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.