This improvement lies in the sense of scale that Hong Kong seems to exude. Though some of the areas might be technically small, the descriptions and the ways in which the characters talk about the various locations impart a sense of bigness. If this were done in AAA fashion, the costs would be astronomical to achieve the same effect in a third-person environment. The tense moments of talking your way through heavy security or deadly shootouts in secret labs are no less exciting for the isometric angle of the action. It isn’t going to blow anyone's mind when it comes to graphical presentation (though the animatic scene transitions added by the Kickstarter certainly look nice), but it has a lot of heart and manages to soar to greater story moments than many games with larger budgets.

Shadowrun provides an enjoyable mix of strategic, turn-based gameplay and RPG progression. Players will have to be able to make use of magic, melee, combat drones, guns, computer hacking, a number of empowered abilities, and even cybernetic enhancements if they want to get through Hong Kong unscathed. No matter what paths players choose to take while leveling and customizing their character, there will always be unique dialogue options to pursue that open new routes through sticky social situations. Or, you know, you could just shoot everything that stands in your way. To me, having a wide array of viable options is where Harebrained Schemes really manages to capture the spirit of the tabletop RPG.

However, Hong Kong wobbles a bit at the landing. The narrative doesn’t allow for the climax of the story to stew quite long enough, which prevents the resolution of the plot from being as satisfying as it might otherwise be. The finale hits the ground sprinting and left me scratching my head at the number of important loose ends that were wrapped up with only a single sentence. One thing you really don’t want is for your story to leave people confused (unless that ambiguity is part of the point your work is trying to get across). It simply feels rushed and the finale of Hong Kong would have benefited from more time allowing the situation to truly sink in.

There are a few technical hurdles, too. The Unity engine that previous Shadowrun games have operated on sometimes suffers from hiccups that make a certain part of the isometric arena untargetable. Accompanying that annoyance are some staggeringly long load times (not Bloodbourne-long, but still sizable), even on high-end hardware. On top of those issues, it is possible to break your game on inventory screens by replacing required equipment. There seems to be no remedy for this besides restarting the game from your last save or checkpoint. For a game that heavily relies on text it is also more than a little strange that I encountered a few residual filler text portions that were still in the text. No, Shadowrun: Hong Kong, my name is not [Insert Player Name]. Or moments when the action on screen was being described incorrectly, which happened a couple of times toward the end. I know the text for this title must have been hugely long, but it would have benefited from another run through an editor.