I keep trying to give this game a million tries, but I never finish it. No clue why!
the raised stakes of dragonfall's excellently paced epic plot is not totally unwelcome, for the shadowrunner nor the player.
It's pretty good, all things considered. The combat gameplay is fun, even if it feels like the hit rate on attacks is low at the beginning. The writing is good, i really like the companions you get, and their side missions are the ones i enjoyed the most, specially the hacker one. The final mission has enough variance to replay the game one or two times, or at least change up the dialogue options you choose to see what happens, i won't spoil, the overall narrative is also great, love the way they set up the final mission.
Onto the negatives. Hacking is super lame, they decided to go the megaman battle network way of dealing with the internet, but with the same combat gameplay as the flesh and bone counterpart, only differences are your stats and your buyable spells. There are no mage companions, so you'll always be missing that role in your party if you decide to go another route. Speaking of which, playing as a hacker here feels very lame, mainly because your other hacker will always be leagues better than you and get his best equipment and components and stuff for free in between missions. There's a "middle point" in the story where the main narrative kinda stops to a halt and becomes an episodic mission parade where you're just doing odd jobs for cash, stopping the pacing dead in it's tracks. Also, there are almost zero ways to resolve situations with anything other than direct violence, or the occasional dialogue that skips said combat sometimes, but not always. There are also no stealth mechanics, and in the sections that tries (emphasis on "tries") to have stealth segments, it's just regular overworld walking but with people walking in patterns, where you initiate regular combat when caught. I have other spoiler-filled complaints regarding just how little we see of our actions in the epilogue, but yeah. Also most of the art is ugly as sin, you can count the exceptions with one hand, thankfully some of them being your companions.
In conclusion, it has some flaws, but it's definitely worth at least one playthrough
Onto the negatives. Hacking is super lame, they decided to go the megaman battle network way of dealing with the internet, but with the same combat gameplay as the flesh and bone counterpart, only differences are your stats and your buyable spells. There are no mage companions, so you'll always be missing that role in your party if you decide to go another route. Speaking of which, playing as a hacker here feels very lame, mainly because your other hacker will always be leagues better than you and get his best equipment and components and stuff for free in between missions. There's a "middle point" in the story where the main narrative kinda stops to a halt and becomes an episodic mission parade where you're just doing odd jobs for cash, stopping the pacing dead in it's tracks. Also, there are almost zero ways to resolve situations with anything other than direct violence, or the occasional dialogue that skips said combat sometimes, but not always. There are also no stealth mechanics, and in the sections that tries (emphasis on "tries") to have stealth segments, it's just regular overworld walking but with people walking in patterns, where you initiate regular combat when caught. I have other spoiler-filled complaints regarding just how little we see of our actions in the epilogue, but yeah. Also most of the art is ugly as sin, you can count the exceptions with one hand, thankfully some of them being your companions.
In conclusion, it has some flaws, but it's definitely worth at least one playthrough
better than shadowrun hk
I’ve read that this is “the good one” out of the three Shadowrun Returns games, but after playing it for a while, the writing, combat, and character building are nothing to write home about. I got bored playing it and wasn’t interested in the setting or what my character was doing. That’s pretty bad for this type of RPG.
Really want to get more into this, the writing is good and the combat is solid, but I always end up gravitating to other games in this genre over this.
This kicks ass. Still fun combat, really fun writing
Shadowrun is my favorite Cyberpunk rpg, its gameplay can feel basic compared to games like XCOM but it does a servicable job and doesnt take away from the experience. What the game does well however is its writing and story, the characters are written in a reactive way that surprised me all the way through.
If you have an itch for a Cyberpunk isometric rpg this is the one.
If you have an itch for a Cyberpunk isometric rpg this is the one.
The only sin of this game is that it might make you want to try playing the Shadowrun tabletop
To this day, no RPG has made me feel an overwhelming sense of dread the way this game's antagonists instilled in me at the end of the first act. To this day no game has made me truly feel the shift from being clueless, powerless, and on the back foot to gaining the upper hand, having an army at my back, and giving the powers that be the boot up their ass they deserve the way this game has. To this day, I have not fallen in love with my party in an RPG the way I have the characters in Shadowrun: Dragonfall.
Rarely in an RPG has a game's reactivity rewarded me (or punished me) for my narrative and mechanical decisions the way that this game does. The player character arc in this game is unmatched. The transition from being the new kid on the block to the Kreuzbasar truly feeling like home is something that I haven't seen any other RPG manage to successfully replicate to this degree, which I think is a product of this game's unflinching, emphatic focus on hope in the face of overwhelming odds.
This game is secretly one of the greatest computer RPGs ever made and tragically, the world simply doesn't know. Discover it for yourself.
Rarely in an RPG has a game's reactivity rewarded me (or punished me) for my narrative and mechanical decisions the way that this game does. The player character arc in this game is unmatched. The transition from being the new kid on the block to the Kreuzbasar truly feeling like home is something that I haven't seen any other RPG manage to successfully replicate to this degree, which I think is a product of this game's unflinching, emphatic focus on hope in the face of overwhelming odds.
This game is secretly one of the greatest computer RPGs ever made and tragically, the world simply doesn't know. Discover it for yourself.
This review contains spoilers
if you think back to what the big, critically lauded titles and series were back in 2012ish, the ones praised unto the heavens for their writing and characters, it would have been like, mass effect, bioshock, dragon age, gta, that type of thing. just really boring stuff that, whenever it tried to reflect on either the outside world or on itself, showed time and time again that it was made by people with very little interest in anything outside of their own relatively narrow perspectives. world of warcraft, the greatest paragon of shit AAA writing, was still popular and respected, and -- it shames me to admit it -- i was probably still playing it. i was starting to think i hate games because i couldn't stand to treat any of them seriously anymore.
so when this came out it was not so much a revelation as a telepathic message directly to me from seattle, WA, halfway across the world. it said "yeah same but check this out".
(to be fair, it's not like there weren't interesting and well-written games around at the time, ones that i got to play a bit later. but dragonfall felt like the turning point for me.)
here's the one spoiler i'm gonna give you as my reason why i loved this so much, and still do. there's a party npc who's this kind of annoying computer nerd, whose conversations with you mostly consist of him whining about his super hot and smart possible spy ex gf who ghosted him. if you apply bioware logic to that, you'll be thinking, oh, i see, his quest is gonna be that he uses his 1337 hacker skills to locate her and drags me to rescue her from some complete non-threat no-name asshole with a gun, giving complete lie to everything that was said about how smart and capable she is, and then they get back together and have many babies and i'm supposed to pretend that this was a happy ending. so, because i was sick of this type of shit, i told him at every turn, no, drop it, shut the fuck up, don't be a stalker, if she wants to contact you again she will, fully expecting that i'm just leading this storyline to a bad ending.
turns out i was not! turns out someone thought of the characters in this story -- and this is true of more than this one quest -- as people with motivations and not just props in the heroic tale of {CHARNAME}.
shadowrun as a setting is a good balance of cool and goofy (as long as the racist bits that everyone would like to forget don't come to the fore), and cyberpunk berlin (depicted here in broad strokes but with a lot of love) is not somewhere you get to visit a lot in games that aren't about ww2. the characters are fantastic, and the gameplay is just xcom but that's fine by me. it's a good ass game is what it is.
so when this came out it was not so much a revelation as a telepathic message directly to me from seattle, WA, halfway across the world. it said "yeah same but check this out".
(to be fair, it's not like there weren't interesting and well-written games around at the time, ones that i got to play a bit later. but dragonfall felt like the turning point for me.)
here's the one spoiler i'm gonna give you as my reason why i loved this so much, and still do. there's a party npc who's this kind of annoying computer nerd, whose conversations with you mostly consist of him whining about his super hot and smart possible spy ex gf who ghosted him. if you apply bioware logic to that, you'll be thinking, oh, i see, his quest is gonna be that he uses his 1337 hacker skills to locate her and drags me to rescue her from some complete non-threat no-name asshole with a gun, giving complete lie to everything that was said about how smart and capable she is, and then they get back together and have many babies and i'm supposed to pretend that this was a happy ending. so, because i was sick of this type of shit, i told him at every turn, no, drop it, shut the fuck up, don't be a stalker, if she wants to contact you again she will, fully expecting that i'm just leading this storyline to a bad ending.
turns out i was not! turns out someone thought of the characters in this story -- and this is true of more than this one quest -- as people with motivations and not just props in the heroic tale of {CHARNAME}.
shadowrun as a setting is a good balance of cool and goofy (as long as the racist bits that everyone would like to forget don't come to the fore), and cyberpunk berlin (depicted here in broad strokes but with a lot of love) is not somewhere you get to visit a lot in games that aren't about ww2. the characters are fantastic, and the gameplay is just xcom but that's fine by me. it's a good ass game is what it is.
The problem with games like this is that when combat is the only way to get through a situation there's going to be a point where combat encounters all feel the same and the best way to get to the fun parts is to open up the console. Still, great characters, interesting structure, my only big reservation is that I thought I really fucked up during the endgame and then I looked it up and my choices didn't really matter to the final outcome which takes a bit of the bite out of all the tough questions in the final few missions.
Entertaining but pretty overrated. The kind of XCOM-inspired combat where your dumbass soldier will miss with 0% obstruction and perfect line of sight, which is just annoying, and the writing is just Gibson rewritten. I forget which is which of these games, but one of them was just the plot for Count Zero with some things changed and the other was just Neuromancer with dragons instead of two warring AIs. Nicely captivating with pleasant graphics and engaging gameplay and dialogue, despite these issues.