To be fair, Deus Ex has a difficulty curve that goes something like "batshit insane hard first mission because you don't know what to do, and you're a gimp". Then it actually gets good, real good. The rocket launcher actually blows people up. Even bosses can't take a rocket in the face and laugh it off. It has one of the best and most immersive storylines, and it even has AN ENTIRE CHAPTER that can be skipped if you play your cards right throughout the game. Basically, you get enough intel to give a proper warning in time, and you don't have to go to France.
After a while, you start to notice the way you like to play. Personally, I liked sneaking, assassinating and sabotaging, and having a kick ass rocket launcher to kill bosses with.
So, now that I've said enough about Deus ex, lets talk about DE:HR. It is an 8.5 of 10 game. It could have been a 10.0 in my book if they hadn't fucked it up.
Their Alpha tester failed so hard. Really really hard. I'll list the faults from minor to major.
1: Megan Reed's mother twitches so frickin much you'd think she was on a mix of amphetamine and cocaine.
2: They kept the stupid laser sight on sniper bug that makes the sniper miss when you attach it, because the aim goes for the laser, which you can't see on your scope... Yeah, that's something they copied from Deus Ex...
3: Hacking becomes really tedious quite fast. They made WAY TOO MANY things to hack.
4: The weapons' damage output is unbalanced. The silenced pistol is basically the most powerful weapon after the grenades/frag mines. EMP is also incredibly powerful. It's harder to kill people with a minigun than with a silenced pistol ffs.
5: Bosses can take 100 bullets from a minigun in the body/head, without dying... And they can step on 4 frag mines. (I played it on normal difficulty)
6: The energy system is so stupid it hurts. You can only regen 1 bar, and everything except minor augs need 1 energy bar, so you will be stuck on the first energy bar until you pop a refill, which aren't that abundant. This should have been avoided by adding the number of energy bars being recharged with the upgrade system. Instead they made all energy requiring augs a pain in the ass to use.
* the next ones can ruin the experience for you. Read at own risk.
7: An important role's voice actor (won't spoil it) really did a shitty job, so did the script writer for that scene. You'll understand if you go for the silver tongue style at the end.
But, the biggest fault lies deeper. They did not understand Deus Ex at all. They did really not understand what made it great. The story is linearized in the bad way. It lacks the political depth the old game had. And it made the assumption that the gamer is a stupid twat. Really * spoiler alert * just get to the second visit to Heng'sha and see the scene where EVERYONE gets the exact same Augmentation error AT THE SAME FUCKING TIME.
The story is too straight forward, and there are cutscenes that implement the "plot continuing stupid action" that is so often used. I am talking about having gone through 8 floors full of guards, assassinating half of them, all unseen, getting to the target, and then go soft and hesitate to shoot the ***** in the knee. WHAT THE FUCK. This is what Deus Ex did well. They didn't make cutscenes that forced you to do stupid stuff just to continue the plot.
It is obvious that the people at the very top of this game didn't know what Deus Ex 1 really was, but some of the ones in the midrange of the corp did. It does a whole lot very well, it has researched a lot of the technology and research done in this field, but it just gets too obvious that there are too many people without the vision of making something that pushes the envelope in all aspects that games usually avoid.
Had it not been Deus Ex, it would have been a good game that touched into fields few dare touch, but considering what they based themselves on, they really did not do well.