Hi all,
At one side I am very interested in this game as I liked Human Revolution a lot and thought it was a good game for most of the duration of the story/campaign and I liked how nice it looked.
But on the other side it sort of started to loose steam after a while, giving the feeling that the designers stopped caring and just wanted to make some end to this, or that they just did not have plain time to make the last part very good.
I found the game not very replayable to be honest, perhaps because of what I mentioned above but also because I did not feel a replay was really rewarding anymore.
Also I did not really care much about the focus on the mechanical augmentation issue in the story, at some point it became so dragged out and the focus of almost every discussion by every character you meet.
In DE1 it was just one of many subjects around which the world revolved, political corruption, out of control privatization, environmental damage, energy crises, the increasing inequality between the rich and the poor and the practical non existence of the middle class, terrorism of various types, unethical scientific development, epidemics, and so on.
HR mentions some other stuff like a civil war in Australia and so on but practically does nothing with it.
Last, I had a talk about this game on Steam chat and realized during it that I did not find Jensen at all that interesting as a protagonist. As my conversation partner pointed out, he is rather a brick.
Denton in comparison was a lot more likeable, he could be sarcastic or snarky depending on how you played him, but he could also care about people, especially the common ones in the street who didn't have much influence in the forces that shape society and their lives.
There were some elements like that in HR but I can't recall them as well as the ones in Deus Ex 1 such as the situation in which you decide to help the hotel owner of the 'Ton with his problems with his daughter, or decide to deal with Jojo Fine.
As my conversation partner already mentioned; it is kind of interesting that the guy who was designed to be some kind of superman/augmented assassin could sometimes be much more humane than 'natural' humans.
As for HR being a real prequel to Deus Ex 1, I pretty much have the same feeling as some others here do and also say no.
It shares elements, names, and so on, but it could just as well take place in a whole different universe.
(on that note, when the developers mentioned in an interview that they 'grounded' the Illuminati more, it felt sort of like a slap in the face of the original writers. Sort of a 'they tried their best but we just know plain better' mentality.)
I'll keep a look out for Mankind Divided as it seems a rather average year for sci-fi-ish titles, but I don't have to high expectations from it other than being perhaps an entertaining game for a few days.
