It opens with the player character flying into Hong Kong to meet with their foster-father to discuss some undisclosed personal business of earth-shattering importance – so important, in fact, that the meeting is rudely gatecrashed by corrupt members of the Hong Kong Police Force, who promptly kill both your foster father and half of the mercenary shadowrunner team he’d hired to escort you both into Kowloon Walled City. It *does* put them in the unfortunate situation of having to do the same trick twice here, though, and the problem with repetition is that your audience tends to have a lot more opportunity to spot the flaws in how it’s done. This admirable refusal to allow their projects to suffer any significant scope creep is why Harebrained are pretty much the only Kickstarter developer who delivers their games on time, and it’s why I’ll continue to give those Kickstarters money where I wouldn’t with (for example) Larian, or the Banner Saga guys. It was built for easily adding new content that used the existing mechanics - which is why they’ve managed to crank out three games in three years - and substantially changing those mechanics would add too much programming overhead. Second, they’ve pushed the initially-awkward Shadowrun engine a long way in two years, but it imposes some inherent limitations on what they can do with the game. First, Dragonfall was critically acclaimed by pretty much everyone who played it, and so they’re sticking with what they know works. I do understand why Harebrained have done this. And while I feel like it’s a little harsh to tar Hong Kong with the “more of the same” brush, there is no getting around the uncomfortable fact that it is true in this case: if you leave aside the tonal and stylistic changes (which are a pretty big thing to leave aside, to be fair), Shadowrun Hong Kong is, somewhat disappointingly, an almost point-for-point retread of Dragonfall.

1 By doing so, you will already have a pretty good idea of whether or not you’re going to like Shadowrun in general. If you are at all interested in Shadowrun, cyberpunk or wordy-yet-well-written RPGs, the chances are that you have already purchased and tried the standalone Dragonfall Director’s Cut. The second, Shadowrun Dragonfall, vastly improved and expanded on what they’d done with Returns to become one of the best RPGs released in the last couple of years. The first, Shadowrun Returns, was one of the very first Kickstarter success stories that traded off some extremely clunky engine restrictions and a so-so main plotline for the very great novelty of actually being released within six months of when the Kickstarter said it would be. This is the third Shadowrun game developers Harebrained have put out in two years. In a way, my reviewing Shadowrun Hong Kong is somewhat redundant.

Which shadowrun game is best