Six years ago, Microsoft released Shadowrun, an online, squad-based, competitive multiplayer shooter. It saw teams of dwarves, elves and trolls wielding magic and guns in an effort to take down the other teams base in a series of offensive and defensive missions. With no Halo on the market at the time, Shadowrun did moderately well for itself but its mere existence scratched people the wrong way. Because, you see, Microsoft only commandeered the license to fit a need. Shadowrun is much more than a squad based shooter.
The origins of Shadowrun date back to 1989 as a pen and paper roleplaying game in the vein of Dungeon & Dragons. Set in a near future, where magic has returned to Earth and corporations control society, Shadowrun is best described as a urban cyberpunk fantasy. The title comes from the main protagonists of the game, the shadowrunners. These runners are hired by the corporations to do dirty work that can’t be publicly avowed.
The concept was ripe for videogames; its origins as that type of game date back to the early 1990s when a trio of independently developed RPGs for the Super Nintendo,SEGA Genesis and Mega-CD were released. Since those titles though, the Microsoft shooter was the only existence the series has had in the realm of videogames. Shadowrun was due for a return. Jordan Weisman, creator of Shadowrun, and his development studio Hairbrained Schemes took to Kickstarter with the idea to bring Shadowrun back to its roots. And they did that with Shadowrun Returns.
Shadowrun Returns is a turn-based roleplaying game viewed from an isometric angle, reminiscent of the first two Fallout games. It is obvious that the game was built on a limited budget because, much like the original Fallout games, Shadowrun Returns lacks a lot of the modern day trappings I have come to expect from computer roleplaying games.
At the outset, the game had me create a character. While there is a good selection of races and classes, I was unimpressed by the character artwork choices and chose the one that felt closest to what I wanted to play, while not being what I wanted to play. As the story begins I find out my character is down on his luck, living paycheck to paycheck. A job opportunity quickly presents itself as an old friend calls, via a recording, telling me he has died and he needs me to look into it. If I can resolve the circumstances surrounding his death I’ll be paid handsomely.
As with all games of this nature, there is more going on than the surface level introduction lays out. What starts out as a little cyberpunk private investigation expands into something far out of the realm of my little character. While there is no surprise in the endgame (you are trying to save the world), Shadowrun Returns paces the story nicely, with each act escalating accordingly.
The narrative is well-written and highly-detailed, handling the plot exactly as one would expect a well thought out pen and paper campaign would. For most conversations, there are multiple dialog choices, and each conversation reveals bits and pieces of the story which allowed me to delve further into what is going on, if I chose to. For as well written as they are though, these choices also show the very linear path that the game follows. Sure, there are different choices to add some flavor to the conversation, allowing me to role play my character a bit more than other games, but that’s all those options really are: flavor. No matter how many different ways I approached a conversation, it all ended up in the exact same place.
The linear thread the game follows extends outward into the world at large as well. Instead of feeling like a truly lived-in world, everything revolves around the player. As such the world feels somewhat dead. There are people walking the streets and manning shops but the NPCs is all just window dressing unless they are essential to progressing the story forward. So, despite the strong story, the world it takes place in seems very shallow.
And sadly, that shallowness can be applied the core combat as well. Shadowrun Returns’ combat plays, on the surface at least, like last year’s XCOM: Enemy Unknown. But where it should feel more robust because of the ability to cast magic, summon beings from another dimension, or jack into the cyberworld Matrix, it feels lacking because most encounters can be pulled off by just focusing on firearms. Magic users and hackers feel extremely underpowered next to a nice assault rifle.
Speaking of magic users, forget using them as the team healers because Shadowrun Returns has a weird spell system that only allows a heal spell to undo the damage from the last attack. So if you get hit for 24 damage from one attack and then for 1 damage from another, the heal spell only heals 1 point. And that isn’t the only quirk the combat/magic system has, with the seemingly ineffective cover system being a bigger issue.
In a game like XCOM, utilizing cover is essential to success. Being as Shadowrun Returns looks so similar to XCOM, even down to the shield icons on usable cover, one would think that utilizing cover would work the same way. Except that it doesn’t seem to work that way. My team would consistently take damage from small arms fire despite being behind full cover walls. I had gotten so frustrated with the cover system not working as it should that I started to just line my team up in a firing line and make the quickest work of an encounter as I could.
Still, despite these weird issues, I did mostly have fun with the combat scenarios because the mission design was so well thought out. I just wish that the game gave me a reason to care if one of my hired team lived or died. Outside of a few particular instances, most missions are run with hired shadowrunners and they really are just hired help. You get no say in their development at all, meaning if they die, oh well. In another weird quirk, if they die on a mission, you can hire them for your next run as if you didn’t watch them bleed out in an office building 20 minutes prior.
These little things hold back Shadowrun from reaching its true potential. However, that true potential is still attainable. What is amazing is that the full capacity might not even turn out being realized by Hairbrained Schemes, but by some smart tech savvy fan of the game. Shadowrun Returns comes with an editor which will allow people to create their own scenarios. Some have already done modifications to the team concept by making permadeath a thing. Others have constructed elaborate campaigns based on the pen and paper quests. While I do not have the time to sit down and learn their tools, I will gladly take advantage of the ever-growing list of interesting mods and expansions being put out by the community.
With or without the user-generated content, Shadowrun Returns is a solidly fun game that tells a determinedly focused story and gave me an enjoyable 10 hour experience. It does leave a bit to be desired but considering how it came about, I am willing to overlook them from the shadows… this time.
Note: This review was written with material received from the publisher. For more on our review process, please read here.
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