You and your squadmates each have a given number of Action Points to spend on movement, attacking, and spellcasting before it’s the enemy’s turn. Players who enjoyed last year’s XCOM: Enemy Unknown or other isometric, turn-based titles like the first two Fallout games will find the combat system familiar. Many of these are entirely devoted to dialogue, but most involve at least some tactical combat. As in a pen-and-paper RPG, you’ll guide your character through a series of connected “scenes,” which generally run between 20-40 minutes each. Particularly impressive are the multiple response options for your character, which are written cleverly enough to allow space for great characterization and fun interaction with NPCs, but are not tied to a binary “good/evil points” system a la Mass Effect. Between the interstitial narrative bridges and the frequent dialogue, there’s a lot of reading to be done-which, when the writing is this engaging, isn’t a bad thing. In other words, pretty standard stuff.Īlthough the environments of Shadowrun Returns are gorgeous, dense splashes of colorful objects heavy on atmosphere, the game places a priority on text. Throughout the next 10-12 hours, you’ll unravel a mystery that involves an organ-harvesting serial killer, a religious cult, a giant corporate conglomerate, and poison-spewing spectral insects. The game’s campaign, “The Dead Man’s Switch,” opens with you receiving a recorded message from a recently-deceased friend, Sam Watts, who charges you with solving his murder. You play a shadowrunner, a mercenary hired to perform shady work in a world full of shady characters.

Like its predecessors, Shadowrun Returns is set in mid-21st century Seattle. And it does, blessedly, have a sense of humor about itself. If not, you’ll have to trust me that it’s still a fun playground to inhabit. If you understood any of the preceding sentence, you’re probably in the game’s target market. The setting is a bizarre collision of William Gibson and Warhammer, with cyber-augmented elf mages jacking into the Matrix to steal nuyen from megacorps. The Shadowrun universe takes a bit of getting used to. But it’s a stylish, engrossing role-playing adventure that feels very much like the pen-and-paper storytelling system it’s based on. Like other successfully-Kickstarted titles-and like the early-90s Shadowrun games on SNES and Sega Genesis- Shadowrun Returns promises a bit more than it can deliver. With that kind of overachievement, hopes were high for Shadowrun Returns, which released last week on PC. In 2012, Jordan Weisman and his team at Harebrained Schemes asked for $400,000 on Kickstarter to develop a new tactical RPG set in Weisman’s cyberpunk-fantasy Shadowrun universe.

Shadowrun binary editor