Shadowrun Returns

You know, I legitimately thought this genre had gone the way of the dodo.  Apparently not! The turn based squad based strategy lives and it's in ruder health than ever.


Now, I should start this off by saying I have minimal experience of the Shadowrun setting before now.  I knew it was cyberpunk and I knew it was crossed over with traditional fantasy in a lot of ways.

Essentially, it can be described as, what if tolkien's universe came kicking back in while humanity was going through the cyberpunk revolution.

So you have elves, trolls and dwarves along with humans interacting with virtual reality and other such future tech.

Cyberpunk has become more of an interesting setting the less realistic it's gotten, in my opinion.  What started out as a vision from the future became woefully outdated very quickly.  The presentation of the internet, for instance, is wonderfully predictive of the turns of future tech but the fact is, humans are ultimately unlikely to ever adopt a virtual reality means of interacting with them and our defences are unlikely to ever be overcome by shooting energy blobs at glowing red cubes.

But that setting has become it's own thing, divorced from our prediction of the future to simply be.

So playing through Shadowrun, it's difficult to see the setting as not being a little... zeerusty.

The gameplay is more than a little old fashioned too.  We interact from an isometric perspective, controlling our characters in combat in much the same way as you might in recent releases like XCOM.  The game makes no attempts to hide it's styles after other games, indeed if XCOM was not the 3d beast it is, it's hard to imagine it not looking like Shadowrun Returns.

But if you're a lover of turnbased combat or deeply indepth rpg's, this is the run for you.

Posted in: cyberpunk, Game, Game Review, shadowrun, shadowrun returns.