammo I noticed a ghostly Adam Jensen stood a few feet from me. Once more, Mankind Divided was trying to turn me. I wanted to be Captain Price and this bloody game was desperate to make me Sam Fisher, complete with ridiculous on-screen displays.

Not wanting to make any use of the ghost clone that had been forced upon me, I burst out of cover and dispatched two guards who were on their way to my location. While Mankind Divided moves with the speed and grace of a slug in August in comparison to CoD’s ‘oiled up pig on a slip-and-slide’, I hit back to back to back headshots on the remaining grunts, and it felt good. I sensed I was approaching an event of sorts, and sure enough it happened a few minutes later – a classic CoD style set-piece.

A meeting was ambushed, resulting in numerous casualties and the plan (not my plan in this article, but the actual plot’s plan) went out the window. At this point I was high above the warzone and taking the lift down felt a little anticlimactic. I considered leaping off the balcony into the sandstorm below, but I doubted even an Aug like Jensen would have survived the fall. The lift it was. I was told that I had to disable a helicopter that was parked (docked? sat?) in the atrium below, and in my eyes (or Aug Vision) all the bad guys had to get taken down.

I thought it would feel cool to gun down the masked foes as they appeared through the dense sand-filled air, but it wasn’t. It was stilted, the combat never freeing itself from a game design document that might as well have been a single page with the word ‘STEALTH’ printed in bold capital letters in size 60 (font of your choice).

Anyway, I disable the helicopter and next thing I know I’m being guided through a train station. I can look around, but control is extremely limited. I can’t fire a gun and then terrorists attack, a bomb goes off and everything is very bad. It seems like the kind of scenario that would happen in Call of Duty, but the whole event is barely interactive at all. Any minute now I’m going to be let loose in order to take revenge, but no… I’m sent to Jensen’s apartment. Looking around an apartment might be nice if you fawn over small details and write for a leading PC gaming publication, but the only details I’m interested in are bullet holes. For the record, I didn’t find any bullet holes in the apartment.

I’m so angry that I storm out and I forget about my number one rule: kill everyone who I deem an enemy. I shoot everyone I see, starting with a hooded figure across the walkway from my door. Man, woman, Aug or Natural, all I see is a home for my gun’s bullets. A man tries to run after I walk into his apartment, but he’s useless and decides to hide next to a tiny wall, so I shoot him. Men with guns come at me, but they’re cannon fodder for this augmented killing machine. I make my way down the stairs to the courtyard below, indiscriminately wasting whoever I come across. Is this what playin Mankind Divided like CoD does to a person?

But then a group of proper bad guys with guns turn up and it’s game over. I take out two but my skills combined with the game’s less than stellar combat mean I’m dead within moments. I didn’t even get the chance to lob an orange cone at someone’s head. Sad, I reload the last save and it’s as if nothing bad happened at all.

While Deus Ex: Mankind Divided gives the impression it can be played like a traditional shooter, in practice it’s a stealth-focused action RPG played from first-person. If you try to force another genre’s playstyle onto it you’ll get very little from the experience. Combat here is functional and up to the job when it’s called upon, but that call should only be made in emergencies. Like if you’re stuck inside a ventilation shaft housed within a toilet block.

Tune in next week as I attempt to play Madden NFL 17 like NBA Jam.