Being the second piece of DLC for Mankind Divided and the first that wasn’t obviously ripped from the base game to make an extra buck through preorders, System Rift has a moderate amount of expectation behind it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do everything that many hoped it would.
The mission starts out with a weirdly well-animated cutscene that reunites our protagonist, Adam Jensen, with an old friend of sorts: security specialist, Francis Pritchard. The plot setup has Jensen travel to a new part of Prague to investigate the disappearance of Pritchard’s missing colleague.
The new area is not especially interesting, but it is something of a delightful microcosm of Deus Ex environments; shady backalleys, anti-augmented hoodlums, apartments with secret passages, abandoned businesses and of course ultra-high tech security vaults. The latter just so happens to be Jensen’s ultimate destination, with Prichard promising that some secrets about the Illuminati are within.
Those vaults are contained in one of the Palisade Blades, the huge structures that could be seen over the water in the base game. These are some of the most secure data storage facilities in the world, a point that is made numerous times by supporting characters and very obvious once Jensen is inside.
This area is the meat of the DLC. Jensen must infiltrate multiple, increasingly secure areas in order to achieve his goal. These are some of the more challenging environments anywhere in Mankind Divided, with endless cameras, turrets, guards and robots. This is mainly a stealth mission, but combat is not impossible.
The first few of these areas are basically offices, which are fun to explore, with plenty of different ways to do so depending on which augments are activated. There’s a million laptops found in important-sounding rooms here. Players that like to look for hidden information are going to be sick to death of the hacking minigame very quickly, not to mention be disappointed when they discover that virtually none of the laptops have any interesting or useful information on them.
One of the main areas of the DLC is deep inside the vault. This area is almost gimmicky in how packed with security devices it is. In fact, there’s actually a new kind of camera here: a heat sensor that is not fooled by cloaks or cover. Being new, these new cameras could be pretty frustrating to some players.
Weirdly, this area has some security laptops right at the beginning of it which let Jensen turn off everything and open all the doors. It might be a relief, but it makes it laughably easy and defeats the whole point of the DLC from a gameplay perspective. It’s not hard to beat the world’s best security using all Jensen’s abilities, when there is no security after using just one of those abilities.
Towards the end of the mission are some exciting and unique moments. One of these actually has the potential to be one of the most intense sequences yet, but only if certain augmentations haven’t been chosen. There are some really interesting ideas here, especially a part where Jensen appears to be somewhere he’s not, although disappointingly nothing comes of this and it’s over quickly.
The ending is also something of a letdown. The promise to both Jensen and players was that this mission would reveal enlightening information, but while the story here wraps up nicely, it is of no real consequence. Almost nothing new is learned about the Illuminati or anything else that players actually care about. Even the previous bonus mission, Desperate Measures, had more relevance to the main plot of the main game. A lot more, in fact.
Summary
In the end, System Rift is a fun two to three-hour add-on with some decent new challenges to overcome and an okay mini-plot, but players who were hoping for something with a bit more narrative weight to it will be disappointed. They shouldn’t have promised us major revelations about the Illuminati if they didn’t plan to deliver.
Dean was a regular ICXM contributor between 2015–2017, publishing 39 articles across game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news. Their work focused on hands-on reviews, platform commentary, and breaking-news reporting during the Xbox One X launch year and Microsoft’s wider Play Anywhere / UWP gaming initiative. They post on X as @SpookyWomble.