In fact, aside from the strong focus on the main storyline at the beginning and ending, much of my time seemed devoted to side-quests and roaming, which seems a little sad after the tightly crafted stories from Harebrained's previous efforts.Ī bad day for rats.Granted, the writing excels even in the side quests, but much of Hong Kong's core story nevertheless lacks a certain spark. It loses some of its focus in the process. For one, Shadowrun: Hong Kong runs the danger of falling into yet another "chosen one" story while also sharing a bit too many thematic similarities with Dragonfall for another, its large, sprawling isometric environments strive too eagerly for the semblance of an open world. The setup leaves a good impression that lasts for hours, but alas, it erodes ever so slightly as the roughly 15 hours of gameplay march by. Elsewhere, its central premise of a fairly ordinary troll (in my case, at least) who gets caught up in the underworld after getting framed makes a little more sense in the context of learning new skills than the previous games' insinuation that you'd been "shadowrunning" for years. Even in the briefest interactions, the writing involved reads like something you'd get from a studio 10 times Harebrained's size. “All of this makes for a memorable (if text-heavy) story and - in spirit, at least - the combination of the attractive setting and quality writing leads me to like it more than what I saw in either vanilla Shadowrun Returns or last year's Dragonfall.
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