Like this, only with streets.
It's good at what it does. It's slick, beefy and high tech. It get's the job done and gives you what you asked for in a professional manner. But at the end of the day you can't help but think that maybe it's a little on the short side.
We've gotten to a point where just saying the word RPG (Yes, that's a word now. Deal with it.) instantly conjures visions of huge sprawling games that take 40 hours MINIMUM just to trudge through the self indulgent bloat of the main plot. Never mind the myriad of side quests and hidden whatnots. And that's totally what I was expecting. Hell, I'd just finished playing Geneforge, which is pretty close to a dictionary definition old school large RPG.
Now, I'm not saying there's anything massively WRONG with a big game per se. That really depends on the individual game and player. But it has rather become a default setting.
The surprising thing I found with Shadowrun Returns wasn't that the game clocked in well under 20 hours. It was that I was entirely satisfied with it doing so. It felt right. It wasn't strung out, it didn't overstay it's welcome. It never became a chore. It told it's story, was fun to play and then it ended in just the right place for me as a player, before either I or the game started to flag.
As I said, the story is unusually focused for what we've become accustomed to in RPGs. You have a particular goal to achieve, and pretty much everything you do in the game is in direct pursuit of that goal. There's only s couple of places where there was anything like a side quest happening in the whole game, at least that I found. I think the game is stronger for this focus, keeping the story and themes to the front of the action, giving the narrative a strong through line. I don't particularly want to get into the details of the plot in the campaign as I think the game is well worth playing and I don't want to spoil it. Suffice to say that in true Shadowrun style you start out with a mystery that leads to a wider conspiracy and much hitting of the fan.
Image unrelated. OR IS IT?
In terms of combat the game strongly evokes XCOM in style and layout, even down to the little shield symbols denoting cover. It's not nearly as terrifying as XCOM though, and once you get the hang of things you probably won't have any problems with members of your team getting killed. Although I was playing on the default difficulty setting so I'm sure you can always make things worse if you like pain. It's also worth noting that you certainly don't need to be a beardy min-maxing munchkin type to get on either. My character was a Troll Rigger after all, and I had no problems.
In case you're not overly familiar with the world of Shadowrun, just no that Riggers main statisitc is Intelligence, and Trolls have the biggest Intelligence penalties in the game. So not exactly the most efficient combination. But I like Trolls and Drones, so whatevs.
Of course, this might also relate to the curious situation I found myself in in terms of Karma, which is what Shadowrun uses for XP. I very quickly maxed out my Intelligence and related Rigging skills, and found that I was still getting more Karma that I really knew what to do with. I mean, a Riggers job is to sit at the back and control his Drones. Anything unrelated to this seems kinda extraneous. But overall I don't think it's a problem, as there's enough available Karma that you can branch out a little without being afraid of gimping yourself later. Don't be afraid to dump some in Charisma early on, it'll probably pay off in the long run.
Possibly the only real problem in the game is the weird checkpoint system. The game autosaves whenever you enter an area. Okay, fair enough. But there's no Save & Quit function. I don't mind the checkpoint part so much. That's a game design decision, and if you want to try and discourage save scumming then that's technically one way to go about it. Even if it doesn't really work. But to not allow at least a save and quit seems...... Odd. Most of the maps aren't really massive, but there are a few larger ones with longer encounters, so good luck if you get two thirds of the way through one and then get called away.
The only other minor thing is that I found the Cyberwear options to be a bit limited. But I think this is down to it being primarily designed for supporting the Street Samurai archetype. Riggers main cash sink is in their Drones. Mages and Shamans have a range of spells and talismans, Deckers need hardware and software and EVERYBODY uses guns. So the Cyberwear seems to be more designed to support the non magic using warrior type than be generally useful across the classes. Which is understandable, if a trifle odd,
It's also worth talking about the campaign editor that the game comes with. I haven't actually tried it out myself, but there seems to be some promising stuff happening in the community. Once they've had a chance to properly make and test everything I'll no doubt check out some player made campaigns. But there is one unusual side effect of including the tools used to build the actual game in the package. I've said before that the campaign was a short, focused experience. And it is. It's a great introduction to the world of Shadowrun, and shows off the sort of things you can do with the editor very well. And thus it's hard to disregard the nagging feeling that the campaign is rather an advert for the editor, than the editor is an extra bundled in with the campaign. Which sounds as odd as it feels, but there you have it. What all that Kickstarter business resulted in was less a single new Shadowrun game and more a robust toolset for making LOTS of other new Shadowrun games. Honestly, I can't see this as a bad thing.
We just need to give it a few months until someone has a full working remake of the SNES game ready for play.
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