I was a big fan of both of the previous Shadowrun games so it’s no surprise that I backed their Kickstarter campaign for this. It’s kind of hard to believe that it’s been two years since the first one. As its title makes clear, this one takes you to Hong Kong under the premise that you’re a native of Seattle who travels to the city-state in search of your adopted father.

Recall how I mentioned that Dragonfall was leaps and bounds ahead of the first game? Well Hong Kong is pretty much identical with Dragonfall. There are some minor tweaks to the mechanics but the only really big change is greatly expanded gameplay for the Matrix. There’s now a real-time stealth game that allows you greatly minimize Matrix combat if you’re good at it, plus a pattern-matching mini-game for hacking. Many people seem to hate these changes but I rather like them even if perfecting a stealth run can get frustrating and repetitive.

Another clear win over the previous iteration is that your NPC companions are better-written and consequently more interesting. There is a ton of story in this game, so much so that some people are complaining about this being more like a visual novel than an RPG. Not me though as I really enjoyed how every character, including all of the vendors in the hub area, has a significant backstory and your team members has new things to say after each mission. The NPCs also have pretty unusual special abilities that make them rather unique to play, abilities that you can’t replicate through normal character generation.

Unfortunately I have to say despite these two improvements, Hong Kong is slightly inferior to Dragonfall. There are some good missions in here. I especially enjoyed attending Deck Con as part of Is0bel’s mission and they did a reasonable job in ensuring that not every run amounts to breaking into a corporate facility to steal something. But the missions in Dragonfall are just better overall. Even the main story here lacks the tension, sense of discovery and epic feeling of the previous game. When they talked about a typhoon hitting Hong Kong, I was looking forward to it really shaking things up but it turned out to be just a bit of background flavor. This game clearly tries to copy Dragonfall in some ways but it just can’t measure up. Controlling a cyber-zombie was way more awesome than controlling a vampire. I’m especially disappointed that Josephine Tsang is the primary antagonist but we never get a real confrontation with her. Having Raymond have one last conversation with her would have provided a very satisfying sense of closure.

Even stranger is that the fights this time around are substantially easier. This is basically a cake-walk even at hard difficulty. Perhaps this is partly a consequence of having so many methods to bypass combat provided you have the right skills. Many of the missions turn to only have one big fight or even none of all. Once you know how little combat there is, you can trivialize the fight by liberally using consumables. They really should have ramped up the number and quality of enemies to compensate for the many more ways of bypassing combat. Another way to increase difficulty and improve the fun factor of combat would be to program enemy AI that is actually effective. The dumbness of the AI is especially evident when you ally with another team of Shadowrunners who basically do nothing.

Finally, I was very disappointed with the large number of annoying bugs. As I write this, a major new patch was released so many of the problems I encountered may already have been fixed. These included strange animation errors, having the power to control enemy spirits also control the enemy shaman, mission objectives not updating correctly and so forth. I had to replay a long fight due to a bug as it wouldn’t end because an enemy shaman had become neutral. I was also unable to speak to Gaichu at the end of the game because he wouldn’t go back to his room after the team meeting. Other things may not be bugs but feel like omissions. The conversation tree with Crafty doesn’t seem to have a satisfying ending and Spider Shen doesn’t have anything interesting at the end of the game. I’m also peeved that you learn nothing about the mysterious benefactor. Presumably that will be the subject of the upcoming free mini-campaign.

I loved Dragonfall and I still love Hong Kong despite it being not quite as good. Still, I’m onboard for the mini-campaign but I can’t see myself buying a big new game unless it’s made with a completely new engine. It’s in sore need of a completely revamped user interface and much better technology. The loading times in this game are awful and a real turn-off, apparently because the engine can’t handle saving the states of levels so the whole run has to be loaded into memory as a single huge level. Plus as many people have pointed out, it’s very silly to have the conversation window on the right side of the screen instead of in the middle. I know that Harebrained is working on BattleTech next but this revival of Shadowrun has been so successful that I can’t see them giving up on it. I look forward to seeing a better, shinier version of this style of RPG.