If I were to give this a score, it would be like a 7/10, maybe a 6.5/10 if I were feeling particularly miserly. And I don't mean to damn the issue with faint praise, because I thought it was fine even though my usual issues with Hickman's writing were still present. But of the big issues I had with the comic, 90% of them have exactly nothing to do with Mr. Hickman, which may be surprising coming from me.
The comic really shows how poisonous decompressed comics have become as a trend, because there was absolutely no reason why this and HoX #3 should be two separate issues. In addition to being a massive ripoff, in that I shouldn't have to pay $10-12 for you to make a singular point (suicide mission means suicide mission, no matter the timeline or lifetime), it actually blunts the effectiveness of the overall event. If this would have been just one issue, where they plan the mission only for it to go pear shaped with the suicide bombing, then spent the rest of the issue scrambling to finish the mission and failing to get out alive, I would have appreciated it a lot more as a complete statement. As it is, I'm just left a little cold by it, and not because Hickman is a flawed writer of emotionally engaging stories or because of my massive "hated and feared" fatigue. Separating this into two issues really kills the pacing for me, which I think is really key for this issue hitting (or not hitting) home.
Also, I really wish they hadn't released the solicits for the new series so this had more weight. Since we know they're not really dead dead, it just feels like a pit stop in the story instead of a real event of significance (an actual problem with Hickman's writing, but I'm again putting more of the blame on editorial and con culture in general here). Yes, we can be reasonably sure that the Cyclops and Marvel Girl we'll be dealing with in X-Men are either from another "lifetime" or (more likely) the pod mutants we saw in HoX #1, but preserve the drama a little bit, please.
What was there wasn't bad at all, though. Nice little parallel with the PoX #3-4 suicide run (as well as the original X-Men dystopian suicide run, Uncanny X-Men 141-142), and Larraz is a really fantastic artist to put on this series. Also, as much as I hate the data pages, the final insert was very well done.
Again, I did not hate the issue at all, and thought it was quite well done at points (I honestly may have given this a 10 if Scott had just spit in Mr. Gregor's face after her spiel regarding her husband. You're trying to exterminate all of mutantkind and you're worries about one person who chose to die? Myopia is something else...). But it really encapsulates many of my problems with comic book publishing these days.