The final entry in Harebrained Schemes' delightful Shadowrun Trilogy sees players thrust into the shadowy underworld of 2056 Hong Kong in a game that doesn't take many risks, sticking closely to the formula of Shadowrun: Dragonfall, whilst serving up another intriguing slice of cyberpunk/fantasy action that's packed full of strong writing and fun turn-based combat.

The story this time around sees you on the run in Hong Kong after both you and your foster brother are attacked by the Hong Kong Police Force whilst trying to make contact with your foster father, who's been sending mysterious messages and getting himself mixed up in the dangerous world of shadowrunners. After having your existence wiped from official records by the rather terrifying Kindly Cheng, leader of the Yellow Lotus Triad, in order to stop the authorities tracking your movements, you repay her actions by agreeing to work for the triad whilst setting aside some time to get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding your foster father and why you were attacked by the police. Phew!

The main thrust of the action here is pretty much identical to the second game in the trilogy, with a procession of well-written and hugely atmospheric missions to dig into as you and your squad of deckers, hitmen, shaman, and security specialists engage in XCOM-lite style turn-based battles that give you lots of powers, gadgets, and abilities to toy with as you take on your enemies. The combat here is somewhat tougher than that found in the other two entries in the series, and you can now kickstart battles before your foes see you in order to gain the upper hand, but by and large it's more of the same, which is fine by us.

With a running time of around about fifteen hours, this is also another impressively breezy affair, however, it does tend to feature more in the way of unnecessary conversations and the middle section of the game gives you a little too much freedom to take on side jobs in an effort to pad out the action, resulting in perhaps the most poorly paced of the three Shadowrun games overall, If we had to argue the toss, we'd say we slightly prefer Shadowrun: Dragonfall all things told, but this is still an absorbing RPG experience that tells a tale you'll be hooked into right up until its ending.

Thankfully, especially taken into consideration the mess the other two games have arrived in on Switch, Shadowrun: Hong Kong is also a better port than either Returns or Dragonfall, with far less in the way of slowdown or stuttering — which is especially odd given this is easily the biggest and most graphically intensive of the three. It does still have overly long loading times and onscreen button prompts feel sluggish and unresponsive just like the other titles in this Switch trilogy, but it does, importantly, manage to play out at a reasonably steady clip.

However, and it's a pretty big 'however', we're still saddled with the same serious bug we experienced in the Switch port of Dragonfall, one that sees the game become completely unresponsive at points when it switches to the console's internal keyboard in order to have you enter passwords into in-game keypads. We had this happen numerous times, each requiring us to restart and lose a bunch of progress, and we didn't find any way of rectifying the situation beyond trying again and again, switching between docked and handheld modes until we finally lucked out and got past the offending segment without it locking up.

If this sounds unacceptable to you, well, we're in total agreement, as there's no excuse for a bug like this, one that should be easily spotted by anyone playing through the port, making its way into this final release version. It's a massive shame, as in terms of overall performance this third entry in the series runs well enough but there's just no getting around the freezing issue here, it needs sorting out with a patch ASAP before we can consider giving this one any sort of positive recommendation. For now, we'd steer clear of another disappointing port for Harebrained Schemes' stellar series.