In June, Square Enix revealed its plans to make a mobile game alongside Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, a big console game coming out on Aug. 23. And now it has revealed more details about Deus Ex Go, which is coming soon for smartphones and tablets.
The announcement from the big Japanese game publisher and its Montreal studio, Square Enix Montreal, shows that the audience of a billion mobile gamers continues to be an important target for Square Enix’s ongoing series of Go mobile games, such as Lara Croft: Go and Hitman: Go. Those prior games appealed to hardcore gamers who like the games on the consoles and enjoyed engaging with the same franchises on mobile devices. and those titles had high-end, realistic 3D-animated landscapes with fancy homes and lush jungles.
But Deus Ex: Go is very different. It has an abstract art style, and the main objectives are sneaking into places and hacking into computers. It’s a puzzle game where you play as Adam Jensen, the hero of the Deus Ex series. You have to choose the right path and the right measures to sneak around guards, hack into computers, and fight when necessary. The maps are hexagonal, like a board game, but the animations of the characters look very realistic.
“You’ll encounter many of the same characters like Jim Miller and Alex as you’ll find in Mankind Divided,” said Nicolas Bertrand-Verge, community manager at Square Enix Montreal, in an interview with GamesBeat. “But you absolutely don’t have to know anything about Deux Ex to play the game.”
Like the action of the main console game, Deus Ex Go will still have hacking, take downs, augmentations, and puzzles to solve. The art style is very high-tech, as if you’re moving around inside a computer. But in a recent preview session, I saw that the game has its own story and physical space. In the level I saw, Jensen is ordered to break into a billionaire’s mansion that has been taken over by terrorists working for an “anti-augmentation” group called Purity First. Jensen has to rescue the owner and hack computer systems. This build actually looked more detailed than the previous version.
You have to manipulate enemies and pit them against each other. You can hack a camera or sentry gun and turn it against the guards. You can decide whether to use violence or to just knock out guards. There may be some crossover with the story of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. You can pick up energy items that allow you to go into a stealth mode where the enemies can’t see you.
The game is coming out sometime this year, and it is likely to be around the same time as Mankind Divided, which debuts on Aug. 23. It will have something like 50 or 60 puzzles, and perhaps four to six hours of gameplay.
Bertrand-Verge said that the game’s narrative takes place just before the events of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. It fits in with the narrative of the main game. There are also five different kits in Deus Ex Go that you can use to unlock capabilities for Adam Jensen in the main game. You can do various challenges to unlock those kits, and if you get them all, you can have five different kits in Mankind Divided. You can access them by linking your Square Enix accounts.
The mobile game is social because players will be able to create their own puzzles and share them with other players. Players can unlock an episode a day and Square Enix can feed new content regularly.
“It allows us to do interesting things with the game,” Bertrand-Verge said.
