Shadowrun Returns Review

Your friendly neighborhood RPG Codex has taken the time to review Shadowrun Returns.  While we wait for our own team to finish and review the game, perhaps the Codex’s look at the game will be of interest. Like most reviews from the site, you can expect a fair degree of personality in addition to the detailed analysis.

The world of Shadowrun Returns is a pretty interesting brew. The year is sometime in the 2050s – for all intents and purposes it is a cyberpunk setting, run by corrupt governments and mega-corporations that pull all the strings. Just with one silly detail – 40 years earlier, magic returned to the world. Elven and dwarven children were born, people mutated ((goblinised)) into trolls and orcs. Dragons, undead, extraplanar creatures and all other assorted fantasy things started popping up.

An elven hacker and an orc shaman infiltrating the offices of a megacorp full of shotgun-toting troll security officers is thus a pretty (typical) image of the world. The hacker and shaman are likely to be shadowrunners, elite commando-infiltrators who are mercenaries outside the influence of third parties, but offering their services to anyone who can offer the most coin. And it is a shadowrunner that you will get to play in this game. Right after you create him.

The character generation is pretty basic. You get to name your dude, choose a gender which doesn’t really influence anything, pick a race and a portrait, choose a character archetype or invent your own, and finally spend leftover skill points, or Karma as they are called in this game.

—–

Not everything is fine and dandy, however. The only classes that I find hard to criticize are the rigger and the shaman, because they have the clearest sense of progression in the game, and offer some genuinely fun and sometimes risky mechanics. When a shaman’s level 6 fire spirit breaks free on the first turn of combat, you are in for a very bad time, especially if its first action is a 50-damage crit in your main character’s face. If the rigger loses his drones in the crossfire, his combat abilities are seriously hampered. But let us look at the other combat options, starting with firearms.

Pistols are alright – they have medium range, decent damage, useful talents, and are extremely cheap. But basically the only advantage they have over assault rifles, that can fire bursts, have longer range, higher damage and almost the same special combat moves, is that they are much cheaper, and can reload for free. But considering the rifles’ big magazines, you hardly ever need to even reload them anyway. SMGs are somewhere between rifles and pistols, and are boring as hell. With only two special moves, you pretty much do nothing but fire medium range bursts. And finally there are shotguns, which if not for their short range, would be THE weapon to roll with. All their special shots are crazy useful, some can even fire on burst mode, they have a chance to hit multiple dudes, and they do incredible amounts of damage.