Finished the game a couple days ago and didn't have internet to report on it. All in all it was very good, but shy of excellent. I am not sure how it compares to the original honestly, there is too much nostalgia going on there for me to make a real comparison anytime soon. I will say that DX:HR is probably the most faithful modern update of any old game series to date. Here are some random ups and downs:
+ Good missions, nice storyline with great political and philosophical commentary, good use of FMV... all around good presentation.
+ Faithful to the narrative linearity yet completely non-linear gameplay style of the original. More faithful to the source material than any other sequel I can think of to an old series.
+ Dialog is excellent, as is the written information in emails and such.
+ Side quests are more detailed and interesting than they were in the original, and in most games of this type.
- Two city hubs down from three in the previous two games. They're bigger, sure, but to only have two cities and then backtrack through them a second time feels cheap. Would have been relatively easy to cut the return trips and make Montreal into a real hub.
- Too stealth focused. I like stealth, I played it stealthy, but people complaining the game is too stealth focused are not wrong. The original did not punish an action path as much as HR does.
- AI is really stupid. Tons of times I had a pile of 10 bodies somewhere because I just kept shooting people in the head when they came to check on their dead buddy. Also, related to that, the pistol is incredibly overpowered.
- Hacking is way to frequent and gets annoying after a while. It's a good mini-game compared to most, but doing it literally 100+ times got really grating. On my second playthrough right now and despite wanting to avoid hacking as much as possible it is still necessary way too often.
- Should have been an aug at the end of the energy tree that allowed all energy pips to recharge.
- Too easy to max out a particular character path quickly. In my second playthrough I had pretty much everything I needed before leaving Detroit, both in augs and weapons, for a ghost playthrough. That makes earning xp and exploring pretty pointless later on.
- Game looks too soft somehow. I know they were going for a different look than typical cyberpunk, but cyberpunk is not that common and therefore it didn't really need a shakeup in my opinion. The FMVs look a lot better, darker and more cyberpunk, but the in-game graphics don't work for me, especially indoors.
All in all I really liked the game but I think a lot of the "OMG BEST GAME EVER" comments come from people being literally amazed at how much this feels like a Deus Ex game. I agree that it's a wonderful thing this is a real DX sequel (or prequel), but that doesn't blind me to the flaws in it. The game is both very gratifying in that it is a real Deus Ex game and that's awesome, but also somewhat disappointing in that it is a flawed game on many minor levels that hurt the experience as a whole. Also I got the stutter bug, so whenever the game loads assets it stutters like a motherfucker for like 5 full seconds. Irritating.
Still, at the end of the day I spent close to 40 hours playing the game and very much enjoyed it. I am so happy this style of game is getting another AAA release and I am already halfway through a second go as a ghost who never kills, and I rarely if ever start a game again right after finishing it. I like the game a lot, I just don't love it, and that bums me out. Might be GOTY by default though, unless Skyrim is much improved from Oblivion.
