This is the best time to talk about the challenges and solutions in this game. Levels here aren’t set up in a linear fashion. The developers didn’t say “Here’s the way to beat X problem.” Instead, they’ve created open living spaces where you have a beginning and an end, but everything in between is rather fluid. You can sneak by all of your enemies, defeat them quietly, kill them in quick doses, or declare open war and exterminate everything in sight. It’s all possible, and even within that there are still usually 3-4 routes to get through an area.
You get to decide what you like the most. It’s good to focus on a single style of play each time you go through Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, but you can mix up that style as much as you like during subsequent playthroughs. The game has a New Game+ feature after you win, so it’s just begging you to try out new styles of play when you’re in the mood.
The big questions to ask yourself when deciding on a style are these:
- Do I want to totally avoid enemies?
- Do I want to kill the people I defeat?
- Once you answer those, you just need to figure out how to beat each challenge in the play style of your choice. We’ll talk about Lethal and Non-Lethal methods in our walkthrough. That gives you tips for going through the game in a brutal, direct method one way, and for a subtle, stealthy run another time.
That said, you can mix and match these without compromising your character’s capabilities. For example, you can absolutely make a lethal stealth run. Silenced weapons and murderous Takedowns are fine. In the same way, a really crazy player could try to beat people and cause plenty of chaos, but never actually kill anyone. That’s the only route that’s really hard to pull off, but you can still do it.
When you’ve decided how you want to play, start to focus on everything that accentuates that style. You don’t need to carry around four firearms when you’re making a Non-Lethal run. That’s a waste of inventory space unless you’re just returning to a store to sell weapons. As we talk about stealth and combat, we’ll help you see the right configuration of augmentations, weapons, and tactics that let you dominate your enemies using each style of play. This will all make sense very soon.
