GAME CHANGER
RELEASE August 23, 2016 DEVELOPER Eidos Montreal PUBLISHER Square Enix LINK eidosmontreal.com
I never played Deus Ex: Mankind Divided at launch. I’d just gotten a PC that could handle this 2016 GPU punisher (I’ll always love you, GTX 1080) when it first came out, but something stayed my hand. Some combination of Square Enix’s bombastic marketing, Eidos Montreal’s ham-fisted use of robot arms as an allegory for racism, and the creeping sense of doom at seeing a largely divergent, self-contained story presented as a ‘prequel’ start to butt against its fictional timeline constraints totally gave me the ick.
In the years since, it’s become apparent that Eidos Montreal’s planned trilogy will likely never be concluded – we’re entering full reboot territory now, almost eight years later – and that’s only further discouraged me from diving back into the developer’s vision of the 2020s.
After falling in love with all over again, despite its vexingly flawed and self-serious sci-fi (check out the Game Changer feature in issue 524 for more on that!), I knew it was time to give the old college try on my trusty Steam
