I remember playing this game around the time of its launch for a couple hours or so, being mesmerized by its brand of hard boiled sci-fi dystopia. It's not hard to see why I was so enthralled by it back then: the first 5-6 hours successfully introduces an interesting world where the advancement of man-made tech is equally matched, if not exceeded, by the occult and the supernatural. Gameplay wise, despite lacking in tutorials, the design starts simple enough to ease you in, but not too simple to bore you. Not to mention the cast of decently written, colorful characters that you are being subjected to.

But the depth in those aspects are quite lacking, especially as you reach a certain chapter where things start to get quite wild, story-wise. The progression of the story's scale and stakes in the 2nd act already feels a bit sudden and unnatural on its own. But combined by all the side characters not being fleshed out enough, the disappointingly same-y level and encounter design, and a unwelcomed difficulty spike in this act, I can't help but feel a bit disappointed with how they executed the game's second half. It almost feels rushed.

A big part of why I loved the first half of the game is how well the game introduces all sorts of interesting lore through its main missions, while maintaining this delightful detective vibe in its gameplay. From delving into Seattle's drug addict woes, to dealing with dead spirits in order to gain their testimony of an event nobody else saw, there's all sorts of stuff happening in the 1st act that I really enjoyed. You don't have to figure the story out yourself, but the CRPG gameplay of exploring thoroughly to fully scope out all your options fits perfectly with its premise of trying to figure out who killed your old friend. Even if the gameplay possibilities and options aren't that extensive (it's a relatively small scale game after all), the act of playing detective and getting yourselves some allies along the way is still a fun endeavor. The 2nd and 3rd act unfortunately doesn't have quite the same level of variety and memorability.

The RPG systems are pretty decent for the most part. Outside of combat, the various stats serve mostly to unlock certain dialogues options or pathways that usually will save you a minute or two of your time, and in the sense of their usefulness, there is a lot of room to improve on. Coupled with the somewhat cramped level design, it can feel more like a linear story rather than a CRPG. But executing these bonus options still feel satisfying.

In regards to combat, these systems feel more fleshed out, since the abilities and bonuses you'll get for advancing in the game's various combat stats feel much more helpful. For example, being able to mark a target to temporarily increase the chance of hitting them by advancing the Decking stats, and combining that with abilities such as full-auto assault rifle attacks. But do note that the combat follows the XCOM system of hit percentages, so be prepared for utter frustration as you miss attacks with 90% hit chance.

All in all, Shadowrun Returns feels more like a prelude of what's to come, rather than a completely realized idea. Still, I did have a fun time playing it, and I will be checking out the sequels someday to see if they ever get to fulfill this game's potential.

I found this enjoyable but wasn't blown away by any aspect of it. The story and characters just seemed a little surface level. It DID make me more interested in the Shadowrun TTRPG, since leveling up felt very satisfying once I got a handle on the mechanics. The art style was good. However, there were a few figures that didn't match their character art at ALL - this was really noticeable in the character creator with the female dwarves. Still I had fun and will be checking out the other two at some point.

Shadowrun is honestly one of the coolest tabletop RPG settings, and this is a worthy CRPG adaptation, though it’s definitely flawed. The actual gameplay is pretty solid, if standard, tactical CRPG, though the UI could be better, the story is pretty good overall, though some dialogue comes off as clunky, the music’s nice, if some tracks repeat way too often, and the thing that’s best to me is how much it oozes the dark, cyberpunk atmosphere of the setting. One of the most glaring aspects, and one that’s brought up fairly often, is the fact that this game’s story is really short, and it is: but given that the game’s generally pretty cheap, and regularly goes on pretty generous sales, I can look past it. And the workshop is chock full of free custom campaigns that tend to be pretty fantastic. This is far and away the weakest of the Shadowrun CRPG trilogy, but that doesn’t make it bad.

First played, and enjoyed, some time in the mid 2010s. Abandoned this playthrough in the final dungeon, because I made my character a "rigger" (drones, basically a summon character) and the game doesn't want you to have done that.

One of the blandest things I've ever played. Stock cyberpunk setting (yeah, there's orcs and magic, but that's less consequential than you'd expect) plays host to stock murder mystery plot, which is given up on halfway through in favor of stock Crazy Vindictive Woman Ruins The World With Evil Scheme, Because She's Just So Crazy And Evil. You go from point A to point B, do some XCOM combat with animations that take too long, wiggle your mouse around until the game shows you the stuff you can interact with, click through Whedonesque "Umm, is this a fragging cult or something!?" dialogue (Or, worse, "Mrs. Kubota" telling you about "the concept of 'giri' - the debt of honor" (eugh)) to find your next point B to travel to, rinse and repeat for two dozen hours. I want, so badly, to believe the actual Shadowrun universe, with magic and ultra-hi-tech, unknowably ancient spiritual tradition and uncontrollable neoliberal hypercapitalism existing together, is something that could be interesting in the right hands. But unfortunately it was not dreamt up by an inspired, talented writer, or someone with any sincere interest in anything, but by boring nerds grasping at daddy's library to make a competitor to R. Talsorian's much cooler Cyberpunk TTRPG in 1989.

Of course, Returns is a Kickstarted proof of concept for a Shadowrun CRPG engine, so it sort of makes sense it would be bland. It has a level editor, like Neverwinter Nights, with Steam workshop support. But "The Dead Man's Switch", the actual campaign it ships with, is honestly even more boring than NWN's three act Bioware chosen one thing (like, "The Dead Man's Switch" was the best title they could come up with! in the 2010s!). And a custom campaign scene never really materialized, because they made two sequels that revamped a bunch of systems, rather than just building on Returns with patches and expansions.

I remember the sequels being much better than this (again, like how NWN's expansions are leagues better than the base game), and I was only playing this "for context" before going back to the sequels, but I was having so little fun with this one I'm not sure I'll even bother.

It’s clearly a very streamlined experience and the foundation for a larger game/platform. The RPG systems are there but very few of them shine through. The exploration is limited and almost compulsory, but it still feels rewarding. The story, atmosphere and world building are top notch, especially during the "murder mystery" part of the game. The ending left me on a sour note because of the annoying enemy waves and a couple of story twists that felt unnecessary. Overall, I really enjoyed it playing it, though, and I look forward to the sequel, which is considered the best in the trilogy.

Proof of concept.

It was almost a decade ago that I had the pleasure of my friends pointing me toward Shadowrun: Dragonfall when I was getting my feet wet with old-school and throwback CRPGs, and since then that game has become one of my favorite RPGs of all time. I followed it up immediately with Shadowrun: Hong Kong and while that game was ever so slightly the inferior of the two in writing, it too wowed me with its incredible plot, mood, and world-and-character-building.

I'm going to warn you right now, I am going to compare this game to those two games non-stop throughout this review.

You see at the time, I was told to go directly to Dragonfall - skip Returns. "It's the worst one," "it's really barebones," "it's basically a proof of concept" came the warnings, and coming from friends whose opinions I'd trusted, that was good enough for me. But years later and as I find myself delving into the genre again with CDPR's Cyberpunk 2077, and after doing a little listening to the (very catchy) soundtrack on youtube, curiosity got the better of me. I legitimately wanted more Shadowrun, so I decided to finally ask the question: is Shadowrun Returns any good?

The answer is yeah. It is any good. On the other hand, all my friends were right on the money. Shadowrun Returns has all the same mechanics as its expansion and sequel (with fewer guns, spells, and equipment of course) and largely plays like Dragonfall with a missing quality of life feature from the latter here and there... though with some questionable mission design. Decking is only necessary in one run in the entire game, and it's never done simultaneously with meatspace combat. Cyberware is limited to glorified stat boosts, so magic seems more fun, and simply shooting a guy with a gun seems to be more fun and more optimal. Other than that it's not bad. Hasting yourself and firing an assault rifle on full auto and instantly killing a dude is still fun.

The big issue is that Returns is empty. Set in the aptly-named Redmond Barrens in future Seattle, SR's plot is that your friend Sam has been killed and sent you a video-email triggered by a dead man's switch asking you to find his killer in return for a whole lotta money. Turns out there's a serial killer involved, and the rabbit hole goes deeper from there. Unlike Dragonfall or Hong Kong, however, that depth doesn't extend to the themes. The story progresses in a linear fashion and while there are one or two big revelations, none of them evoke fear or awe or catharsis, none of them require you to pay any great amount of attention to the characters and what they tell you about themselves or the world around you. There's no enriching emotional payoff for doing something thoughtful for another person, nor is there any eureka moment for figuring out a great mystery the game has put before you. The game explains everything that is happening to you very matter-of-factly, which is fine, but given that Dragonfall and Hong Kong do all these things I've mentioned and more, it's a little underwhelming.

Ironically, while the plot is incredibly easy to follow, the dialogue, ridden with setting-specific slang, can be a bit impenetrable or worse still, undermine the tone. SR assumes you know what the UCAS is, it assumes you know why people sometimes speak in Japanese loanwords, it assumes you know who Renraku and Ares are and why everyone keeps saying "chummer." One guy threatened me by calling me an "aho" and telling me I was about to "get fragged" and I think if a guy said that to me with a gun in his hand I would laugh in his face before getting shot.

The maps are similarly shallow - they're pretty enough, lots of little visual detail, but remarkably few things to interact with and virtually nothing to explore beyond finding a medkit or grenade in a junk pile sometimes. Whole rooms and closets and hallways will exist as nothing but set dressing. No fights, no secrets, no alternate routes or optional encounters or incidental NPCs. Again, this is all very notable because this game's sequels don't do this.

There's no party to speak of, just a bunch of nameless NPCs with headshots you can hire for each run using your own money (which you get a LOT of specifically for this purpose), with a few named recurring characters sprinkled in who participate in the plot sometimes but otherwise largely do not intersect with your story. I get that they were trying something different from other CRPGs here but this is one of the game's biggest flaws and given the depth of the character writing in the games to follow, it's clear the devs felt this way too. To make matters worse, the scaling on hiring prices seems to be all over the place. At the start of the game, mercs are very affordable with plenty of wiggle room for you to buy equipment, but the costs quickly double or triple and outstrip the money you're making off of runs, which nearly led to me having to run some jobs solo - that is, until I realized that the Nephilim Network - a second tab of mixed-build mercs (which I believe are kickstarter backers) appear to have bugged hiring rates. At the start of the game they're universally more expensive than the normal guys, but for some reason in the back half a bunch of the strongest ones drop from 1500 nuyen to 1000 - and the weakest ones go from 1000 to 3000. My assumption here is that someone typo'd the values on a spreadsheet somewhere, but it's a saving grace for the late game until you suddenly receive an obscene cash injection right at the end of the game and money becomes a non-issue entirely.

Other (admittedly very small) weird holes and design issues crop up towards the end of the game too - some very odd typos appear in character dialogue, with one very minor NPC not using proper punctuation in his sentences (and no it's not a netspeak thing - his dialogue just strikes me as a first draft that missed a proofread.) In the final mission, you'll find yourself at a dead end after clearing out every enemy in the level, but combat doesn't end and no matter how many turns you wait, nothing triggers. I thought it was broken scripting until I looked up the solution - you have to backtrack to a previous room and sit next to a breakaway wall so that the enemy AI will path to you properly and smash through it, allowing you to finish the monster off and progress. It's a minor gripe, but it's also a bit of a sour note on an otherwise pretty fun finale.

Taken altogether, these factors all contribute to a game that feels less like an RPG set in a living, breathing world and more like a series of jobs that your guy does in sequence while occasionally things happen around him. I said towards the beginning that I came into this wanting more Shadowrun. Did I get what I want? Yeah, I think so. It didn't blow me away, but it fed my craving, and perhaps more importantly it sated my curiosity without leaving me feeling worse for the experience. The nicest thing I can say about it is that it made me want to play Dragonfall and Hong Kong again, and it does make me wish they'd make more of these things. That's not bad, all things considered.

This game has a pretty snazzy final boss theme.

So Shadowrun Returns feels like a game made by devs who are making a video game for the first time in their life. The budget is quite clearly not that much and the balancing is just off. Most of the fights are either steamrolling or getting steamrolled. The final fight is one of the few that I think has something going for it.

Despite those issues I think its a good game. The atmosphere is very well done. The music fits the tone. The story was also good tho I wish we had some actual freedom. Its a very linear game due to the low budget.

The setting is def my favorite part of the game. Urban Fantasy and Cyberpunk is an interesting mix.

I like the leveling up system. I made a blaster mage with some investment in rifles and some extra points in charisma. spells are fun to use.

Jako čistě tahová strategie by to neuspělo; na to je to příliš přímočaré a bez výraznějších taktických možností. Jako čistě RPGčko by to neuspělo; na to se tu příliš málo pracuje s rozvojem postav a jejich schopnostmi. A stejně tak by to neuspělo jako adventura či příběhová hra. Ovšem tvůrcům se podařilo vše výše uvedené namixovat způsobem, který funguje a plní svůj hlavní účel, kterým je ukázat možnosti „co vše jde udělat" v editoru, který by měl být splněným snem všem pánům jeskyně. A dle zatím dostupných fanouškovských výtvorů to vypadá, že i je...

Eagerly kickstarted this back in the day in the hopes of getting something cool and I arguably did. It's a fun short experience but objectively works best when viewed as a sort of proof-of-concept for what the premise offers. Its sequel, Dragonfall, nailed everything that was lacking in this and then some. I do ask myself if playing this specific entry on the console rereleases is better despite some bugs given the consistent UI since it was apparently redone in the Shadowrun Hong Kong engine or the fan port on the PC version in Hong Kong itself that had some QoL improvements present in later games. The UI in this base version of Returns is something that was clearly designed for touchscreens while the sequels were much more in line with a proper PC experience.

Before I started this game, I was warned that it was supposedly the weakest part of the new three games and after playing it, I can see why. The whole thing feels a little unambitious.

I'm not sure if that's the result of a small budget or simply because they wanted to create a "small" game, but either way, it lacks interesting decision making in the story and character build. Granted, I chose the possibly most bland character class and just went for a combat focused shotgun-wielding troll and simply did not need more than two shotguns in my whole playthrough, but I can still tell by looking at the skill system that another class wouldn't have made a huge difference. The game simply doesn't offer enough opportunities to even use your skills on. For example speech checks were barely there. I also feel like having a set team instead of constantly hiring mercenaries would have been better. The idea of paying for party members is fairly unique though.

Combat was still quite good. Shadowrun Returns plays pretty much like modern Xcom and it was fun finding the perfect position for your characters, make the best use of AoE effects and buffs and get through missions without casualties. I probably should've played on hard, but I don't have much experience in the genre and wanted to play it safe for now. Dragonfall is getting played on hard.

Returns feels like a solid groundwork. A decent combat system, varied classes, pretty good presentation and music. It just needs more complexity ... the story feels too linear and it seems like you can't impact it in a meaningful way. If the other games offer actual involvement in the story and makes your profession or race more relevant in dialogue I could see them being really fun. But in this case I tried to play as a somewhat dumb but loyal street-cred guy who just wants revenge for his friend and while some of the dialogue seemed to fit that kind of character, there were other moments where the game clearly railroads the player into a certain direction and only gives you very smart and convoluted answers to choose from.

I may sound a little negative here, but I appreciated that the game didn't overstay it's welcome and I feel pretty positive about it overall. Like I said, it feels like a solid foundation. If it gets uphill from here, I can see myself becoming a fan.

There are a lot of options in terms of classes and character progression, but there isn't much reason to do a 2nd playthrough. The plot itself isn't stellar, feels rushed, and has a couple twists that don't make sense at all.

The combat is refreshing. Each class has a handful of attacks with different effects, and you're free to multiclass if you know what you're doing. While this can lead to occasionally spamming the same daily driver damage spell to finish off an enemy, the beginning and middle of combat encounters yield a lot of possibilities.

Role-playing is limited, with somewhat frequent character-specific dialogue options appearing, usually requiring an "etiquette" or a high enough level in a certain stat. I hope the sequel takes this concept much further, because the dialogue in an RPG should not be so limited. Especially one with no voice acting.

There is almost no optional side content, aside from one or two quests or a slightly different way to approach a quest.

The turn-based combat is the only thing keeping this game at a 3/5.

Shadowrun Returns. The game that started Harebrained Schemes' Shadowrun Trilogy, and yet is hands down the worst of the three. Now, this isn't to say it's a BAD game, otherwise it wouldn't have gotten a DLC so good it became it's own game, or an actual full sequel. But, it is most certainly flawed. No companions are free to take, instead costing you money to hire(including the ones required by the story to progress). Because of this, it never feels like you're actually growing with these characters, never connecting with them, so because of this, you never really care if any of them die.

Now, while some may tell you that that's the quintessential Shadowrun experience in Tabletop, it was only ever like that to help facilitate drop in play, letting people join a group for a single session before leaving and never being seen again. But this is a video game, and I've seen Tom's troll ass available for every goddamn run I've gone on in this game, so having the hireable mercs system feels like nothing more than a waste of good nuyen that could be spent on fun stuff, like cyberware, weapons, or spells.

Besides this, most of the story is a tad generic at best, and super weird and full of some of the weirdest parts of the Shadowrun lore. And, while the guys who've been playing the tabletop game for decades will know who Harlequin is, I don't know him from Tom, and at least Tom's been available to me the whole game. Good ol' dependable Tom.

Anyway, moving past these faults, the game is still quite fun(otherwise I wouldn't have finished it), with a plot that, while the majority of which you'll see coming from a mile away, the climax was definitely not what I, or most other people, expected to see, in a largely entertaining way.

However, the best piece of praise I can give Shadowrun Returns is that it allowed Shadowrun: Dragonfall and Shadowrun: Hong Kong to exist. And honestly? That's pretty good praise in my book.