Being a huge fan of Dungeons and Dragons and Blade Runner, Shadowrun the RPG is a mixture of man, magic, and machine enough to get any geeks blood pumping. But does Shadowrun Returns do the tabletop game justice? Find out in our review.
Combat in Shadowrun Returns plays an awful lot like X-Com: Enemy Unknown, but for some reason it just wasn’t as engaging. I ignored it for a while just to see where the story was going but after the story dropped off then so did everything else. In Shadowrun Returns instead of having classes you have pre made characters which can, with enough skill points, eventually learn to do almost everything. Since skill points are given out so often there is no reason to put much thought into your character progression. This leaves your character lacking any sense of individuality at later levels.
This and the fact that your party is made up of hired runners the majority of the time leaves you with no real connection to the characters you are controlling. In X-Com you recruit a rookie and help them grow through battles that truly test their mettle. You give them the best weapons and armor in the world, you watch as they rescue civilians and kill aliens never before seen by man. Their lives depend on your decisions in battle. But in Shadowrun Returns you hire 2 to 3 party members to assist your main character. You don’t control their level, equipment, appearance or abilities. So instead of having a no man left behind mentality, I would literally run through later levels intentionally having one character take all the damage often killing them. Aside from the forgettable guns for hire you bring into battle, the actual mechanics of combat quickly grow tiresome. One reason is because the enemies all have the exact same array of abilities you do. They always have a gun, magic, or a sword, or even a drone all of which you instantly know how to handle, battles become formulaic and a fight that takes 15 minutes often feels like 45. Sure you fight the occasional non-humanoid creature but then there is only one type of non-humanoid creature so that too quickly becomes boring.
