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.
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.