So I haven’t played Dragonfall, which I’ve been lead to believe is the Shadowrun to really take in if you want the premier modern experience of the setting, and I from what I’ve heard, Hong Kong flies a bit more turbulently for people when they play it in the sequence of release. It’s possible that my general positivity on the game will be due in part to having it not fare in comparison to SR: DF, but I think if one’s approach to comparative criticism leads to sinking ships across the board, especially when two works are in sequence/concert and not in competition or replacement, then the process of arriving at one’s point is leaden. Hong Kong works as a series of barely associated concentric processes, feeding into each other with a good deal of success while having a bit of difficulty propping up each other. This appears in the obvious form of many economic elements within the game being nullified due to a, pretty egregiously, uninformed choice about playstyle at the beginning of the game; I played as an all the way sniper/shotgun street samurai, and with that choice, I rendered about 70% of the NPCs in the game’s hub useless. There is flavour to be had in the conversations players can dig into with these shopkeeps, but due to the narrative mechanics of the game having such a minor degree of overlap with the progression mechanics of the game, which are nearly exclusively delivered via combat or combat avoidance, the flavour of the game does little to promote itself outside of the immediate party members available for use in those combat parts of the game. Etiquette’s try to integrate dialogue into the game, but because of their simplistic binary status as efficacious promotions in at any moment - in contrast to say the roadway lead to lamppost approach of the non-combat dialogue possibilities in Torment, where you had to use the complete toolset of the game to carve open a path external to the obvious route so as to allow convincing to take place and cement that path’s alternative within dialogue - the dialogue merely becomes a displaced combat verb, one which is essentially a skill that reads ‘non-lethally dispatch all enemies’. It’s a shame that there is less necessity of the dialogue on the rest of the mechanics, which are, of course, themselves disassociated with the text portions of play in HK, because it’s typically well written and excellently edited prose. It doesn’t assume grandiosity that, if done poorly, can sink a game as quickly as elevate it, but remains squarely in the sphere of plainspoken pathos, the same kind of sparse and unpretentious dialogue and description you might find in the best kind of genre fiction: Le Guin’s Dispossessed or Ishiguro’s Green Giant. The world is degraded from the wild intermixing of elevated prose description of dreamlike strata intermingling a stream of consciousness dizziness; the world is a series of reticulated possibilities, and the style reflects that. There is depth to the characters and the setting, but they are debted to the effectiveness of the run, if only in presence and not in actual use.

The minute to minute XCOM-lite combat is about as stripped down as this system can get, and as has been stated by many reviewers, very easily stretched to absurd simplicity. By the time I was about 2/3rds of the way through the game, I was taking out 2-3 enemies per turn with only my PC, and the rest of the squad wasn’t shabbily either. There is satisfaction in the progression from cowering behind cover to beheading behemoths of corporate providence from 100m away with a sniper rifle, but at least in part because of the modality of play swapping back and forth, as well as the budget constraints on system’s design, it wears its welcome out pretty quickly. At a certain point, because the ceiling for all the various builds are low, and because of the constrained breadth of combat possibility, unlike that in XCOM or DOS2, it is hard not to see the various verbs reduce to differently coloured kill buttons. Luckily 20 hours keeps this from becoming a dragged out and woozy affair, allowing only just a bit too much revelry of the overpowered nature of play to stay on board, but nonetheless, it is something that for last 5 missions felt like a was tapping through to get back to talk to all my little boat babies.

I might add a bit more on this log once I play Dragonfall, just so that I can comment on how the system’s and setting are unique in their own ways, but as far as CRPGs go, in isolation, HK is a safe bet for fans of the genre.

Improves on the gameplay of Returns and Dragonfall Directors Cut, better cyberware, you can give companions items (even over their locked ones). Great writing and characters, especially Gaichuu, Racter, and Ambrose. You can start combat but only if enemies are nearby and are known to be hostile, seems to be kind of buggy and not that useful but it's better than nothing. More spell options but magic still isn't too interesting, decking is also improved but still not enjoyable or a good representation of the matrix.

Doesn't give necessary info on purchases or skills. For example you might be able to choose between one of two abilities for your companions but one of them doesn't tell you the AP cost of the ability. You might want to buy a new drone but it won't tell you what skills the drone has forcing you to buy each of the four one at a time, go into a mission, and then get into a fight to see. You might want to buy a new spell, drone, weapon, etc for a companion but some of those have skill requirements and you can only check your companions skills when going into or during a mission. You also can't change your companion's items until you load into a mission, even though the selection screen before a mission shows you everyone's inventory you can not make changes until the level loads and it brings up the inventory screen again.

There were a lot of bugs in the game back when I played it, I know that some have been fixed, at the time some of the bugs I had that should be fixed now include characters unlocking a new item but the devs forgot to put it in the game, upgrading a characters ability and then that ability disappears, conversation options not working.

It's a well written game with great characters and a great setting whose combat and upgrading mechanics can't quiet match the rest.

I still really enjoyed the game because most of it is just reading and interacting with the world while being able to take non combat focused approaches, but the actual combat gameplay is still poor and so easy that combat is basically just a waste of time that never really makes for a good representation of Shadowrun.

A very fun turn based tactical RPG with a compelling story and a rich unique world. The only thing stopping this game from being a full 4 stars is all the unfixed bugs. People who know me know that bugs are the least of my complaints usually, but when they prevent me from progressing in the game, it kinda matters. Considering this game came out in 2015, these kind of bugs should be eradicated. Obviously they just left them in. With that said, everything else about the game is a great time. Yes, it feels a big old school, but I don't see the issue with that.

I do recommend this game if you like good narratives and tactical RPGs like me.

This is my first Shadowrun game, so I can't compare it to the others (yet... going to play Dragonfall next). I saw this was set in Hong Kong, and thought it might be fun to play a game set in Asia.

The game starts off really strong. The story is intriguing, the characters are wonderful, and the music is solid. I had a lot of fun doing the missions and then talking to everyone in Heoi after each run. The combat is nothing crazy, but it's satisfying enough.

Unfortunately, several missions in, the dialogue runs dry. Some NPCs in Heoi quickly have nothing to say, while others take a bit longer to run out of lines. But they all do eventually, and it really makes the game feel dead when previously there was so much content. It truly made the world suddenly feel empty.

Even worse is Shadows of Hong Kong, the DLC. I tried my best to force myself to play it. There are spelling errors and many bugs, making it feel very low quality compared to the main game. I had to drop it at this point.

Overall, I think Shadowrun: Hong Kong is worth playing for its good points. It's an interesting, story-intensive game. The characters are probably its strongest point. I don't think the DLC is worth bothering with, though.

Homeopathic Dragonfall.

That above line is a bit extreme, and I don't think that I really mean it. But I was writing out my thoughts on Hong Kong, and those words found themselves on the page. I don't hate Hong Kong by any means — if anything, it's more of what I already like — but the magic was lost on me, here. I missed the connections I had with the old crew, the NPCs strewn throughout the Kreuzbasar. Hong Kong is cold, and brutal, and awful. I didn't want to be in the world of Hong Kong the way I did in Dragonfall. I wanted to escape it.

And that was the point.

Berlin was the city of dreams. Kowloon is the city of nightmares.

This is a crew brought and stuck together through little more than necessity. You're drawing alliances between manic pixie girls, psychopathic drone operators (but I repeat myself), flesh-eating samurai, and gamers. Kindly Cheng is an immensely strong character, acting almost as the polar opposite of Dragonfall's Paul Amsel; stony, ruthless, sadistic, operating in all of her ferocity because she has to. Your party feels a bit less organic — more unique, less real — like something that you and your friends would all collectively come up with if you ran a tabletop campaign together. This is most likely going to be the tipping point that determines whether this is your favorite entry in the series, or if it's second place; if you thought your party in Dragonfall felt too soft, Hong Kong agrees.

Hong Kong is still built off the back of the previous two entries, which means it's mechanically almost identical to what those games did. There are expansions and tweaks to factors like leveling and magic that provide a few more options and quality of life improvements. These are harder to notice if you're not actively looking for them, but that's probably the ideal way of balancing a game. This is probably the best-feeling world to actually interact with in the series.

The most notable and obvious change is in the way that decking gameplay has changed; it's less of a secondary combat operating below the current combat layer, and more of a slow stealth-puzzle segment. I'm not really a fan of this change, because it makes it a little tougher to carelessly brute-force your way through your hacks; deckers have it bad in all three of these games, and this was Harebrained's attempt at making it less awful. I don't think it worked, but keeping Dragonfall's mechanics here wouldn't have been much better.

I couldn't manage to feel the same attachment to any of these characters that I did when I went through Dragonfall. I did still like them, of course — Rachter and Kindly Cheng being completely, unapologetically awful is kind of refreshing — but there was something about them as a collective that felt artificial. Is0bel's entire DeckCon sequence is silly in a way that didn't make me laugh, and Gobbet is a little too monkey cheese random for my tastes. I can't manage to remember much of anything about Duncan. It didn't really feel as though all of the discord among the cast gets resolved in a satisfying way, though I imagine that's a hefty appeal for those who didn't like how quickly you gained buddies in the prior entry.

It is, however, immensely gratifying to be rewarded so strongly in the final act for your attentiveness up until that point. Getting what I believe to be the best ending requires you put a significant amount of care into studying every little facet of this world, and it demands that you show the game some respect if you want a happy outcome. You can rules-lawyer the final boss as though you're the most annoying guy at the table, and it works. It's great.

Much less great is the Shadows of Hong Kong expansion that follows the ending, and was riddled with bugs, spelling mistakes, and a second ending that offers a complete non-choice which allows you to throw out all of the development of every character in the interest of going back to a blank slate. Fucking flimsy. It reeks of being the mandatory Kickstarter stretch goal that it was, and it's best skipped over lest you want to sour your memories of the game in the eleventh hour.

Hong Kong is a game that needed to be different, and it was. Shadowrun Returns is like the family member that we don't talk about during the holidays, so Dragonfall got to skirt by as a literal expansion to that game. Hong Kong is a proper sequel, which meant things needed to be fresh, lest Harebrained be accused of self-plagiarism. I can respect the way in which they shook things up, but I still think that Dragonfall sticks the stronger formula of the two. I haven't stopped comparing Hong Kong to Dragonfall since I started writing this, and I feel a little bad about that. But it's an inevitable comparison when you look at them side-by-side, and one that I can't really bring myself to gloss over.

This was the last good thing that Harebrained ever made.

I really liked this! Cool world, fun CRPG gameplay.

Stopped playing when I went on holiday and have no interest in going back

is that a good review? Yes, no, dunno mate

i think "wow, cool robot" is apt descriptor for my experience with this game, because despite it being about a capitalist dystopian hellhole, it makes me feel at home. i'm a huge sucker for isometric rpgs, cool home bases, and rag-tag found family party dynamics. i just love being in the world of srhk, and suggest everyone check it out.
big caveat: the dlc expansion is GARBO. totally sucks. it has some fun moments, but it flushes the story of the main game down the toilet, and the combat encounters are Awful. if you rly like the main game, maybe check out the dlc like, a month after playing when the high's worn off.