This post covers the mini-campaign that was included in the Extended Edition of Shadowrun: Hong Kong. This was released for free to all owners of the original game and was one of the KickStarter campaign’s bonus goals. In the event, the release passed almost without notice. Even now, there doesn’t seem to be any walkthrough or guide for it on the net, which is pretty remarkable given that there’s a guide for every little game out there. Still, it’s free and there are Steam achievements for it so I had to play it.
Shadows of Hong Kong picks up shortly after the events of the main campaign and requires that a save from the end of the game to be imported. It offers only two main missions (three if you count the very short excursion that the game starts with in media res) and two side missions. You have exactly the same companions as before and the game is too short to allow your characters to improve in any meaningful way. My rigger character for example didn’t get any new drones so I just dumped the extra Karma in Charisma for more etiquettes. It’s actually kind of cool that the group thinks of themselves as total badasses. After all, once you’ve taken on a literal god, what else could faze you?
It turns out that the answer here is cops. Lots of them, possibly all of the cops in Hong Kong. One loose thread from the main game is that you never got a chance to get back at Krait, the Hong Kong SDU commander who gives you grief over the whole game. So this time, she gets to be the big bad. The enemies aren’t any harder than before but there sure are a whole lot of them and the game ups the difficulty level by imposing some very nasty time limits on many of the key fights. I got frustrated a few times at having to fight many of these big battles several times because I wasn’t sure about the things that I needed to do before the time limit.
The overall quality of the game is kind of meh. I spotted at least a couple of bugs (missing inventory icon, dialogue trees that are repeated etc.) There’s just very little point to many of the interactions. You can talk to some of the police officers on your side and there’s no plot development there, just fluff. You visit a heavily armed battle barge but there’s nothing to actually do there. Even the writing is odd. Your job is ultimately to get evidence against Krait but the game begins with her gunning down civilians in cold blood. If that’s not bad enough, what kind of evidence would be enough to hang her? The overall impression is that even the development team is getting bored of the whole thing and just wants to get this obligation out of the way. It’s decent if you really want more Shadowrun but it’s nothing to write home about.
