Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (Season Pass) (DLC)

The Mankind Divided Season Pass is a mixed bag that lives or dies on two words: A Criminal Past. That second story DLC sends Adam Jensen undercover into the Penley T. Housefather Correctional Facility, a supermax prison built exclusively for augmented felons. You arrive stripped of your augs entirely, thanks to a chip slapped on you at the gate, and the whole opening stretch forces you to play like a baseline human in a hostile yard. As the story progresses you can claw your augmentations back, and the game even gives you a choice between Jensen's traditional aug tree and the experimental set, which is a genuinely smart bit of build flexibility for a DLC. The map is layered, the inmate characters have actual personality, and the branching midgame decision point gives the whole thing real replay value. For lore fans, it also plants seeds that connect to Mankind Divided's main conspiracy in ways the base game only gestures at. It is, without exaggeration, one of the better stand-alone DLC chapters in the action-RPG space post-2016. System Rift is the other narrative piece, set after the main game's events and built around Frank Pritchard, Jensen's sharp-tongued ex-colleague from Sarif Industries. It sends you after data locked inside the Palisade Bank's architecture, and it includes a sequence pulled directly from the Breach multiplayer mode's visual aesthetic. The level design keeps Mankind Divided's signature multi-route DNA intact, and Pritchard is good company. The problem is that the whole thing feels like a chapter that was trimmed from the main game and repackaged, which the community has been pretty direct about since launch. It does its job, but it does not hit the emotional or mechanical highs of A Criminal Past. The rest of the season pass is where things get genuinely awkward. Alongside the two Jensen's Stories episodes, you get the Assault and Tactical gear packs (weapons and items), four Praxis Kits, 5,000 credits, 1,000 Weapon Parts, and booster packs for the Breach mode. The catch that reviewers and community members flagged immediately: some of those consumable items are one-time-use. Redeem them on one playthrough, start a new run, and certain things are just gone. The DLC weapons themselves persist across playthroughs, which softens the blow slightly, but the one-and-done consumable system is a Square Enix monetization decision that still reads as hostile in 2024. The Breach booster packs are effectively irrelevant since the mode has been dead for years. The story DLCs are accessed from a dedicated Jensen's Stories menu, completely separate from the main campaign. Your main-game progress does not carry over, which actually works in A Criminal Past's favor since the aug-stripping premise would fall apart otherwise. Both episodes are short, landing somewhere between three and six hours depending on how thoroughly you explore. That is not a lot of runtime, and if the two narrative missions were available standalone at a fair price, that would be the cleaner recommendation. As a bundled season pass, the value math depends entirely on how deeply you are invested in Jensen as a character and how much the Deus Ex conspiracy lore still pulls at you. Bottom line: buy this for A Criminal Past, tolerate System Rift, and mentally write off the consumable items as noise. If you already own the two story DLCs separately, there is nothing here worth a second purchase.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

Be the first to comment on Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (Season Pass) (DLC).