Shadowrun Returns Review

Indulge me for a moment, will you? Think of a good friend of yours. It can be anybody, it really doesn't matter. Now, remind yourself of their most unpleasant character traits, the things that occasionally make you wonder 'why do I still talk to this person?'. Maybe they're in denial about their drinking problem, or they drop tired Portal references in conversation whenever cake - or the infinite vacuum of space - are mentioned, or maybe they're a teensy bit racist. Nurture that feeling of unease, allow it to swell up. Still with me? Right, now you know how I feel about Shadowrun Returns: an unremarkable, sometimes even unlikeable game with a few incendiary sparks of charm that kept me coming back to it.

That might have spoiled the overall opinion a bit early on, but never mind, we can start over. Shadowrun Returns is the famous Kickstarter-fuelled attempt to bring the classic cyberpunk fantasy pen-and-paper role-playing game to our beloved PC platform, which sounds like a great idea when you think about it. D&D has been swanning around for long enough with successes like Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights (and some real shockers too, but let's put those to one side) while her shy sister Shadowrun has only ever been entitled to some console titles from twenty years ago and that unspeakable first-person shooter thing, so let's give Shadowrun another chance to do the diplomatic dance with the world of videogames and see whether anything exciting happens.

You can choose to have your character’s appearance roughly reflect their portrait or alter the details manually

Much like those old PC D&D mainstays, Shadowrun Returns presents itself as more of an RPG toolkit that happens to have a campaign tossed into the bottom of the box if you're into that sort of thing, going by the name of "The Dead Man's Switch". That's fine if you're a game master that's just been itching to create your own four hundred hour campaign epic, but for those of us that just wanted a game to play it's a tad disconcerting, a sense that we're perhaps not entirely the intended audience here. Anyway, for the sake of this review remaining sane, let's just assume that this campaign comprises the entirety of what you would call 'the game'.

So, 'the game'. Character creation is everything you'd expect it to be, selecting your race from the standard fantasy stock like a set of well-worn cutlery, then selecting your class from the standard Shadowrun stock like a set of exotic surgeon's tools. I'm certainly happy to see any game that goes out of its way to eschew the warrior/mage/rogue archetype structure, but Shadowrun goes perhaps a little bit too far in that respect. Street Samurai? Rigger? Physical Adept? I was half-expecting to find 'Smooth Talker' or 'Heavy Weapons Guy' nestled in there somewhere.

Once you've gone through the creation of your 'shadowrunner' - essentially a futuristic mercenary Postman Pat - and the brief introduction to the stats screen, Shadowrun Returns dumps you into its old-school isometric view of your run-down apartment. The game gives you a minute or so to rifle through your own belongings and realise just how far down the food chain you've been placed before it sets off the phone. It's an old friend, or rather, a recording of him. He would be talking to you in person, but he's suffering from a minor case of dead, and asks politely if you wouldn't mind tracking down whoever offed him. A large cash reward is mentioned as an aside, just in case you aren't the sort to immediately sympathise with the demise of an NPC that you were introduced to about five minutes ago. So begins your very own gritty noir cyberpunk adventure... and then, 15 or so hours later, it finishes. Die-hard RPG fans might call it 'perilously short' and laugh at it in the shower block, but I'm personally quite happy with Shadowrun Returns's length: it has a smooth story arc, keeps your attention with a plot that actually progresses at a decent rate, and doesn't overstay its welcome. This means that less time is spent meaninglessly padding the next objective and the experience as a whole is improved - assuming you weren't actively seeking out a timesink, that is.

You already knew what the Matrix was going to look like, didn't you?

Good thing too, because Shadowrun Returns would make a rubbish timesink even if it was 80 hours long. A worrying slice of your time is expended clicking your way around empty areas of varying degrees of linearity, desperately looking for something to do other than chase sidequests or the objective marker. Occasionally you might find an NPC that's willing to chat or an item to pick up if you're lucky, and sometimes that leads to new developments, but it's still nothing more than another attempt to keep a tattered tarpaulin of interactivity draped over the painted-on environments.

This is all just so much cream cheese, though, designed to pad the space between the slabs of meat in the Shadowrun sandwich: turn-based combat sequences. I was eagerly anticipating these, since the combat is essentially X-Com with magic and hacking and remote control robots (and quite frankly I think an arcane firestorm or two could have really helped with some of those later terror missions in Enemy Unknown) but the issue at hand is of depth. Everything feels a tad extraneous to the gunplay, which isn't necessarily a bad thing since the gunplay itself is well-balanced and solid, but it did make me question the importance of magic when all I was mostly using it for was hitting enemies behind cover (since magic apparently doesn't adhere quite so stringently to line-of-sight as bullets do) or buffing the people in my squad with the best weapons. Occasionally you get to jack into the Matrix (no, that's not my terrible sense of humour, they really do call it the Matrix) but it's not terribly different from overworld combat and gives the impression of being shoehorned in because Shadowrun canon dictates it, not because the developers thought it would be a good idea. Overall I have to grudgingly call the combat entertaining, especially when you start putting together squads full of multiple classes and start juggling their respective skills, but I still harbour a certain level of disappointment that it wasn't more varied or complex.

Now, evidently the boys and girls at Harebrained Schemes weren't taking notes the evening that the checkpoint systems were explained, because Shadowrun Returns hoards its checkpoints like Smaug hoards priceless dwarven artefacts. You only ever get a save when you hit a loading screen and some of these loading screens can be anywhere from five minutes to nearly an hour apart, which is the point where gameplay stops being merely bland and starts being a catalyst in the slow erosion of your sanity. You could argue that it's an effective way to put some weight on the player character's life, but it just feels crude and unnecessary, like smacking us around the head and shoulders with a welding torch every time we take damage. And why, come to think of it, do we only get the game over when our player character is downed? Are all the squadmates too overcome with grief to pull out the revive kit I know they have concealed in their pockets?

And then there’s dialogue like this, which drops all pretence of choice and gives you three ways to say the exact same thing

Sometimes I feel a little bit guilty about pointing out the rough edges on indie games, since it feels like a level of nitpicking that really ought to be reserved for titles that can afford more polish, but then I remember that rough edges tend to rub against you as time goes by, and if you try to ignore them then they'll just keep coming back until it looks like you took a belt sander to the face, so let's get this over and done with. Shadowrun Returns earned a massive gripe right out of the gate for failing to adequately explain the skill tree, leaving me to pour several points into skills I was never likely to use. Such a stumbling block only managed to set me up for further picking of aforementioned nits when I discovered that the animations in Shadowrun Returns were apparently made in Windows 3D Movie Maker. Magical projectiles sail through the air without any kind of weight or substance to them, characters slide awkwardly as they walk and recoil from damage as if brushing away an annoying mosquito. It's the kind of thing that I'd call 'underwhelming' if I was in a genial mood and 'immersion-breakingly weak' if I wasn't. Finally, while I appreciate the work that went into the gorgeous hand-drawn 2D scenery, I don't think I've ever missed the ability to rotate the camera quite so much. Trying to navigate terrain that you can't necessarily see behind is a task that ought to be reserved for the TV repair man, not for the player.

Shadowrun Returns really does shine here and there though. If I had a magical pair of pliers that could extract any aspect of a game and condense it into a suitable form, I'd tear out Shadowrun Returns's writing, because it's honestly quite exquisite and deserves to be patched into a far better game. I ravenously consumed every line of text - item descriptions, loading screens, dialogue options, milk bottle tops, bank statements - because it was just so well-crafted, a throwback to some of the better point-and-click adventure games where rubbing every item on everything else became entertaining simply because of the varied textual responses you would get. Characters were decently well-rounded and fleshed out, even the shopkeepers and random passers-by that existed only to facilitate the transfer of goods. Here and there I was granted glimpses into a world with far more terrifically alluring depth than what Shadowrun Returns granted me, and it actually became quite painful, akin to having your face pressed up against the sweet shop window and trying to get a taste of the Mint Twizzlers by licking the glass.

At the end of the day, Shadowrun Returns is passable. It doesn't excite or surprise, and it has more than its fair share of flaws, but it's not particularly offensive and manages to dish out a fair share of fun once it gets rolling. If you wanted a conclusive reason to buy it - and perhaps you do - then I can only point out that an expansion with a bigger budget would do a world of good to Shadowrun Returns. Not to spend on voice acting or more art assets or anything foolish like that, but to throw at unnecessary features; fleshing out the game world with exquisite detail, right down to the backs of the cereal packets lying in the gutter, or adding a spell that summons a glittering disco ball mid-fight. But right now? Don't expect anything special.