If everything's special, nothing's special. "Kitchen sink" settings like Warhammer 40K or Shadowrun, in addition to tending toward derivative Ultimate Showdowns of Ultimate Destiny are by necessity unfocused and unclear on their power dynamics and defining character traits. So by the time I hired a dwarf grenadier street samurai named Yitzhak Rothenberg, jumping the shark was a foregone conclusion. But, if I find the mish-mash of high fantasy and cyberpunk a bit annoying to get into, I'll concede the basic Shadowrun precept does seem to offer ample opportunity for character customization... for better or worse.
For anyone not familiar with Shadowrun Returns, that's me in the very first round of the very first fight after the tutorial. Never one to let myself get pigeonholed I decided to freestyle my class selection, barely skimming the various abilities and stats and relying on my metagaming intuition to slap together something borderline workable. Less than enthusiastic about what seemed a fairly pared-down character customization process, I finally just pumped up my intelligence and scattered a few random points elsewhere and just jumped straight into the Dead Man's Switch campaign. I'd say "with predictable results" but in 2013 (after a decade of MMO-inspired simplification and dumbed down "accesibility") it would've been a real breath of fresh air to even be able to die in the first act of an RPG, no matter how badly you gimped your stats.
Unfortunately, in other respects Shadowrun Returns doesn't make a very good first impression. Its graphics were clean but rudimentary (and at times annoying due to overly-long animations) its sound simple and repetitive, its mission maps small and lacking interaction. Unfortunatelier, it also doesn't make a very good last impression, given the entire campaign that shipped with the game consists of only a dozen of said mission maps strung together in completely linear fashion. Obviously Harebrained Schemes was banking on fanboy unpaid labor to supply their for-profit product with content. All in all, this feels more like a game made in 2003, not 2013. Still, for an $8-$15 title, it's reasonable.
As for what's in between that beginning and end, I'm mostly annoyed that party management is as linear as the campaign itself. Choose 2-3 pre-fabricated mooks before most missions, with one of them usually being a plot-central character - each of which contravenes my "no filthy hu-mons" RPG party policy. And yet, as you pillage your way up the runner food chain and unveil the mystery of your former ally's murder, something intriguing starts to take shape, both in terms of gameplay and storytelling. Experience is gained by completing tasks, not grinding, and both EXP points and cash were decently balanced to keep you making hard decisions on a first run.
Uncharacteristically for me, I slotted a few points into Charisma, given that elves in this setting seem defined not by wisdom but by their prettiness - too bad the linear mission trudge gives you few opportunities to put your dialogue skills to use. Characteristically for me, I gravitated toward a support caster role, to the point where I spent the second half of the campaign not even equipping a primary weapon (no, not even the predictable magic missile) and by gum it done worked! With one or two combat drones active, five magic spells and my decker targeting skill I was quite the support powerhouse by the end, especially if I had a choke point to trap with the overpowered Lightning Barrier.
The combat falls somewhere between the simpler older RPGs and more detailed newer ones. It does have special attacks for various weapons but they're unimaginative damage boosts, status effects tend to resolve to either DoTs or stuns, it does have oversight but no melee engagement so it's hard to draw battle lines.
As for the writing, sentence by sentence it's not much, neither poetic nor biting, but I was increasingly impressed by the well-balanced character concepts as I went on.
They avoid unnecessary cutesiness, scenery chewing or the usual politically correct moral pecking order. Both females and males can be villains or gritty heroes, soulful or hard-bitten. The downtrodden can be justified in their grudges or not, worthy of a chance or beyond help. For how brief your interactions are and how archetypal their introductions, I was surprised at how many of the supporting cast can show secondary motivations and other depth during conversations, especially, it bears reiterating, for such a short campaign.
It would be easy to nitpick and bash Shadowrun Returns for its obvious flaws, but the truth is it did eventually coalesce into something modestly enjoyable. Its developers obviously had a pretty good idea for what they wanted as their end result and for once the good intentions are visible through the cracks. It makes me curious to actually play that copy of Battletech I bought months ago and never installed.
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