Shadowrun: Hong Kong (PC)
Let me start this short unofficial review by saying that I really wanted to give this game a thumbs up, because I loved Shadowrun: Dragonfall so much. However, Hong Kong does not deliver and we need to be honest about it. I am not sure what changed in the development of this game, but the final result feels rushed and unfinished. In fact, after just 24 hours into the game I was so disappointed and bored that I could not even bring myself to finish it.
The trailer features graphical improvements as well as a cutscene with a voice over, so I was really hoping Harebrained Schemes is improving on the excellent foundation of Dragonfall. Unfortunately, I was wrong.
The good
I won't be doing a full review, because I have not yet finished the game and I will be waiting for Director's Cut which will hopefully fix most of the issues, so this will just be a short discussion about what was improved and what went wrong. To be perfectly clear - there is a good foundation in Hong Kong with many improvements and I would be intelectually dishonest if I didn't give praise where it is deserved. Namely, the game now begins with an actual cutscene and some voice overs, the character creation screen allows for some neat roleplaying options such as choosing your name, last name and street name (something the previous games lacked), the interface has been slightly improved with some new options like the ability to position your squad before combat begins, the animations and graphics look a bit nicer, the music is slightly better in my opinion, and finally the cyberspace part now features both sneaking and actual hacking.
Everything in the game looks familiar, but nicer. To my great disappointment, nicer does not translate to better.
The bad
Unfortunately, despite all the improvements I just mentioned, everything else in Shadowrun: Hong Kong is a mess. The first alarm kicked off as soon as I began reading the text. Namely, right from the start I began noticing errors, missing words and letters, to the point where it seems that nobody bothered to run this through a simple "Word" spell checker. Now, you might be thinking that this is nothing more than nitpicking, but the dialogues in general are horribly written. Most characters in the game seem to talk for no other reason than to make the game feel longer and they bring nothing of value to the table. This stands in stark contrast with Dragonfall, where the dialogues are superbly written! I mean, when the local blacksmith in Hong Kong greets me with 3 pages of text describing how he is sharpening a sword and where he learned the craft, the game is just wasting my time. I have not learned anything of value about that blacksmith, I have not learned anything about his character, I have not received a quest, I have not learned anything of importance to the story, and all of it is nothing more than fluff... And this wouldn't be such a problem if it wasn't a regular occurence for almost every character in the game. After playing Hong Kong for 24.4 hours, I noticed that 70% of the game is just reading these hollow meaningless walls of text, followed by often uninspired and short missions where you will again spend 70% of your time just talking about things that don't matter.
The new hacking mini-game
Furthermore, there are bugs in combat where the character just glides in the air instead of showing proper running animations, the combat does not feel as engaging, the dialogue trees are broken with certain options disappearing for no apparent reason and most of the characters you meet are bland and boring. They certainly don't express their opinions as vocally as in Dragonfall, their backstories are presented in generic and uninspiring manner, while the story takes a long artificial pause after entering the main hub. Where in Dragonfall you are doing missions to gather money with a clear goal of buying some very expensive information, in Hong Kong you are doing missions for no other reason than to pass time for story to progress.
Conclusion
The game is broken and unfinished. It almost feels like there was more content planned and that the developers ran out of time. Makes me really sad, because I actually loved the general direction of the story. Hopefully they are planning to release a Director's Cut which will iron out all the bugs, flesh out the characters and rewrite the dialogues so that they actually lead to something. You can't have bad writing if writing is the crux of your game.
