There is an expansion to this game called "Sorcerer King Rivals" that is sold as a completely standalone game... i.e. this game with the expansion pre-installed along with it. As of the time I am writing this, if you were unlucky enough to purchase this game, the only way to get the expansion is to purchase the full version again, with an additional cost thrown on top for the expansion content. There is NO OPTION TO UPGRADE from this version to the expansion at this time. That said... Pros: - Solid 4x lite for when you want to build cities and tech trees but you don't want the depth of a Civ VI - Reasonably decent storyline that never takes itself very seriously - Solid graphics and music for the price Cons: - Random (if somewhat rare) crashes due to an old, apparently unresolved memory leak - Huge array of craftable weapons wasted since VERY few available units are able to equip them - A variety of bizarre timing bugs come up when overlapping certain hero abilities with eachother - Similar issues also arise from combinations with certain Sovereigns' abilities
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.
