Not really what I would call a bad game, but I'm giving it a negative review because it is just boring and a bad Deus Ex sequel.

If we are to judge Human Revolution on its own merit, it's just kinda okay. The combat is fluid, the graphics are pretty (except for the vomit-inducing omnipresent yellow color), the music is great (probably my fav aspect of this game), and I really enjoyed the voice acting, especially the actor playing Adam Jensen. But in total the game fails to present anything out of ordinary. Almost every gameplay mechanic makes it feel like a generic AAA title. The story also feels only serviceable, providing nothing extraordinary within the first couple of hours, but creating a sense that it might become entertaining, if I keep playing. Which is fine, and how things are usually done in AAA games, I guess.

However, if we judge this game as a Deus Ex, it fails miserably to live up to the series' reputation. While I know Deus Ex: Invisible War is generally considered significantly inferior to the first game, I think Deus Ex: Human Revolution cannot hold the candle to either of the previous games. Gameplay-wise it's been streamlined to an extreme degree. While it tries to keep up the appearance of a Deus Ex game by allowing you to interact with objects, characters and environment, these only create an illusion of the gameplay the previous games had.

Human Revolution cannot in all honesty be called an immersive sim. In the older games almost every room contained tons of interactable objects; it felt like a playground where you could do almost anything you wanted. Particularly in the first game every mission clearly provided you with several paths of completing it, which could then branch out and intertwine. And you never felt like you was making "a choice". The gameplay always just flowed naturally, because the alternate ways were not hidden as some kinda extra content, and neither of the paths was prioritized. Every character you interacted with had at least several lines of dialogue. In DEHR the game usually has one "right" way of completing a mission, and one "special" way (plus the "wrong" way, aka going guns-blazing). You have to actually put effort into finding that "special" way, as you would do in any other stealth game, because this game doesn't have a multitude of them like the originals. The interactable objects are far and few between, and all you can usually do with them is pick them up and move them around for no reason. Every NPC, except for the key characters, has only EXACTLY TWO lines of dialogue, and they are usually completely pointless. Not to mention, all the NPCs are basically saying the exact same things in different words.

Speaking of words, 90% of written material can and should be skipped. It's just filler that adds nothing to the story or the world. Okay, so from two hours of playing it I figured out that this is 2027 and augmentations are everywhere, and for some reason everybody is upset about it. But that's pretty much all you get in every single note and email. They just keep repeating the same exact talking points, which don't really have anything to say anyway. In the original Deus Ex the written material was all fascinating to read, as it would discuss questions of freedom, authoritarianism, capitalism, social justice, economy, the impact of technologies upon society, etc. And the NPCs would relate all that to their personal stories, and present you with moral dilemmas. The second game wasn't on the same level, but it still had fleshed out characters and discussed some of those themes, as well as some other interesting sci-fi concepts. A lot of that related to our real world and what we are going through right now as a civilization. This is how you do cyberpunk. This is what cyberpunk is all about. So you always WANTED to speak to every NPC, read every book, every terminal, hack every computer, and read every email. In DEHR I want to do the opposite: skip all that filler and get to the actual missions. Because it is a chore to go through all that text. Which, again, is pretty common in video games, but in Deus Ex this is a crime against the series' integrity. DEHR have no themes aside from augmentations. And even for that the game fails to present a convincing case.

So to conclude, DE and DEIW were both cyberpunk immersive sims. DEHR is not. It is a pale imitation of what a Deus Ex game should be. But on its own, it's not that bad of a game. Pretty decent even. I would probably rate it like 7/10 on its own, and like 4/10 as a Deus Ex.