Reviews and Thoughts on Shadowrun: Hong Kong (Spoilers within)

[Blackadar]

Having completed S:HK, I figure it was time to share Wot I Think about the game.

Game Length: About 12 hours and that included every mission I found but one.

It's easy to start this review. If someone liked the other games, they'll probably like this one. It has the same music style. Same art style. Same character leveling. Same skills. Same gameplay. It's basically the same game with a different story. As such, you could easily call this a new DLC adventure of Shadowrun: Dragonfall. So that's the basic recommendation - if you like the others, you should buy this. I did and I enjoyed it. Somewhat...and that's the kicker.

I'm not nearly as happy with this game as with the past games and I know why:

Empty
Derivative
Disjointed
PCs and NPCs
The Matrix


Empty: Tthe maps appear to be bigger. They're lovingly created and visually appealing. I've always loved the art style in this game. But they often feel empty and underutilized. There's very little compelling content that rewards you from straying the least little bit from your course. There are no quests off the beaten path, no interesing rabbit holes to fall down into.

Derivative: The game and story are entirely derivative. It's impossible to play this and not feel like you've played this before multiple times. FAs I said above, it's bascially the same game with a different story. But even the story isn't all that different - you run into a problem, watch someone get killed in the opening adventure, end up working for a broker who feeds you jobs, interact with the same computer terminal, do the jobs and finally advance the story. It's Dragonfall's premise all over again.

Disjointed: Unlike Dragonfall, where the above quest-system made great sense, this is a wasted opporutunity. Instead of nibbling around the main plot line by facing some weird incidents to build tension towards the final climax, you're off on entirely unrelated missions that aren't all that interesting. As I said, this made sense in Dragonfall because you had to make bank to advance the plot line. Here, they're just something to do for a while. So the plot is very disjointed. You go to the Walled City early and then never again until the final battle. The plot about dear old Dad isn't all that interesting and doesn't even make all that much sen sense. The denouement attempts to explain it, but by that time it's far too late. Missing Dad is just a plot device and an illogical one at that. So the missions and the mission structure are a massively WASTED opportunity to bring a more cohesive adventure to the story.

PCs and NPCs: The ghoul was a nice touch. The others...forgettable. Your brother? Annoying. The NPCs here really took a step back and weren't all that interesting. And there's still no control of their leveling. The specials are an attempt to give you some control, but frankly they're not all that great or that useful. I'd much rather have the ability to shape my party the way I saw fit. And it didn't help that my character - a sword-wielding street Samurai - happened to be the same exact type as the only interesting NPC out there. As for the player character, I didn't see how any of their responses would have changed the story much if at all (with the exception of keeping the vampire girl alive). In short, the PC doesn't matter except to be the wall that everything bounces off. When will HBS learn that the best stories often have the PC to go through a journey and not just move through the story without impactng it?

The Matrix: The gameplay in the matrix is still incredibly annoying. Even more this time with their "Simon Says" hacking game and the overall detection meter. It's not fun and it's not interesting at all. It sucks. I finally started using the deathray cheat to make it through these parts. And at times you simply can not avoid it. It's terrible and HBS should entirely dump the systems and start over there because they're making it worse, not better.


Again, it's not that it's a bad game. I'll give it a thumbs up review. But as for Kickstarting the next one in this series or buying it at full price? I'd have to see some genuine advancement in gameplay, strategy and story telling before ponying up dough again because I feel like I'm playing the same game over and over again - especially when this version isn't as good as the last one.

Verdict: A tepid thumbs up. Very tepid.

[djscrewhead]

Beat my first playthrough at around 22h according to Steam, but a good 4-5 hours of that was re-loading previous checkpoints/saves trying to figure out where some game-breaking bugs came from.

Apart from a few game-breaking bugs that needed to be worked around, I thought I'd done everything but now that I'm looking at the Steam community posts, I see that I missed a fair amount of side missions that I'm going to have to re-start to play through again.

The story itself is good, but I can't help but feel it's a step down from Dragonfall. Obviously some minor spoilers follow, but I'm going to keep things as vague as possible:
Whereas in Dragonfall, you had to do things to push the story along; go talk to a guy to get a DVD player, find someone to restore some discs, go through said discs and have a conversation with your group about what was going on, etc..

In SR:HK, there's an NPC that gets introduced fairly early on that, for all intents and purposes, reminds me of newbie GMs. You talk to her, she tells you she'll look into it, and then after a mission or two she calls you over, tells you what she found out, and then pushes you onto the next leg of your mission. All you really do in SR:HK is work as a Shadowrunner while this one NPC does all the research and just tells you what's going on and points you where you need to go next. The story doesn't feel as personal, and it doesn't feel as if your whole "crew" is in on everything.

Like I said, it all feels like a very noob GM explaining everything to you because they don't know how to incorporate you into the main storyline. The NPC gives you your missions to do in whatever order you please, and every few missions just tells you "Oh by the way I found this out so here's another mission to do when you're up to it". Even though this story should be even MORE personal than Dragonfall, it kind of leaves you feeling like your choices and decisions don't really matter.. Kind of like the first Indiana Jones movie, where really he was completely inconsequential to the plot, and if you'd have removed Indy from the movie, it would have played out almost exactly like it did with him in it.

It's not bad, but it really didn't feel as engaging as Dragonfall, or even Dead Man's Switch. Technically, bugs aside, the game is really well put together and fun to play, but out of the three Shadowrun games, this is probably the one with the weakest story, and with the way they left a couple of plot bits dangling, it really feels like they're setting themselves up to release another Director's Cut.

Game-breaking bug I ran into: couldn't get out of combat on the "top"/3rd floor of the "Prosperity Tower" run. From reading the forum it looks like it was probably a stray shot that hit 2 barrels and didn't blow them up, which somehow made them count as "hostile enemies" on the floor that hadn't been eliminated, so I could never take the elevator off and restarted the mission at least 4 times.

Non-gamebreaking but odd and making me have to do another playthrough soon: for some reason I didn't get any option to talk to my "crew" outside of runs. I thought that HBS took a huge step back by getting rid of your crew's personal side/back stories and personal quests, but it looks like they're in the game, so I guess I'm gonna start a new one and hope I can access my crew's missions.

Other odd bug: I killed the ghoul that can join you when investigating the murder of the elders, and for some reason he was available to me on the final run through the WC, despite being, you know, dead, and having absolutely no skills other than what I imagine is the one sword swipe he starts with and his claw attack (since he was DEAD and didn't level with the party on account of rigor mortis).