Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

20 to 40 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Overrated"

The original was great. No doubt about that. But this PREQUEL failed to live up to the hype. I'm really not sure what all the fuss about prequels is these days. I can barely think of a single successful one, be it movies or computer games.

Anyway, DXHR fails in a number of departments...

* For starters the storyline/characters are NOWHERE NEAR as interesting as the original and frankly it was often hard to care about ANYTHING in the game at all. After a while I just started wishing it was over.

* The missions and sidequests failed to engage my interest and the upgrade system was nothing to get too excited about either.

* Also as many others have mentioned the boss fights made it almost compulsory to chose the combat uprades as opposed to the stealth ones which took away some of the choice in the game.

* And speaking of stealth - well it kind of got boring/tedious after awhile. But the combat alternative wasn't much better either with mostly ordinary and unimaginative weapons.

* Oh, and don't get me started on the tedious hacking system. Nothing like breaking the immersion with a hacking mini-game every 2-3 minutes. *sigh*

So, I guess that pretty much covers the negatives. But the reason I give the game a 7 is because it did succeed in some areas. Overall its a rather interesting and fun experience but it just all seems to kind of wear thin pretty fast.

For example, hacking is fun once or twice but not TWO HUNDRED times. Also, sneaking around and doing silent takedowns can be fun, but only for awhile. And even the storyline and characters started out with a lot of promise and intrigue but seemed to deteriorate more and more as the game unfolded.

Overall, I'd say DXHR is worth it but don't expect anything too great here.
It seems that the developers put in a ton of effort into the game to make it interesting and cool but maybe they just tried too hard because the original really was better in so many ways.