Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is beautiful, brutal, and seriously ambitious

Yes, great video games should be more than just graphical eye candy, but in the case of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, it's hard to ignore its aesthetic charms. The Dawn engine demo shown at the first annual PC Gaming Show—which included a list of flashy effects like depth of field, global illumination, volumetric lighting, air density, and exquisitely rendered cucumbers—was but a tease for what the actual game looks like in motion. Mankind Divided was easily the best-looking thing I saw at this year's E3—and in a show filled with graphical heavyweights like Dice's Star Wars: Battlefront, Sony's Uncharted 4, and Ubisoft's Ghost Recon Wildlands, that's high praise indeed.

For the moment, let's assume that Mankind Divided actually ends up looking like its E3 demo (see the ruckus caused by SEGA's Colonial Marines for an example of when that doesn't happen), and take what Eidos Montreal has done at face value. The developer has crafted a world that's both futuristic and believable, and rendered it with the gloss and lighting of a movie (and running on a PC, naturally). In the train station at the start of the demo, people were going about their daily business, or as best they could under the rule of an oppressive government. Police drones hovered menacingly around the platform—stopping random passers by for impromptu scans and inspections—while police officers asked to see papers, punishing those who failed to comply with a swift strike of a baton.

Like in Human Revolution, Mankind Divided's world is one grounded in the scientific advancements and technology currently being developed in laboratories around the world. Eidos Montreal has again consulted with renowned bioinformatics and neuroscience researcher Will Rosellini to make sure that the technology in the game is as realistic is possible. But this time around in the story, those with mechanical and electrical augmentations ("mech-augs") are no long the envy of society. Mech-augs are outcasts, people to be feared because of their physical superiority over the rest of the human race. In what Eidos Montreal is calling "Mechanical Apartheid," they are kept at arm's length and treated harshly by the authorities, who are quite happy to dole out physical punishment at the slightest provocation.

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