GameSpot's The Lobby: Is Deus Ex: Mankind Divided too familiar?

[MUSIC] So, delighted to have you both here and because you are both experts. You aren't, they are sexperts. Shall we say? Blame the dude sex. Blame it on dude sex? They have sex? And might kind of [UNKNOWN]. Officially today. I guess. Gamespot's review is up. And tron gave it?>> Eight.>> Eight out of ten. Thank you John Luke say man. So I'm use to X-Men. I wasn't in to super human evolution. I couldn't get the swing of it.>>Oh really?>> Yeah. I loved thou the old Warren Spector one and I like Deus Ex 2, as well, actually, but for whatever reason, I was looking forward to Mankind Divided because I feel like I missed the boat in the first one, and it wasn't necessarily the game's fault, I just was probably playing something else or something. Sure. So, I guess Do you, first of all Jean Luke, what have you made of it? I want your history with the franchise. Are you a fan of the old games? Yeah, I played the original, huge fan of that. I kind of like this sort of immersive sim style games, Thief and System Shock and Dishonored kind of carrying that legacy I didn't I enjoyed human revolution a lot. I never played invisible war. Right. I didn't care about that one at all. [LAUGH] Wasn't that only the Xbox? No PC as well. PC, really. I didn't play it. It kind of felt a little bit ported. But anyway. So I played human revolution and I enjoyed it. Quite a bit. It didn't fully grab me at the time. I think I played on the console. Right. And I remember being really frustrated about the boss battles. Mm. Because I played, like a non-lethal stealth run and that that is sort of like the big thing people talk about that game. You come up on it and it is like. Here's these guys and now you have to fight them, and you're like. There's no way to kill the bosses self wise. So they fixed that, in this one, by just not having boss battles. Great, that'll do. They just completely took them out. Yeah, which I'm sure is probably fine right? I think they had a second edition of Human Revolution where they actually did add more to the boss battles. Yeah they did patch stuff, a bunch of things in actually to rectify that. And apart from that sort of stuff, how does the game play? Does it play? I mean it's been a long time, it's been August 2011 is when Human Revolution came out, it's been five years. Does it feel like it's been five years? It does, and it was, so at the beginning of the game, it has like a 12-minute recap. And just, it's like, hey, you wanna watch this 12-minute recap, which is Adam Jensen reading the Wikipedia entry for human revolution over Footage which was good because I don't remember anything that happened in that last game. Something about the illuminati and- Well it seemed like the story in that one was even not necessarily the biggest attachment, right Aaron? It was kinda the augments are bad maybe some people don't like augments we hate progress. It was one of those games where it was So as the game is less about that and more about freedom of movement in the environment and solving puzzles in a way that you thought you would you had outsmarted the game. Only to find out that the game had expected you- Right. To do that or giving you the option to do that That's all that is unique about that game. It's also one of those games you can put your gun away which- Right. Oddly enough is kind of cool. So my kind of kind of fight then and how does it play similarly to that? Does it reinvent the wheel? What are we talking about here? Superman can divide feels exactly like he's turned the page in the next chapter in the same book. I mean there's. They polished up the animation and then they did add some new abilities But you're still setting most of your skill points initially on the stuff that you already know and you need, like hacking, jumping, breathing, toxic gas. [LAUGH] And then there's like, early on, this is not really a spoiler, the gift of To lock out some mobility. So they make you choose which ones you want before you've really had a chance to play with all of them. Okay, in Max pretty early? So what about the levels themselves. Let's get into how this game actually plays or feels when you're playing it. Is it the same sort of things where you're You're okay I can pretty much go in here all guns blazing. Or maybe I can hack this one door and just get something different or.>> Yeah absolutely. So yeah typically you'll go to an area and then it's like nope there's a guard there and he wont let me in and you look around and be like alright I can jump up and move that wall. And then you can get around that way. You can go through events. You can hack. You can, it's all, that's kind of the thing is you All the options that were there in the last game are still there and still kind of the same. And so, I feel a problem that most people run into with these games is you get into a rhythm where you're like, I like the hacking so you always just hack or you always use the vent, you always use the same three [UNKNOWN] And [CROSSTALK] There's always the vent So you kind of just do the same thing. Right. And then you get into this rhythm, and so it's less about, it's sort of like, you get to a new room and you're immediately like, all right, where's the vent? There's the vent. Right. You're gonna go in that vent. See you're not really problem solving, you're just kinda like, I don't know, you're doing what's comfortable to you, I guess. Yeah, pretty much, cuz after finding that predictable rhythm for like a couple of levels, I started to just knocking on anybody who sassed me. Okay. And the game got really interesting all of a sudden. Really? Why because you were just forced to be in combat scenarios then? I think you can play the game kind of combat wise. Right. Everything is there in the game for you to do it. And the game often times doesn't expect you to do it. So Some hilarity can ensue like you knocking a guard out, running into a closet, closing the door, and then knocking the next five guys out who open the closet door. [LAUGH] And ending up with a guard dog pile. But there's still opening the good door, like they haven't figured it out, okay. But it's interesting because I think you can also knock out characters that give you side quests. So that's the punishment for Going- Just knocking out anyone. Yeah. It looks, from what I've seen, and I haven't seen it running in person or anything yet. I was interested in all the preview stuff we were doing in the weeks prior to its launch. The world itself looked pretty interesting. Like detail levels, more variety than was in Human Revolution in terms of that. What did you think of that Aaron? So far it's mostly been city streets. And I think John Luke went all the way over to the end. Some sewer sections that had some side quests which were interesting. I don't know, like Deus Ex has always been a game where, even though you have a lot of options, I always still feel like I'm in a corridor. Right, yeah. It doesn't have that Dishonored feel where You're kind of seeing how far to the side of the map you can get. Which I felt in Deus Ex one and two you were doing a lot of. Yeah. Like that's what that game felt like. Which is what I played of I played a little bit of human revolution. Yeah yeah human revolution and that's what it felt like. It felt like the blinders were on a little. [UNKNOWN] Does this come the same with this one? Yeah, definitely when you get into the machine, it is more of a straight path. For me, the stuff I really like is sort of the hub world area. Right, [UNKNOWN] It's pretty good, so you're walking, a lot of details, a lot of characters. I would find myself Like you know you see random and they're having a conversation that you can just overhear and it took a while before I felt like I started to hear repeat stuff. Okay, cool. So they recorded a lot of dialogue. There were a lot of characters that I could engage in a full conversation with and it didn't lead to a side quest, it didn't do anything, it was just there to build the world, and that was cool. Cool. Like if you like that kind of stuff you could just Poking around and talking to people. Yeah. And reading. Creeping. Creeping on people. Reading their stuff. It's pretty good at that. It sounds like the biggest criticism you guys have with us is that it's very similar to human revolution. Totally. So somebody who didn't really play a lot of human revolution, I feel like this is great. It could be a great game. Totally. If you don't have that Yeah, if you can play you'll probably be like this is awesome. Like first time experiencing this. But for me as someone who really like Human Revelation but it's been five years, right? So I was kind of hoping that it would do a little bit more to advance just like mechanically and stuff like that and it Kind of doesn't. So he kills more of the same.>> Five years is a long time for any game series. Especially for a first time sequel I guess.>>Yeah on a larger level, I'm kind of over games where you're just a kleptomaniac The act for the sake of kleptomania. Right. You spend a lot of time picking stuff up in this one. I don't know what the next thing is. Some genius game developer is going to have to come up with whatever the next thing is. But you run through this Mass Effect and Deus Ex where You're playing a like a slightly moral character depending on how you play them. And what you do most of the time is break into people's apartments and steal their medicine and their bullets and you're like this cat burglar, and it just doesn't really add to the story. It doesn't really make Sense for you to be doing this constantly. Yeah totally. Like I just Adam Jensen, cat burglar. I know what you yeah and I guess it's like I'm sure the developers have argued or you don't have to do it but when that's one of the only things you can do Do outside of walking around. I guess that's probably a bit weird. Ammo management's always an issue in this game. So you're motivated to go poke through people's drawers. Right. And most of them have bullets. And drug management. [LAUGH] The drugs don't even, it's not like I have this drug now it does this specific thing. Most of the stuff you pick up just gives you crafting parts. Just turns to scrap. Yeah just turns into scrap right? You're also kind of a creeper on people's emails. I'm listening to conversations with them as well. There's a nurse. You get to this area where it's like a slum area, really bad. You talk to this nurse lady and she just talks about here's how dire the situation is, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, man, that sucks. Here, I'll give you some like health packs and blah, blah, blah. The next thing I do is I go up, I find her apartment, and I'm like, all right, let's see what's on her computer. Let's take this from her safe and like The game doesn't like you took that from her safe. I'm like yeah whatever man who cares. [LAUGH] No cost to questions at all. It's amazing steal from the poor give to the poor. Exactly. Thanks so much for coming on talking about Deus Ex Machina. [INAUDIBLE] review up on gamespot.com now, eight out of ten. Yeah, final thoughts? You'd recommend this, but with the caveat that it's pretty similar? Yeah, I would definitely recommend it if you liked Human Revolution, you're like, yeah, I could use another one of those, absolutely. If you've never played it, I think, and you seem like this is the kind of game I wanna play, I wanna check out, I think it's absolutely worth checking out. If you were hoping for something just like Little bit more fresh, it doesn't really give you that, unfortunately. Well John, you've completed it. Aaron, you have played a bunch of it, but haven't completed yet. Do you think you're gonna go back in and complete it? I got sidetracked knocking out large swaths of people. [LAUGH] Through the world. Make your own fun. Yeah. No, I would like grease and games like this and just seeing how far you can push it. And I think the combat around is typically pushing it for a day's X Games. Right. So, I wanna see how far I can take it. Excellent. All right. [UNKNOWN] people comeback and tell us about it. [LAUGH] Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on, appreciate it. [MUSIC]