I've taken other reviews here into consideration, and that said, am partly responding to them, based on my own experience outside of gaming. First, the writing. I've got actual experience in proofreading, editing, and writing. I noted a few mistakes here and there, but IMHO, they didn't seem show-stopping. Indeed, much of the team consists of static characters- *especially* Duncan Wu as previously noted. But besides Racter and Gaichu, I think some of of the minor NPCs were interesting, e.g., Ten-Armed Ambrose. (I actually know people much like him.) Really, though, I think some of the real gems were in the Shadowland BBS-- I'm actually old enough to remember the old subculture. Speaking of that... The Matrix overhaul I liked- I've dabbled a bit in coding, scripting, and programming, and I have a few hacker friends. I say that because I know it's hard to represent that world without losing gamers that aren't savvy about it. If this wasn't fixed isometric perspective (i.e., isometric 3D, like Witcher series), yes, sneaking would be easier. But I thought it was closer to hacker flavor than HBS's previous setup. What I was VERY surprised other reviewers missed was the additional Adept weapons. I actually started with Returns, playing a Physical Adept, and wondered why there was so much lack in the way of hand-to-hand weapons. When I got to Dragonfall, I took the well-worn route of the gun-based Street Samurai. I haven't played an Adept in HK yet, but did note there were a lot more weapon choices dependent on Qi Casting- especially the "Blood Calls To Blood"- essentially, vampiric spiked knuckles. I may make an addendum after spending some time playing an Adept again. One last thing- in-game support for User Generated Content seems to be better. Cirion/seberin (of the Antumbra Saga) is back with another UGC mod... UGC can be hit-or-miss, but I recommend you check his stuff out.
I know the current generation of gamers really like to play with digital gamepads, but I appreciate the customized keyboard controls, for use with arcade joystick controls (like X-Arcade). Since the switches are all mapped out to the keyboard, I just cleared out the assigned keystrokes and operated my X-Arcade controller to set the buttons and joystick to the corresponding key maps. Since sensitivity can be adjusted as well, the game plays well enough, IMHO, with analog controls. The controller is industry-standard, more or less, so my keyboard doesn't need to take such a beating (and will last longer than most gamepads).
