I went back to human revolution a couple months ago. I loved it the first time, but I was really surprised how clunky a game from 2011 felt. I think there were also some scaling issues with my 4k monitor. it's really too bad; mankind divided had a much better "feel" to it, but the story was not as interesting or well developed.

I played HR for the first time last month and couldn't finish it, because it bored me to death and then gave me stupid boss fights. It's so dumbed down and just doesn't come close to the first Deus Ex. And yes it felt clunkier than the first game (I lost count of how many times I fell to my death trying to jump onto some platform to perhaps find a secret or hidden route, only to hit a stupid invisible wall)..

The director's cut provided non-combat solutions to some of the boss fights. But at launch, yeah, those were a huge miss if you had optimized stealth or hacking skills. It felt like a huge slap in the face to anyone that managed to bypass the boss fights in the original Deus Ex by finding the killswitch words.

Penny Arcade captured the sentiment at the time pretty well:

https://arewenewatthis.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/deus-ex1....

(Sorry this is not officially from their site--their archive search system is terrible)

In my opinion, there wasn't really an option other than to optimize for a stealthy gameplay style in DX:HR since ammunition was ridiculously scarce. (Intentionally so: https://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2011/08/17/why-i...) There is rarely the opportunity for a stand-up gunfight, very much unlike the original Deus Ex, to break up the monotony.

The ammo problem wasn't much of an issue for me, as I went for a strictly non-lethal playthrough (for which I was annoyingly denied the achievement, as one of the guards I tranq'd immediately fell unconscious...off a roof).

The unavoidable boss-fights were certainly something of a shock at the time.

Yeah, the main problem is that HR encourages much more intense character specialization than the original game. The latter half of Deus Ex has a lot of situations where you're expected to fight (although you can generally cheese your way through, run past enemies, etc.) but there's a limit to how much you can overinvest in non-combat skills, and the inventory is spacious enough that you can afford to tote around heavy weaponry to get through tough spots (any character can effectively use mines/grenades and they take up very little space).

At launch the boss fights were much worse. They updated it to provide alternative solutions to most or all of them, at some point.

Somehow it got away with the same “click a button, get a cutscene” ending as Mass Effect 3 without the same level of outrage. Deeply boring game even at the time.

The original DX, on the other hand - it took me years to get past the first level, but once I did it was really engaging.

Deus Ex went downhill over time. First was great. Second was not much meh. Third had stupid boss fights and I decided that trying to finish it is not worth time.

Mankind Divided was such a letdown...

That’s funny, Deus Ex is probably the oldest game I re-played that I actually finished again (with mods) as it felt far less clunky than even some games only 10 years old.