INTRO:
Shadowrun’s main appeal has always been its blend of cyberpunk with magical fantasy. It has been criticized as contrived and lazy at times, but the glee of having cyborg elves, orc businessmen and dragon CEOs, among other outlandish things, is difficult to dismiss.
Shadowrun: Hong Kong is Harebrained Scheme’s third Shadowrun-licensed title. It is built on lessons learned from the previous games – Dragonfall, in particular. Like the two previous games, this one takes place in a city that is known for having a considerable presence of shadowrunners, who are practically criminals for hire. The city is, of course, the titular Hong Kong.
PREMISE:
The city of Hong Kong survived the collapse of the Chinese nation by selling itself out – again. This time though, the business interests who own it have no intention of letting anyone else govern the city; that the megacorporations have gained extensive powers that overshadow those of governments since the Seretech and Shiawase Decisions have made this possible.
Anyway, Hong Kong still retains its wealth, albeit even more unequally distributed than before. Parts of Hong Kong are run-down tenements, neglected by the corporations. In the place of (supposedly) lawful authorities, criminal networks dominate these segments. They provide the infrastructure, manpower, expertise and other resources for shadowrunners to do their thing.
The main player character happens to be in Hong Kong, after a plea by a certain person that had been important to his/her life in the past. However, as to be expected of a Shadowrun story, things turn bad quickly and the player character is now on the run, seemingly due to reasons that the aforementioned important person would know about. This is, of course, one of the ages-old excuses to have a protagonist turning into a shadowrunner.
The story-telling journey is a well-trodden one, consequently: finding questions to answers while dealing with threats that want to obscure the truth along the way. The stops in the journey though, are the main appeal.
ADAPTATION OF PEN & PAPER RPG SYSTEM:
Like Dragonfall, Hong Kong uses a game system that has been adapted from the pen-and-paper editions of the Shadowrun RPG. Specifically, it is using the system that has been developed for Dragonfall. Players who have played that game might notice more than a few familiar things, which perhaps would give the impression that things that are not broken should not be fixed, but rather recycled. Nevertheless, the recycling of the gameplay system has allowed the developers to concentrate more on content.
KARMA & EXPENDITURE:
Karma is obtained from completing missions or doing certain things on the side. There is no clear trend to the latter source of karma though. For example, saving a bunch of otherwise harmless people from trigger-happy security forces does not always seem to yield Karma, though there are other consequences down the line, such as getting ruthless and powerful people angry.
Anyway, Karma is how the player character improves his/her skills. There is no particular limitation to how the player wants to develop his/her character. The lack of limitations also includes ignorance of any facts about the scarcity of Awakened (i.e. magic-capable) people in the Sixth World, which followers of the IP might find irksome.
Predictably, the Karmic costs of increasing a statistic of the player character increases as the statistic gets higher. This means that the player is better off having the player character focus on one aspect of his/her abilities, instead of spreading the points around. For example, it might be tempting to develop a physical adept that is skilled in Qi Casting and Unarmed Combat, because these two go together in the setting of Shadowrun, but the player is better off focusing on just one or the other in order to remain competitive.
The player can hoard and spend Karma at any time (which partially goes against the rules of the table-top setting, but then, video games are meant to be quick-and-easy affairs). This means that the player could possibly keep some points for when an option that requires a skill that the player character does not have happens to arise.
However, in practice, there tend to be other options that do not require skill-checks; there is only one single incident in the playthrough where skill-checks are needed in order to avoid having to go on the violent route (which is almost always available by default). Therefore, there are few reasons to hoard Karma points – which is a good thing.
SLOW USER INTERFACE FOR KARMA EXPENDITURE:
Unfortunately, spending Karma is more of a chore than joy. This is due to the rather sluggish user interface that is used for the expenditure of Karma. When the player brings it up, there is a noticeable delay from the game at doing so; the game had even frozen on me at one time.
This is a noticeable setback, compared to the previous Shadowrun titles from Harebrained.
SKILLS & ATTRIBUTES - OVERVIEW:
Skills and attributes are what separate the shadowrunner from the everyday person. The bulk of the player’s use of skills and attributes is in combat, though they have non-violent applications in some situations. Generally, higher is better, but the incrementing costs of improving skills means that the player needs to have a team with a balanced mix of skills and attributes.
NON-VIOLENT USES OF SKILLS AND ATTRIBUTES:
Non-violent solutions to situations often involve checks of attributes; as long as an attribute is higher than the threshold that is described in the option, the player can choose the option. There are also other non-violent options that make checks on certain skills, like Spellcasting and Conjuring. (In this adaptation of Shadowrun rules, there is no differentiation between knowing how to use a skill and knowing how it actually works; the pen-and-paper system actually makes this delineation.)
In other words, the game’s implementation of non-violent options involving the capabilities of player characters is not really much different from what has been done in the history of Western RPGs thus far. If the game’s designers had not thought about having an option for a certain situation, it would not appear in the game at all, even if the player believes that there is an opportunity to use a skill or attribute that is not considered among the options that are presented.
The team members that the player has chosen also happen to matter in this regard. For example, if the player’s team has encountered an electronic obstacle and the player character is not a decker, an option to ask the decker in the team would appear when interacting with the obstacle.
VIOLENT USE OF SKILLLS AND ATTRIBUTES:
A Shadowrun game would not be complete without combat situations; after all, the setting of the game does mention that the world is a dangerous place, and shadowrunners’ survival often meant killing those who would kill them.
A character’s skills and attributes – mainly the former – would determine how he/she/it contributes to combat. Before describing this further, it should be mentioned first that there are always means for characters to make melee, ranged or area-effect attacks in every fight; there are no overt restrictions other than naturally understandable ones (e.g. line of sight and obstacles). (Matrix combat is a somewhat different thing though, as will be described later.)
Characters who are skilled in melee will have to run up to enemies to hit them; this means getting shot at while closing the distance. However, careful use of cover and buffs, as well as fickle RNGs, means that there is always a chance of not being shot at when doing so. Furthermore, getting up close and personal with an enemy causes that enemy to suffer penalties to his/her/its ranged attacks. Of course, melee attacks also completely ignore any defense bonuses from cover.
In the modern world, any means of harming an enemy from range is desirable; in Shadowrun’s world, those means include projectiles shot from guns or from hands crackling with magic. The exact means depends on the attacker’s favored skills, of course.
However, as skilled as an attacker is, ranged attacks are affected by cover; cover reduces both their accuracy and the damage that they are able to inflict. Indeed, even a character that is terrible at dodging things can shrug off a lot of damage as long as he/she is behind thick cover. (There will be more elaboration on the mechanisms of cover later.) This means that cover is useful even against the most skilled sharpshooters or spell-slingers. On the other hand, advancing far enough down a path of ranged combat would eventually yield one or two special abilities that can negate the cover bonus that the target has; there will be more on abilities shortly.
COMBAT ABILITIES - OVERVIEW:
Combat abilities are options that can be taken during a fight to gain a short-term edge. This advantage goes away as soon as combat ends, which is just as well because they have no use outside of battle (hence their name).
There are five categories of combat abilities, four of which are represented as icons on a radial menu in the bottom right of the user interface that comes up during combat. These categories are associated with the non-primary gear that a character is packing such as grenades and other consumables, or tech and/or magic that is their specialty.
If a character has abilities in multiple categories among these four, the player can switch between them using the aforementioned radial menu. The radial menu has rather small and translucent icons, but there are also shortcut keys for efficient switches.
The fifth category of combat abilities are those associated with the primary gear, namely the weapons that characters have equipped themselves with. Interestingly, each equipped weapon carries its own set of combat abilities, which can be exploited in some gleeful ways, as will be described later.
Careful use of these combat abilities is key to victory., because the various combat abilities have their own limitations. For example, having a damage buff applied at the right time means that an enemy or two can be efficiently killed, leaving other resources to deal with the remaining enemies.
CONSUMABLES:
Some combat abilities come from consumables. Obviously, using them consumes them, never to be recovered in any way. Consumables are therefore the most uncomfortable of purchases; the player has to come across situations to make the most of each consumable so that they are worth their asking prices.
The most readily usable – for better or worse – consumables are hand grenades. Anyone can use them, but only characters that have trained themselves in throwing things can make sure that they land where they can do the most harm or benefit (usually the former). Unlike missed grenades in other turn-based tactical games, the ones in this game lose a lot of their potential damage output if thrown poorly.
Other consumables include medical kits that can be consumed to restore hit-points, which will be described later with other forms of healing. There is no limitation to healing with medical kits, other than their obvious consumption.
Next, there are magical consumables. Known as “preparations” in Shadowrun parlance, these can be used to release some magical effects. The most commonly used of these are fetishes, which can summon spirits to act as additional combatants.
COMBAT SPELLS:
In the Shadowrun universe, mages and shamans can fire off spells that can seemingly do crazy things, which earn them the first reprisal from whomever they oppose. In the pen-and-paper systems, these advantages are balanced with Drain mechanics and other subtler things, which are not so easily implemented in a video game like Hong Kong. Therefore, the main combat spells that they use are implemented as a type of primary gear, making them not much different from guns and swords. Like melee weapons, combat spells do not have magazine capacities, and the spellcasters can use combat spells as many times as they like. However, combat spells have the least versatility, which might surprise players who are used to having magic being implemented in video games like Swiss army knives.
For doing something more than just hitting the enemy with blasts of magic, there is the category of combat abilities that are executed through spells, as mentioned earlier.
GUNS:
For better or worse, many problems in the Sixth World can be solved with violence. The most readily available source of violence is, of course, firearms.
Guns, as to be expected, allow their user to harm their enemies from afar, and to inflict damage that is partially independent of the skills of their users. However, as a balancing measure, ammunition is a concern: guns have magazine capacities that determine how many times that they can be fired before they have to be reloaded.
Speaking of reloading, characters do not have to bother about having spare magazines; they will always have them, regardless of how rare, cumbersome or volatile the ammunition might be. This can seem too simple for players who prefer more complex ammo management in their turn-based tactical games. Still, it is convenient and goes some way to balance guns against the other primary weapons.
The main reason to use guns are the various combat abilities that are associated with them. Some of these are understandably sourced from the built-in firing modes of the guns, but some are obtained from having reached certain levels in the firearms skills. There are aimed shots, full auto-fire and suppressive fire, to name some examples. Each of these combat abilities has a cost in terms of the rounds in the guns’ magazines. For example, automatic and suppressive fire tend to consume a lot of bullets.
Interestingly, each gun has its own set of combat abilities, even if there are copies of the same type of gun. This means that a character can carry around more than one copy of the same gun so that he/she has two sets of the same gun-dependent combat abilities.
Gun-related skills are parked under the Ranged Combat archetype of skills. There are as many skills as there are types of guns; which skill is associated with the gun is generally mentioned in their description. This means that a gun-using character could rarely be proficient in the use of more than one type of gun.
There are some guns that are too rare to be given a skill of their own, so they are parked under certain other skills for simpler implementation. An example is the minigun, which is parked under “Rifles”, of all skills.
Certain other guns are not parked under any specific skill at all, and instead use the Ranged Combat skill and Quickness attribute to determine their effectiveness in battle. These include Grenade Launchers. The game could have done better by informing the player about the limitations of these weapons though. Still, the limitation is understandable; these weapons can be exceedingly powerful if their shots land exactly where the player wants them to.
MELEE WEAPONS:
In the modern world, one would think that weapons like katanas, kamas (sickles) and clubs are not great choices for armaments when the enemy can have guns. However, in practice, enemies with guns just do not do well against someone who is already on top of them or whose tactics are about getting closer instead of maneuvering into better firing positions. This is implemented in-game through a penalty on shooting any enemy that is already right next to oneself.
Melee weapons also inflict considerable damage per hit, and many of them also happen to bypass several points of armor. Some weapons are also augmented with tech or enchanted with magic that gives them secondary properties, which are often to the detriment of their intended targets.
On the other hand, melee weapons are considered as instruments like guns are, and can potentially be knocked out of their wielders’ hands by skilled hand-to-hand opponents.
“UNARMED WEAPONS”:
Speaking of hand-to-hand combat, all characters can always fall back to their bare hands. Then there are characters that specialize in using their own bodies as weapons. These include characters that have gone for cyberware upgrades that give them spurs, physical adepts whose Qi Casting requires them to come into contact with enemies, or people who just focus on fisticuffs, which are surprisingly effective against even the most heavily-armed or –augmented opponents.
Interestingly, some weapons have been designated as being part of the “unarmed” category. These are the brass knuckles, cesti and such other instruments that are practically mounted over a person’s hands. These weapons do not inflict as much damage as melee weapons, but they do have some combat abilities that are exclusive to them. Chief among these are the combat abilities that are unlocked as the character raises his/her Unarmed skill. For example, there is Rip Armor, which as its name suggests, removes armor from the target.
Just like guns and melee weapons, each “unarmed” weapon has a set of combat abilities with its own cooldowns. This can result in some hilarious exploits, like a hand-to-hand character that have three “unarmed” weapons who can entirely strip an enemy of his/her/its armor in a couple of turns.
GEAR REQUIREMENTS:
Most gear items require their user to reach certain levels in their associated skills before they can even be equipped. Veterans of Western of RPGs would be quite familiar with this, because this limitation has been around for a long while.
Furthermore, the player can only ever have one copy of a gear item in his/her inventory. The player cannot purchase more than one of each, even if he/she has the money.
TEAM-MATE GEAR:
Only the main player character’s gear is fully customizable. The other team members come with their own gear, for better or worse; better, because the player does not have to spend money on their base gear; worse, because they rarely upgrade their gear.
If the player wishes to upgrade their gear, the player has to purchase better gear and loan it to them. They will return the borrowed gear at the end of any mission, but the player has to manually replace their gear before the start of any mission.
This would not have been a hassle, if not for deficiencies in the user interface for gear-customization.
SLOW GEAR UI:
Kitting out characters is a necessity for any mission. Unfortunately, doing so is a chore, due to the sluggish user interface for gear. It takes a while for it to load whenever the player brings it up, and whenever the player makes any changes to equipped gear, the game chugs. If the gear change involves a character’s outfit, the game chugs even more as it struggles to fetch the necessary models from its library of assets.
COVER:
As mentioned earlier, cover is the most significant part of any character’s defenses. The player will need to use cover to protect team members from enemy fire, as well as any other important characters that may be under the player’s control (such as mission-critical escortees). There are three types of cover: light, medium and heavy. Any kind of cover, including light ones, cannot be destroyed.
Light cover is generated by things such as heaps of garbage. As a general rule of thumb, if a piece of cover looks flimsy, it probably provides only light cover. Light cover will not reduce incoming damage, but does reduce the chance to hit the cowering characters.
Medium cover is provided by fences, office desks and such other objects that are designed to be sturdy enough for civilian use, but not meant to facilitate combat. Medium cover reduces a bit of incoming damage and has a greater effect on chances-to-hit than light cover.
Heavy cover is provided by purpose-made barricades, such as concrete blocks and sandbags. The presence of these usually indicates that there are upcoming fights with security forces that have presumably placed them there. Vehicles also provide heavy cover, though of course these are only ever found outdoors or in places that are intended to have them, such as parking lots. Heavy cover inflicts the worst penalties to chances-to-hit, and halves incoming damage.
Cover is obtained by positioning a character next to a piece of cover. If the player has done so correctly, the character assumes a cowering posture. Cover has to be between a character and the enemies in order to be effective, so the player might want to have a character shuffle around a cover as enemies attempt to shoot at him/her from a direction where the cover does not intervene between them.
If the player is trying to attack enemies without having cover getting in the way, the “flanked” text label is a handy indicator that confirms that a target is not benefiting from cover. There are also some combat abilities that can push a target out of cover, but these have to land their hits for this to happen.
AREA-EFFECT ATTACKS:
There are some combat abilities that can hit multiple enemies at once. To help the player make the most of them, these combat abilities often come with a control scheme that lets the player decide where the center of their area of effect would be.
However, there is no guarantee that the attack would land where the player wants it to; a percentage counter shows the likelihood of the area-effect attack landing where it is intended. Any cover in between the target location and the attacker inflicts considerable penalties on the chance-to-hit. Furthermore, if there is any piece of cover that is in between the attacker and the actual location of the center, the damage that would be inflicted is drastically reduced.
It should be noted here that the control scheme for area effect attacks only works on combat abilities with areas of effect. It does not appear when the player is using guns like Grenade Launchers. This is an unfortunate limitation.
COMBAT UI AND MISCLICK MISHAPS:
When combat occurs, rectangles with icons appear at the bottom of the screen, depicting the various combat options that have been described earlier. Taking those options is as simple as clicking on these rectangles – or so it seems.
The main problem with this UI is that the gaps between these rectangles are not sequestered away into the same panel as the rectangles. Hence there is always the chance of a misclick, e.g. the player clicking on the gaps in between these rectangles; the game interprets this as a move towards some location in the environment. This mistake can, of course, be prevented with careful placement of the mouse cursor, but this becomes a source of laboriousness that is to the detriment of the turn-based gameplay.
More competently designed games with turn-based tactical gameplay, like Xenonauts, is prudent enough to provide an option to completely reserve entire regions of the UI for control inputs. That Shadowrun: Hong Kong does not do so does not make for a good impression of the developers’ skill at foreseeing possible problems from their design decisions.
HIT POINTS AND DEATHS:
Shadowrun: Hong Kong uses the usual video game mechanic of hit points. As long as a character has at least one hit point left, the character can fully function in combat, no matter how badly injured he/she/it is. (However, there are a few combat abilities that do bad things to characters that are already badly injured.)
Enemies dying is a good thing, but the player should not expect to be able to loot their corpses; their corpses simply disappear after they perish. (However, if the game has been scripted to do so, they will leave behind things that the player might need to retrieve.)
In the case of the death of the main player character, this immediately results in a game over and a game reload. If team members die though, they remain dead; death in the Shadowrun setting is often a permanent fate. The writing of the game does account for the death of team members, especially in the case of either Is0bel or Gobbet, two characters that had already known each other prior to the events of the story. However, most of the other team members start out as strangers to each other, so there is not a lot of writing gymnastics that Harebrained’s writers have to do to account for these occasions.
The entire team always starts any mission with full hit points. There is usually nothing that would cause them to incur injuries prior to the start of any mission.
HEALING:
The most direct method of healing is through the use of medical kits. Unlike the medical kits in the pen-and-paper system, the ones in this game can be consumed as many times as the player wants, inside or outside of combat, just like typical video game medical kits. However, medical kits are not cheaply available, and they do take up equipment slots that could have been used for other things.
There is magical healing, but it follows the limitations that had been set in the previous Harebrained games. Magical healing can only be applied during combat, and only heals the damage from the most recent injury. It is nowhere as sophisticated as the magical healing methods in the present-day pen-and-paper system, but it is perhaps serviceably gameplay-balanced.
Hong Kong introduces shamanic salves, which can only be used during combat to heal someone over every turn that they are active. The effects of these items end as soon as combat ends, however, which limits their usefulness. Still, having an ongoing healing effect on a character that is under consistent attack is useful.
When combat ends in favour of the player’s team, their most recent wounds are healed, but any previously lost hit points are not restored; these have to be replenished with medical kits. Therefore, it is in the player’s interest to minimize incurred damage so that attrition does not take its toll.
NO LIMIT ON BUFFS & DEBUFFS:
There are no limits on the buff and de-buffs that a character can have. This means that a team member can benefit from many buffs, though it often takes actions to apply and renew the buffs, which means that there are opportunity costs anyway.
ACTION POINTS:
Speaking of “actions”, Action Points (APs) are the key resource of combat. This determines the amount of things that a character can carry out during their turn; more APs are generally better for a character, and characters with more APs tend to outperform those that have less. There are no known setbacks that punish a character for having many APs anyway.
By default, every character begins with 2 APs during his/her/its team’s turn; as the campaign progresses, the player’s team members, including the protagonist, gains three, to reflect increasing familiarity with their own skills and coordination with each other.
Most actions require only one AP, but there are some that require 2 or more. For example, the use of any grenade generally requires 2 APs, though there are some special bonuses from skills that reduce the AP cost to just 1. The player will want to be careful with the planning of the use of abilities that require different amounts of APs.
APs can be temporarily reduced through certain attacks, typically those that disorient enemies. Most melee attacks can do this, especially unarmed ones. This is just as well, because it prevents enemies from simply backing off and shooting melee characters in their own turn.
Any unspent APs at the end of each round are lost. In the next round, each character is given APs equal to the amount that he/she usually starts with. This is an important fact to keep in mind, because APs are not reset to their usual amounts at the start of each round.
That said, a character’s AP counts can be reduced into the negatives. If this happens, they are considered as incapacitated; humanoid characters stand around looking dazed to indicate this is happening to them. Dazed characters can do nothing and are much easier to hit. Some characters, such as Duncan, have combat abilities that can immediately remove dazed characters out of the fight.
The APs that dazed characters gain over every round go towards reducing the AP deficit, meaning that they can be dazed over a few rounds. This means that the player could choose to finish them off, or focus on other enemies that happen to be actively contributing to the fight.
99% CHANCE TO HIT, DAMAGE & CRITICAL HIT ROLLS:
The highest to-hit chance for regular attacks that are not augmented by special abilities is 99%. This means that there is always a tiny chance of missing, which can be frustrating when such bad luck happens. However, this is not as fickle as the damage and critical hit rolls.
Damage ranges are wide in this game, and made even wider with critical hits. The chances for critical hits to trigger are significant in this game, often going up higher than 50% for hits that land. It can be frustrating to watch a ranged attack that has been boosted with buffs and special abilities fail to deliver death-dealing damage output, or watch enemies score lucky hits that force the player to use precious consumables to salvage the situation.
ARMOR:
In the dangerous reality of the Sixth World in Shadowrun, just about anyone who is going about in any place that is not guaranteed to be safe (and there are precious few of such places) would be wise to have some sort of armor. Thanks to technological advancements and magical discoveries, even the thinnest of clothing can have armor lining – assuming that said person is not opting for skimpy clothing that exposes entire sections of their body.
(Of course, there is magical protection that is of help to such bold people, but such people are so magically proficient that they are invariably NPCs.)
Consequently, Armor is a statistic that almost any character has. It reduces incoming damage by exactly the same amount. The main factor that contributes to a character’s Armor rating is, of course, whatever armor-lined or -reinforced clothing that he/she is wearing. Armor can also be bolstered with certain spells. However, Armor can only ever reach a maximum of 10 points.
10 points might not seem much later in the game, when incoming damage can reach into the dozens of points, especially for critical hits. Nevertheless, high Armor ratings can negate glancing blows completely, ensuring that the opposing side must land telling blows in order to do any damage to heavily armored characters.
Armor can be stripped away during combat; this is indeed a priority, because heavily armored characters have an advantage in battles of attrition. There are some attacks that can remove armor; most lethal grenades do so. However, characters that are skilled in Unarmed combat can readily do so, apparently by simply tearing off the enemy’s apparel. (The player will not get to see characters becoming progressively naked though; Harebrained’s developers don’t have the time or willingness to do that.)
Interestingly, the Armor of team members is restored after the victorious resolution of a fight.
DRONES:
In the Shadowrun setting, “rigging” is the act of controlling machines like they are extensions of the controllers’ bodies. These controllers are in turn called “riggers” in the IP’s parlance.
(Rigging has since been differentiated into two paths: vehicle rigging and drone rigging. In this game, rigging is mainly about the latter.)
In Harebrained Schemes’ Shadowrun titles, drones follow their riggers around, but otherwise do nothing much and they are not viable targets for enemy attacks. However, their riggers can activate them, giving up one AP to control them in combat. Gameplay-wise, the activated drones are controlled like any other character on their side.
However, if the rigger of a drone is incapacitated, the drone is automatically deactivated. If the rigger is killed, the drone self-destructs, taking it out of combat. Due to this vulnerability, it is more efficient to kill enemy riggers before their drones inflict too much damage. Incidentally, CPU-controlled opponents tend to make terrible decisions about keeping their riggers safe.
On the same note, the player will want to ensure the safety of his/her riggers. Yet, the player will want every member of the team, including any drone and its rigger, takes his/her/its share of enemy fire. In the case of drones, having drones go down is usually better than having their riggers killed, because drones do not stay dead.
In this adaptation of Shadowrun, drones are practically immune to hacking – not that this is of any significance as there is a noticeable scarcity of opposing deckers, as will be described later.
Drones, being machines, can only have their hitpoints restored with drone repair kits or certain combat abilities that riggers have, if any. The kits take up gear slots that could have been occupied by other things, whereas using those combat abilities means that riggers are not doing anything else. Therefore, drones should not be seen as extra help; rather, they give the player different options to solve problems.
The main incentive to have a drone is that drones are the only characters that can move into vents – no matter their actual size. Not all mission areas have vents though, and any intel for a mission generally does not include the presence of such vents (unless, of course, the player looks at a walkthrough).
SPIRITS - OVERVIEW:
Magicians who take the path of conjuration can summon spirits to be temporary allies in battle. The spirits have capabilities that no mortal character has, such as attacks that bypass armor. However, spirits are not reliable team-mates, as will be described shortly. If anything else, spirits make good meat shields; they tend to have a lot of armor to begin with and can take considerable damage.
(In the pen-and-paper system, using spirits in such a manner is certain to give its summoner a bad reputation in the spirit realms – but this is not an issue in this game.)
Having summoned spirits takes away one of the summoner’s APs; this represents the amount of effort that is needed to maintain their service. This is important to keep in mind, because that one AP can count for a lot of lost opportunities over the rounds.
SPIRITS FROM FETISHES:
In the urban places of the Sixth World, in which Hong Kong is one, there are not a lot of places where spirits can naturally dwell. Therefore, most spirits are summoned from fetishes instead. (There is a narrative in the Shadowrun setting about why spirits are drawn to fetishes, but it is too long to be described here.) More powerful (and more expensive) fetishes summon more powerful spirits. The fetishes are consumed in the process.
Spirits that are summoned from fetishes are an unruly lot, however. In their first turn, they only ever have one AP, which is not much to work with. On subsequent turns, the magician that summoned them can implore them to do more; this is represented in-game as the amount of APs that the player wants the spirit to have.
More is better, but this comes at the risk of angering the spirit and causing it to break free. Having it have more APs leads to a higher probability of this disastrous occurrence. The summoner’s charisma reduces this risk. However, as the turns go by, the risk grows, regardless of how charismatic the summoner is. Eventually, even having it do absolutely nothing (i.e. having 0 AP) come with a risk of the spirit rebelling. Alternatively, the player could nip this risk in the bud by dismissing the spirit before it rebels.
This mechanism has been recycled from the mechanism that was used in the previous Harebrained Shadowrun titles. It is nothing new.
Spirits that have broken free are hostile to everyone, and prefer to harm their summoners first if they are within reach. However, they have only two APs, so the havoc that they can inflict is limited.
SPIRITS FROM THE ENVIRONMENT:
Next, there are the spirits that are summoned from the environment. Unlike the previous Harebrained Shadowrun titles, spirits that are summoned from the environment do not follow the same rules as those summoned from fetishes.
Specifically, the spirits that are summoned are more reliably controlled, and come with 4 APs each outright. This makes them quite powerful and dependable – for the two rounds that they are available.
After the two rounds, they simply disappear (making the same animation as when they are forcefully dispelled). Alternatively, the player could dismiss them earlier, but there is no reason to.
MOST ENVIROMENTALLY-SUMMONED SPIRITS LOOK THE SAME:
In the previous Harebrained Shadowrun titles, the spirits that are summoned from nodes in the environment have appearances that are as varied as their locale. For example, in Shadowrun Returns, a spirit summoned from a putrid garbage bin is a hideous floating tumor. (This was pointed out by fans as something that toxic magicians would do, by the way – and toxic magicians are often villains.)
In Shadowrun: Hong Kong, these spirits appear to have the same look; an armored warrior from the feudal ages, minus the lower halves of their otherwise humanoid body. Returning to the example of summoning a spirit from garbage, the spirit that is summoned in such a manner looks like said warrior in Hong Kong, albeit with a green tint and a set of poison-oriented abilities to differentiate it from the others. This lack of visual variety is most noticeable in a particular mission involving the desecration of a Wuxing workplace, when such spirits appear en masse in response to the player’s vandalism.
Perhaps Harebrained has the excuse that the setting of Hong Kong gives a common “theme” to the spirits that are summoned from the environment, but this can seem like yet another case of palette swapping to jaded players.
MATRIX - OVERVIEW:
One of the main appeals of the Shadowrun setting is the Matrix, which is the successor to the Internet in the Sixth World. (In the case of the Matrix in this game, it is still the first version of the Matrix; the second world-wide Crash has yet to happen.) The Matrix can be interacted with through intermediary devices, or dived headlong into through full VR. The VR experience is depicted in the Harebrained Shadowrun titles, which is just as well as most self-respecting hackers in Shadowrun would do just that because of the accelerated response times that their digital avatars have.
The first incarnation of the Matrix in the Shadowrun setting has IT systems being less connected with each other, due to limitations in wireless technologies that would not be surpassed until after Crash 2.0. Hackers often need to be physically on-site, connecting to the local system through a physical port (called “Jackpoints” in-game).
This also means that the player only ever sees the VR representation of the local Matrix system; the player would not be surfing the world-wide Matrix in this game.
Anyway, the Matrix segment of the gameplay is implemented as a separate layer of the game world. The game switches between the two quite easily, without any load times. This is because almost every module in a campaign has at least one map that is reserved for gameplay in the Matrix; this map is loaded up with the other maps in the module.
Gameplay in the Matrix, especially combat, follows different rules, however. Furthermore, it does not occur at the same pacing as happenings in “meat-space” (which is the hacker slang for the real world in the Shadowrun setting). These differences will be described in their own sections.
DECKERS JACKING IN:
Prior to the events that led to Crash 2.0 and the advent of the new Matrix afterwards, only “deckers” are able to hack anything. Deckers are hackers who specialize in the use of “cyberdecks”, which are portable and highly customizable computers. When deckers use their decks to infiltrate a system, they become completely oblivious to their surroundings in meatspace; they may still be moving, e.g. fingers swiping across holographic displays, but they are practically in a trance.
This means that any decker on the player’s team is physically vulnerable in this state; that many jack-points tend to be in places that lack cover makes the problem worse. The decker’s real body becomes uncontrollable too. This means that the other team members have to protect the decker, and heal him/her if he/she is in need of medical help.
When a decker jacks into a local Matrix system, his/her persona always appears at the VR representation of the jackpoint. This always happens, even if the decker had been anywhere else in the system in a previous visit.
JACKING OUT:
As long as a decker’s persona is not caught in a combat situation, the player can have the decker disconnect from the local system without any problem. This is convenient, because this removes any need to backtrack, which can be particularly tedious due to the system’s defenses that will be described later.
TIME DIFFERENCES IN THE MATRIX:
As long as the player is outside of combat in meat-space, the game will always show the happenings in the Matrix. If the player’s decker jacks in during combat in meat-space, the next round has the game focusing on the happenings in the Matrix, as long as the decker stays out of combat.
If combat occurs in both the Matrix and meat-space, the game alternates between the happenings in meat-space and the Matrix, but not at a one-to-one basis. Every combat round in meat-space is equivalent to two combat rounds in the Matrix.
MATRIX HIT-POINTS & STATISTICS:
The decker creates a persona that acts as his/her character in the Matrix. This persona has a separate hit-point counter and other statistics that are dependent on his/her cyberdeck; his/her hacking skills also contribute to the capabilities of his/her persona too. As for the persona’s combat abilities, these depend on the programs that he/she has loaded into the cyberdeck.
Whenever the decker leaves the Matrix and returns to it, the hit-points of his/her persona is restored. This is convenient, though missions often occur such that doing so comes with opportunity costs, especially during combat.
Generally, any damage that the persona incurs is not passed to the decker. In-universe, the cyberdeck takes the damage instead, and deckers run the risk of damaging their (often very expensive) cyberdecks if they are not careful about the punishment that their personae are taking. In Shadowrun: Hong Kong, this is not an issue; cyberdecks can never be damaged in this game.
LOADING UP PROGRAMS:
The loading-up of programs into cyberdecks makes use of a user interface that is not unlike the one that appears just before the start of a mission. This one appears before a decker jacks into the Matrix, which can seem odd because program-loading is supposed to have happened before the team has gone on its mission. Still, this design decision works.
DUMPSHOCK AND BIO-FEEDBACK:
However, full VR experiences do come with risks in the Shadowrun universe. The first hazard is “dumpshock”. This happens when the decker is forcibly ejected from the local system, usually due to his/her persona being eliminated. Dumpshock also happens when the player has the decker disconnect from the system during a combat situation in the Matrix. In both cases, the decker takes actual and considerable damage from the dumpshock.
The second hazard is “Black” defenses. Black defenses appear as palette swaps of regular defenses, albeit with a few more aesthetic features like spikes. Black defenses not only damage the decker’s persona, but also inflicts actual damage on the decker. Therefore, the player might want to prioritize the elimination of Black defenses first.
INTRUSION COUNTER-MEASURES:
The main form of defenses in any Matrix system in this game is the Intrusion Counter-measure, or “IC” for short (pronounced “ice” in Shadowrun fiction). In this game’s take on the Matrix, IC always appear as bug-shaped arrangements of polygons, with the exception of Blocker ICs. The various types of IC will be described shortly.
PATROL & WATCHER IC:
The most numerous IC’s are IC’s that follow patrol routes in the VR representation of the local Matrix system. They would be familiar to players that have played a lot of stealth-oriented games; they are adversaries who move according to set and limited paths, and can be evaded by observing them and looking for gaps in their routes.
In this game, the Patrol and Watcher IC’s are there to keep the player on his/her toes as his/her decker’s persona moves back and forth between sections of the Matrix system (without disconnecting and reconnecting). In the previous Harebrained Shadowrun games, there were no such IC’s, for better or worse. Although the challenge that they pose is understandable, they made backtracking in Matrix systems so much more of a chore, and with little reward for the additional challenge that they pose.
Anyway, the detection range of these IC’s is represented with cones of highlighted tiles; if the intruding decker or his/her programs (more on these later) are caught within these cones, they are detected by the IC’s. Otherwise, the IC’s overlook their presence completely, even if they are very close by or other IC’s are already engaging the intruders in Matrix combat.
Unless the Patrol or Watcher IC’s have detected the intruders, they cannot be directly targeted for attacks. They can be hit with area-of-effect attacks, but if they survive, this immediately alerts them to the presence of intruders. Therefore, the player has to be mindful of where area-effect attacks would land; getting them involved while engaging other IC’s can make things more complicated.
Any Patrol or Watcher IC’s that have detected intruders immediately pursue the latter, with the goal of getting as close to them as possible. Patrol or Watcher IC’s always prioritize following intruding deckers. Any Patrol or Watcher IC that is pursuing a decker’s persona happens to increase the chances of other IC’s hitting the decker’s persona. These IC’s also happen to be quite tough, and more difficult to hit than other IC’s.
COVER & OBSTACLES:
Perhaps for reasons of convenience, there is cover in cyberspace too. The narrative of the Shadowrun setting does have an explanation for this, but it should suffice to say here that this is there to make combat in the Matrix similar to combat in meat-space.
However, the player should be mindful that some objects in the Matrix environments are considered as level boundaries; these cannot be used like cover.
Furthermore, anything but heavy cover in the Matrix does not obstruct the detection cone of Patrol or Watcher IC’s. Therefore, the player has to be mindful of where the player’s characters take cover lest they are detected.
HOSTILE IC:
Some Matrix systems have sections with already-activated hostile IC’s. These immediately engage the intruders as soon as the latter step into the sections that they are guarding. Curiously, they do not notify the Patrol or Watcher IC’s of the presence of intruders. (In fact, they behave like the IC’s in the previous Harebrained Shadowrun games.)
There are generally two types of hostile IC’s: ranged and melee ones. Ranged ones are quick to take cover, while the melee ones often charge towards the intruders. They are much easier to fight than enemies in meat-space, due to their predictable composition and behavior. However, the caveat here is that the player’s decker is often alone; having two deckers on a team would make Matrix combat easier, but at the cost of having two team-mates being vulnerable in the real-world while they are jacked in.
There is a third type of hostile IC that behaves like a turret. Among them, these are the easiest to hit because they often lack cover. However, they have considerable attack range.
ALARMS & TRACE:
Once an intruder is in a system, the intruder runs the risk of triggering the system’s alarm. The alarm is raised after the decker’s mishaps have generated enough “trace”.
Conveniently, the player can see how close this is to happening. The amount of “trace” that the system needs to raise the alarm differs from system to system, usually according to the size of the Matrix system and the density of Patrol and Watcher IC’s. Some systems – often small ones with only a few sections – have very short trace counters, while the big ones have huge counters. This might seem paradoxical since the size of the system should be proportional to its importance, but this is likely due to a gameplay balancing decision.
If an alarm is triggered, more IC’s appear, and in some missions, opposing deckers do too. If this happens, the player’s decker would be almost hopelessly outnumbered. Furthermore, physical security would be alerted to the presence of intruders, if they are not aware of them already. Moreover, almost any locale has a script that spawns additional security detail when an alarm is raised. This usually torpedoes the infiltration segment of a mission. Therefore, it is in the player’s interest not to let this happen, at least not prematurely.
Deckers can use programs that reduce Trace, but these programs have long cool-down times. These programs are, of course, useless after an alarm has been raised.
As long as an enemy IC is still operational at the end of its turn, it generates trace. Watcher and Patrol IC’s generate the most trace, so again, it is in the player’s interest to avoid attracting their attention.
LACK OF OPPOSING DECKERS:
As a general rule of thumb, in the official campaign, as long as the alarm in a Matrix system has not been triggered, the player would not encounter any opposing deckers in the Matrix. The enemies that would accost the player’s team outside of the Matrix completely lack any combat deckers too; no NPC would be visibly going over to a jack-point to insert himself/herself into the local Matrix system and hunt down the player’s own deckers. CPU-controlled opponents in this game are just not coded to be this cool.
Therefore, the player may only ever encounter opposing deckers after system alarms had been tripped; that would mean that the player has badly screwed up his/her team’s infiltration of the Matrix. There is no reward of any kind for encountering and prevailing against opposing deckers.
BLOCKER IC:
Blocker IC’s serve as gates that prevent access to databases and subsystems that the local Matrix system control. They appear in-game as imposing gate-like polygons.
Blocker IC’s ignore the presence of intruders, unless the alarm has been raised or the player had unwittingly hit them with area-effect attacks. Blocker IC’s are very tough, have very long range, and high damage output. However, if they are defeated in combat, the player does not need to bother with the gameplay mechanism that is associated with them.
“HACKING”:
The aforementioned mechanism is what passes for this game’s take on “hacking”. As to be expected of “hacking” in the gameplay of video games, they are goofy affairs that can be handled with simple low-level logic on the player’s part.
Anyway, when the player’s decker interacts with a Blocker IC that has not been roused in alarm, the game brings up the “hacking” user interface (UI). There is a keypad in the bottom left corner of this UI, which the player uses to start the “hacking”.
When it starts, a meter at the top of the UI runs down, showing the amount of time remaining before the Blocker IC rejects the decker and raises the Trace counter significantly. The player can add more time by playing the “Simon Says” button-pressing mini-game on the keypad. Every time the player successfully completes a round of the mini-game, more time is added to the meter. However, the number strings become longer after each round, thus making this an unsustainable way to buy time.
As for the actual “hacking”, the player is shown more than a dozen combinations of glyphs. The player has to pick the right one. Partial glimpses of the right combination flash on a display beneath the time meter. If the player guesses correctly, the Blocker IC unlocks and disappears, but if the player does not, the right combination resets, together with the other possible combinations.
In other words, this is a memory game. For better or worse, luck is a factor too, as the partial glimpses may flash much of the combination, or flash one part after another such that the player can perform the process of elimination more quickly. If the player is unlucky, the display might just flash the same one glyph over and over, and that glyph happens to be in multiple combinations.
Alternatively, the player may be able to bypass a Blocker IC if he/she has the passcode for it. The possibility for this is always obvious to the player; when interacting with a Blocker IC that has a passcode, an option for entering a passcode is there in the UI.
SHADOWRUNNING:
Having described the more technical parts of the gameplay, the narrative-related parts are next; these concern the game’s main plot point of shadowrunning.
Thanks/No thanks to a turn of events early in the game, the player comes under the employment of a local fixer/crime leader. She is entertainingly nasty, but she is also the only reliable source of jobs and information for shadow-runners in the region. In the last few segments of the game (that is, the “Bonus Campaign”), the player comes under the employ of other shady people who are interested in the player character’s exploits.
Like the previous Harebrained Shadowrun titles, jobs are handled through the protagonist’s Shadowland account. The player can accept any job and is given all the time to consider its pursuit, despite any warning that the job offers are time-sensitive. Payment is also done through the same account. All these mean that this part of the gameplay can be carried out using the game’s dialogue/monologue/narration system, which is convenient for Harebrained.
During the down-times between jobs, the player moves about the home base and its surrounding amenities, stocking up on supplies and buying new gear where necessary. This is also when the player character interacts with the rainbow cast of NPCs in Shadowrun: Hong Kong.
TEAM-MATES:
Due to unavoidable (i.e. written into the story) turns of events, the player’s team starts off with the main player character, and three others. There is Duncan, the player character’s childhood friend who is a well-trained cop; there is Is0bel, a hacker who is quite withdrawn no thanks to a harsh life; and Gobbet, whose life has been harsh but made much more interesting and bearable thanks to the patronage of a spirit mentor.
There are two other possible team-mates, one of whom happens to introduce himself as a would-be adversary. Nevertheless, the writing for these two characters is such that moments after their introduction, they put forth an overt statement that implies that they are potential team members. Experienced RPG followers would realize this almost immediately.
There are other team members, but these do not have as much writing invested in them. In fact, these other shadowrunners are the “rewards” for Harebrained’s Kickstarter backers; they are the characters that the backers have designed and developed, likely for their pen-and-paper campaigns.
The more-storied team members do offer the player some measure of control over their development; the system that is used for this purpose is identical to the one in Dragonfall. After certain points in the advancement of the main plot, the player gets to make one of two mutually exclusive choices for the powering-up of these team members. Interestingly, these choices involve combat abilities that are not available to the other shadowrunners. These combat abilities reflect their specialization, background story and personalized gear. For example, Gobbet gains gifts from her Rat mentor – gifts that no other shaman could replicate because they do not follow the teachings of the Rat mentor.
KICKSTARTER BACKER CHARACTERS:
Apparently, even after two games, Harebrained has yet to pay enough tribute to its Kickstarter backers. Fortunately, instead of a terribly long list in the credits, or named but ultimately inconsequential characters that are all over the place like in Pillars of Eternity, the tribute to them in Hong Kong comes in the form of characters with actual dialogue. They also have subtler indications that they are tribute characters; one of these indications is an option to ask these characters about what they are doing and what their story is. This goes a long way to make them seem better integrated into the Shadowrun setting than the in-game implementations that other Kickstarted games had used (such as, and especially so, Pillars of Eternity).
FIXED CAMERA ANGLES AND 2D ARTWORK:
There is the trend of indie RPGs resorting to 2D artwork that is draped over environments with invisible 3D frames; it so happens that Harebrained Schemes’ Shadowrun titles, including Hong Kong, follow this trend.
The 2D artwork is drawn from an isometric perspective, which has always been the most efficient way to represent a locale in Western RPGs. Like the previous Harebrained Shadowrun titles, the 2D artwork in Hong Kong showcases the semi-futuristic and fantastical setting of Shadowrun. The state-of-the-art shares the same space with the mystical, while the gaps between them are packed with run-down things that had seen better days (or probably haven’t at all).
In other words, the visuals in Hong Kong bring out the dystopian setting of Shadowrun quite well, despite their limitation of being viewed from an isometric perspective. The cost for this is, of course, a fixed camera angle.
NO VISUAL AID FOR OVERLAPPING MODELS:
Unfortunately, due to the aforementioned use of fixed camera angles, the game suffers from problems that are caused by things obscuring each other.
In other Western RPGs with isometric perspectives, this might not be much of an issue if on-screen characters have similar sizes. However, this game is set in Shadowrun, where there are short humanoids no taller than a meter and humanoids that are three meters tall; the risk of taller characters obscuring shorter ones becomes obvious. The risk becomes even more apparent when one considers the game’s dependency on context-sensitive highlights that respond to the proximity of the mouse cursor.
(STILL) NOT MUCH ANIMATION FOR CHARACTER MODELS:
Even after two games, Harebrained Schemes has yet to figure out how to provide more animations to characters outside of combat. When they are not in combat, the characters only ever express their idle animations. Whatever personality that they have is only ever conveyed through the dialogue/monologue system, thus requiring the player to fill in whatever gaps in their presentation with his/her imagination.
NO VOICE-OVERS:
Of course, not having a lot of animations for characters in non-combat scenes would not be much of an issue to players that are used to such games, in which text delivers the flavor of the story-telling. However, games like Pillars of Eternity have already upped the ante by providing voice-overs for almost every character, and certainly for those that are important to the main plot. This game has no legible voice-overs whatsoever, except in ambient noises like the haggling in marketplaces.
Furthermore, human and metahuman characters do not even utter anything during combat, including in their death throes when they are messily slain. In contrast, inhuman characters do have utterances, albeit illegible ones.
ENTERTAININGLY VISCERAL COMBAT:
Speaking of characters being slain, combat is at least one part of the game’s aesthetics that is convincingly entertaining (for people who are amused with fictitious violence, of course). Gunfire, magic and, of course, explosions are satisfyingly loud, especially when they land hits.
There is also noticeably a lot more gore in Hong Kong than in the previous games, especially if the kills are from critical hits. Granted, the player would not be seeing character models being bisected, but organs and fluids spill out of their models all the same despite the seeming lack of open wounds. Models and their remains disappear afterwards though, unless they are programmed not to for purposes of story-telling.
MUSIC:
Predictably, the music in Shadowrun: Hong Kong has more than a little Oriental flavor. Oriental string and percussion instruments are particularly prominent, especially in the track for the main menu. Flourishes with these instruments happen to accompany the commencement and resolution of combat too.
Otherwise though, there is not much that a seasoned listener of video game music would not have heard.
CONCLUSION:
At this time of writing, Shadowrun: Hong Kong is perhaps one of the most well-written and fleshed-out digital game that is based on the Shadowrun IP, barring perhaps Dragonfall.
Unfortunately, its experience also includes hours of dealing with the deficiencies of the game engine that Harebrained Schemes has made. Limited control over the camera, visual issues like overlapping views of models and hitches in the user interfaces make for an awfully low ease of playing the game.
Furthermore, when compared to Dragonfall, Hong Kong added nothing much to the formula. There may be some implementation of new rules that give the player more choices in developing the statistics of his/her player character. Yet, just about everything else in Hong Kong has been recycled from Dragonfall. Still, Hong Kong is far from being a waste of time, if only due to the difference in the narrative setting.
It is digital RPG titles like Shadowrun: Hong Kong that shows how far the genre has come in bringing imagination to visual and aural reality, and how far yet it has yet to go to emulate the ease of simply playing RPGs with pen and paper.