Deus Ex: Mankind Divided leaves a lot of questions unanswered during the main campaign and the Jensen Stories section of the game hopes to address that. For those who haven’t played the campaign, this review will include a lot of spoilers because it involves a key part of the original experience. In the trailers you might’ve seen that a train station bombing takes place at the start of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. Well, while you know why the bombing happened—the political motives behind it—we never know who actually carried it out. Desperate Measures wishes to address this. This side story takes you to offices of a security firm and it’s up to you to break in and extract key evidence. Doing so not only reveals the true culprits but also reveals why those involved tried to cover it up. Usually Deus Ex: Mankind Divided deals with massive conspiracies so I was pleasantly surprised when I reached the end. I’m sure you will be too.
The Desperate Measures story expansion can be completed in a few hours if you’re playing on challenging settings. The security offices are crawling with security robots and personnel. Almost every hallway also has a camera. A good thing about these little missions is that you get the option to choose your loadout at the beginning of the game when it comes to abilities. You can assign points how you see fit. I haven’t started System Rift yet but Desperate Measure requires a lot of hacking and stealth. Be sure to invest some points in those along with the necessary cloaking device. I had to restart the mission from the beginning because towards the end of the story it became impossible to go anywhere without utilizing advanced stealth mechanics.
The story features great voice acting and everything feels like it belongs in the universe. Usually when you get an expansion it can sometimes feel like it lacks the quality of the main title, especially one that comes free with the game to begin with. Thankfully this is not the case here. Apart from that, consideration to performance has also been given because I never encountered any noticeable drops below 30 FPS during my playthrough. The main game suffers from a lot of issues when there’s heavy action so I quite content when those issues didn’t arise here. I’m not sure if this is due to the numerous patches Eidos Montreal have pushed out or if the new areas are well optimized. Whatever the reason behind it, you won’t have an issue playing mission.
Summary
Overall, Desperate Measures begins to tie up the many loose ends left in the main game and it starts with one of the biggest ones. It wraps up the mystery behind the train station bombing conclusively and adds a more human element to the game when it comes to the motives of the players involved. When you play Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, it can sometimes feel too “out there” and despite its name, doesn’t deal with the lives of people unless you engage with all the side missions. Desperate Measures corrects that because the answer to the mystery lies in basic human emotions and motivations aside from some elaborate coverup by the Illuminati.
Additional Information
System Rift is the next story mission and it might involve finding out who the Illuminati—or at least some of them—really are. I can’t wait to jump into that one and unravel another mystery.
Asher is a games journalist, former News Writer (Gaming) at Windows Central. They contributed 1110 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: wrote over 1,100 ICXM pieces on Xbox news, hardware reviews, and platform commentary before joining Future plc’s Windows Central in 2017.