I'll tell you why I didn't like HR.

1) It was fantasy. It felt like fantasy. Never at one time in that game did it feel like I was in the real world or talking to real people I may meet on the streets. In DX, you felt like your world was in utter chaos and turmoil. In this, you feel like you are on a different planet, and so it loses a lot of its gravity. Also, the world is not just so foreign, but so unlikely and bizarre (even the way people dress) that you have a hard time imagining that it could exist on another planet.

2) It lacked all subtlety. If they want to portray something, they put it in massive red letters and smash it into your face. The real world is not like that. DX was not like that. Often times DX never told you who was right and who was wrong, and fans would argue about that later. It was not narrated to the player. HR assumes that you have the intellect of a 2 year old though.

3) It lacked all realism. DX was about a probably reality, and kept its world, its people, its style, its weapons, etc. as realistic as possible. Even the fantastical elements such as augs they tried to explain in a realistic and plausible way (and did a really good job too). HR was absurd in its characters, absurd in its style, absurd in its weapons, etc etc. No real attempt was made at realism, and everything was fantastical and exaggerated. (even the human proportions on many bad guys) Fantasy is one thing, but it has to be plausible fantasy. HR (which considering the dates in which the story takes place, should have been even more tied to reality) is not plausible at all.

4) The texts and conversations in the game were naive and stupid. Everything from the blinding you with the obvious conversations to the weapon mod descriptions which demonstrated an incredible lack of scientific knowledge. DX was full of philosophical enlightening and technologically plausible conversations and texts. You could learn a lot just by playing the game. HR was just a big, stupid, popular political message excused as a game. No intelligence went into its design, and you could end up stupider for playing it instead of smarter.

5) It did not fit the DX universe at all. Not only was the style and architecture absurdly implausible for something that soon before DX (funny you never see ruins of buildings like those in DX, and that robot and mech tech only got worse), but the storyline did not fit at all. If you are making something that does not feel or look like DX AT ALL, and that does not fit its storyline, what right do you have to call it DX? It was a new game, and they needed to do their own thing. I get that. There was plenty they could have done, however, that was in the framework of what was describe in DX as happening in that time-frame and that did not contradict the DX storyline or make it seem implausible. It just wasn't part of DX. They should have named it something different and just marketed it was their own game. Heck, they could have even said it was inspired by DX if they wanted to and left it relatively unchanged!

6) I could go on and on, but to be quite honest, the game is simply not worth be devoting this much time to. It is not a game in the spirit of DX. Lots of good games have had good sequels that I have enjoyed. They were new. They were not carbon copies of the old games, but they also did not throw the old games out the window, nor were they geared toward the lowest common denominator in society. HR was a prequel that was not worthy of the DX series (the DX series being, IMHO, DX. HR and IW don't even count, because the both were garbage).