Shadowrun Hong Kong - Extended Edition

If you REALLY liked the first two games, this one's certainly worth a play. If you just want to experience the best of the series, though, give this one a pass and pick up Dragonfall instead... it's still the best in the series. As others have mentioned the decisions in "Shadowrun: Hong Kong" are too straightforward, with little to no meaningful reason to choose the less obvious route in the two situations where an actual decision must be made. Your character's elevation from inexperienced outsider with a weird accent and no familiarity with the local customs to leader of a crew of "heavy hitters" is too meteoric to be terribly interesting. Also, Is0bel (the decker) is painfully boring, and Wu (the street samurai) is even more painfully underdeveloped. The biggest downside for me, however, is how all the dialogue and storyline is piled in between your earliest missions, such that it is possible, if not probable, to blow through all the optional dialogue and side stories between roughly the first 2/3 of the missions, leaving virtually no storyline progression during the last several runs. All of that said, the desperately needed Matrix overhaul was VERY well done... I felt none of the eye roll inducing tedium of the first two installments' versions... and the new Cyber Affinity tree presents a very enjoyable new character build as well as providing flexibility for more interesting variants on min-max purist archetypal characters. If your preferred party makeup includes Gaichu (melee street sam) or Racter (rigger) they are exceptionally complex and well written characters.

The latest installment of Shadowrun smacks of the Hollywood treatment: seems like more time and care has been placed in the visuals and less in writing and quality control. The plot is kind of meh, the writing is flat and there are a lot of grammatical errors, which frankly caught me off guard: the least I expect from any game is a basic grasp of the language. Overall, it is hard to believe that this game was made by the same folks that brought us Dragonfall. As I spent money on it, I will finish it once. But then it's back to Berlin.

I loved returns and DragonFall. I got Hong Kong with hesitation because of almost unanimous veredicts telling that Dragonfall was way better. Well, no. This game has objectively: 1) Graphic improvements: there's some overlaying scenery that looks great. Map art is also better than previous 2) Minor gameplay improvements: npcs skills, better UI, more items and tweaks 3) Major gameplay improvements: Virtual battles are fun now. They were terrible in previous titles. 4) Music is , simply put, done from better talents. It is true that the story is not as novel, and the characters are not as impactful as Dragonfall but, they are not bad. In fact, the story telling is not necesarily worse than the previous games: it's less exhaustive, This last point together with the previous improvement list made me go through the game faster; it's just so smooth. If I would play only one title of this series it would be no doubt be this one.

Bottom line: If you haven't played Dragonfall, play Dragonfall first. If you really liked Dragonfall, you'll probably be able to look past this game's flaws. Shadow Run:Hong Kong basically does everything right that previous Shadowrun games did. It has great writing in a unique setting (punctuated by interesting choices), solid turn-based combat, and a bunch of gameplay options that let you approach levels in a variety of ways. The new setting is skillfully woven into the story and helps set the narrative apart from previous Shadowrun games. However, SR:HK tries improve on the formula with systems that tragically seem half-baked. For example, Matrix combat has been reworked to use some stealth game mechanics and different sorts of hacking minigames. It's interesting, but feels incompletely implemented. The alarm decrease ability from the previous game is present, but can only be used in the rare "combat" sections, completely surrendering your character's turn. The new design never really captures the same sort of tense interrelated matrix and meatspace combat of the predecessors, which is a shame. Another poorly realized idea was the promise of tying earlier choices/alliances into later quests. It sounds awesome in theory, but I always found the payoffs underwhelming (and narratively forced). This game also feels less polished than Dragonfall, with shopkeepers repeating long-winded introductions (as if you never talked to them before), a few rushed story points, and some buggy (but not game breaking) hijinks with abilities. These little blemishes add up, and while I still found SR:HK enjoyable, it definitely falls short of its predecessor.

This is my first experience with anything Shadowrun-related, so I was a little skeptical going in. But I love isometric RPGs, especially when the story and characters are interesting. The story and characters in this are great, and the writing is really, really good for a video game. And what I've seen of the Shadowrun world makes me want more, so there's that.