The year is 2054 and your old friend Sam has been murdered in Seattle. You’ve been hired to find the killers and bring them to justice, one way or another. Soon you’ll be embroiled in a mystery that expands from missing organs, an antagonistic detective and biker gangs all the way up to the dynastic control of one of the largest Megacorps.
It is a brilliant indie game, at almost every angle.
Has two huge downsides though:
- a horrible save system (neither proper autosaving/checkpoint saving nor actual manual saving - you copy "autosaves" to do that) - you cannot save at any point only the start of an area
- a lack of voiceovers/voiceacting which would spice dialogues up greatly
Greatest strategy, action, adventure game for mobile, since 70% mobile games are just trash filled with IAP.
If the game did not suffer from game breaking bugs I would have rated it 6/10. Unfortunately I was forces to load a previously saved game because the game stopped responding to input or I couldn't pick up a mission-critical item.
Other reasons why I gave Shadowrun Returns only a 5/10, even though I mostly enjoyed the playthrough:
- Lacking in depth. Class and race choice don't seem to matter. Very little use for skills of which the player can expect to open up alternative possibilities.
- Extremely linear game, both in dialogue and 'physical' routes. Alternative routes are offered only once in the whole game. To use them the player needs to have drones with him/her in the party, else he/she still has only one route to follow. Because of the linearity the game feels more like an interactive story instead of a game in which the player's actions have impact on the world.
- The levels, both indoor and outdoor, feel very empty. The NPCs are all static and there is no ambient sound.
- 'Hard' difficulty, on which I played the game, is not hard at all. I did not die once and actually never came really close.
I just started playing the Steam workshop entry 'Shadowrun Unlimited' and from what I have read this fixes quite a few of these problems. The mods may add (higher quality) replayability, so that's a pro for the game as user generated content platform.
At the first time it was quite dissapointing because of the some decisions the developer made, lack of normal save system and several bugs (which is understandable when you making a game in such... engine like unity).
But playing more and finishing it I can say it's an amazing game with excellent atmosphere and writing. Totally different from previous Shadowruns though.
p.s. Jake's comeback was totally unexpected :)
I gave a high mark and I need to explain a few things. Firstly, the game has its shortcomings like the checkpoint save system. You have some RL things and you have to close the game? Too bad, you're going to lose everything you played since the last check point. Secondly, the story is short (12 hours tops) and linear. That's not something to be excited about. Thirdly, there are a lot of things that are missing: a map(both mini map and realm map), a quest center where you can choose different missions (no such freedom in Shadowrun Returns). Still the game has its strong points: the universe is great, it's practically bug free, the combat is done well, the portraits are beautiful and the matrix implementation is really good. Above all, the game is highly modable and it's likely we're going to have user generated campaigns to keep us busy. All these considered, it wouldn't justify such a high mark unless you consider the price. I preordered the game( not kickstarter) and for ~13$ I'm satisfied with what I got and I recommend it to other fellow gamers. Just make sure you read about this game cons, if they trouble you too much then it's better not to buy it.