Deus Ex: Undivided Attention

It's always nice to be pleasantly surprised, when Deus Ex Mankind Divided released in 2016 I was not that interested. Can't recall why, I put it into my rental list but just never put it at the top and that was that. Until just over a week ago and I was feeling bored, burned out from too many JRPG games and just fancied something different and that's when this game finally caught my eye. 
I was hooked as soon as I finished the first mission, this game quite simply gelled with me and unlike most of my rentals I didn't send it right back as soon as I finished, I dived back in to finish the hardest mode and win some achievements and wrap up side missions I missed the first time around. This is an amazingly well made game, it's narrative may be rusty and the controls in some situations trying, but overall it's an amazing game.

Deus Ex Mankind Divided belongs to the sub-genre of RPG FPS, the series hasn't strayed from it's roots in this regard, although it could be argued that Deus Ex doesn't take the RPG mechanics particularly far. What it does do, is get great mileage out of it's options, it's the perfect example of quality over quantity. 
There are quite a few weapons, but don't expect to find several types of shotgun or assault rifles, there is one of each but you can modify the stats of any gun and also equip attachments on the fly. Because there is no weapon surplus, you know which gun to use for what situation and to what play style you have. 
The weapon handling isn't tight, but it's not supposed to be. Guns are very powerful (taking into account enemy augmentations), but you can't just Rambo your way out of a situation, which helps encourage a second type of play style; stealth.

Stealth has been a big part of the Deus Ex games, I would even go as far to say that you're generally inclined to play more stealthily than aggressive, the rewards tend to be greater and there are so many routes for evasive and sneaky play that it makes the game easier to finish anyway. Many of the game's abilities for the player improve your stealth abilities, a transparent cloak, silent footsteps and camera hacking for instance. 
All abilities have a cost and a consumption, your energy meter's total length will reduce as you continually use abilities until you can only use low powered ones and for a very brief moment of time. The only way to refill the gauge is to use bio-cells (an item you can buy, craft and loot), these are a scarce and expensive resource which is pretty much the only way the game makes any attempt to cap your use of abilities. 
It's not the strongest curb in all honesty, and at times it does feel frustrating that you have to use items to get more than a fifth of your bar back.

Other gameplay mechanics is the hacking minigame, something you'll see a lot of as there are lots of places to get into... unethically. It's a fun little detour and adds up together with all the other threads of gameplay, the minigame itself is very simple: You have to capture green nodes to hack access into whatever it is you're hacking. There are initially dormant firewalls, but as you capture data nodes (the method you reach the green nodes) you can trigger a firewall counter attack. The firewall will increase the difficulty of capturing nodes and if it reaches your inception node, you fail. Sometimes failing can raise alarms and send guards at your position - not good.
There are data caches in the minigame that award you with a small amount of bonus money, items and experience and some of these items can be used when hacking to stop the firewall tracing you, capture nodes instantaneously and so on.
You can also hack cameras, robots and environmental objects like windows and extendable awnings. 

The game takes place in Praque but does have specific story missions that occur in completely new locations. The city itself is full of tiny details, shops and people and events. There are also side missions you can embark on and what I like best about how Deus Ex handles side missions, is that it doesn't throw tons of fetch quests at you with ever increasing rarity of loot. Instead you have self contained stories that allow to explore areas of Prague you may have not seen otherwise. Again, it's reinforcing the quality over quantity philosophy that Mankind Dividend embodies. 
Overall it took me around fifteen hours to finish the game on my first playthrough and that's doing just over half of the side missions, so it's not a long game but it's so well made and there are some unique achievements you can earn on repeated playthroughs. It's hardest mode is the now obligatory perma-death mode and there are extra challenges such as not killing any enemies or bosses and not setting off any alarms. It's easy to plow an extra twenty-five to thirty hours doing all the extra stuff the game has to offer.

So, is Deus Ex Mankind Divided worth your time? It certainly is, it's a well crafted game that is fun and well paced. It's an absolute joy of a game and I can't recommend it enough to play.