That’s the good and the ugly out of the way, which means that it is now rather unfortunately time for the bad news: mechanically speaking this Deus Ex is a triumph and probably the best the series has ever been, but narratively it is an absolute clusterfuck. For starters it does the one thing AAA RPGs should never, ever do, which is to assume that the person playing it will have played all of the other games in the series (including the shitty phone ones) and/or read all of the terrible tie-in fiction and that it’s perfectly fine to introduce characters and groups from these games with little to no explanation of who they are. Mankind Divided doesn’t quite reach the nadir that Mass Effect 3 did (I still shudder whenever I think of that Mary-Sue space ninja) but it’s this attitude that it doesn’t have to waste time filling the player in on missing backstory that contributes to much of the main plotline’s general feel of incoherence. It’s a problem exacerbated by the generally mismatched nature of the game; outside of Prague (and in more than a few locations within it) Mankind Divided strikes me as a game that suffered some development troubles. The missions are bolted together in a jumbled, ad-hoc way that’s usually a classic symptom of the developers being forced to a deadline and having to assemble the story out of whatever they had lying around at the time. It doesn’t flow at all. For all its flaws Human Revolution at least managed a story with a distinct beginning, middle and somewhat wonky end, whereas in Mankind Divided the story is just a thing that happens until it doesn’t.