Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Shadowrun Triumphantly Returns!

If you’d told me at the beginning of 2012 that Kickstarter would become a font for games based on much beloved but now defunct FASA properties, I’d have looked at you askance.

“Why not use crowd funding to generate games based on original intellectual properties?” I might ask with the benefit of hindsight.  To which I’d reply, also with the benefit of hindsight, “It’s easier to generate enthusiasm for a property that people are already familiar with.”  At this point I’d nod, shrug, and then move along, since I still wasn’t super clear on what Kickstarter was, hindsight or no.

But now, in the heat of Kickstarter’s magic moment, as titles lovingly Kickfunded begin to drop from the tree of the internet like overripe fruit, I get it.  Kickstarter is a means by which people can make the games they’ve always wanted to make, but have never been able to get funding for.  Maybe there’s a perception that these games wouldn’t sell.  Maybe there’s a perception that they wouldn’t develop a following.  Maybe there’s a perception that the intellectual properties or the nebbishy FASA developed (that is to say, complicated as all get out) rulesets these games are based on simply wouldn’t translate well.

These are all fair concerns but, it would appear they’re totally unfounded.  Mechwarrior Online is doing pretty well, and Shadowrun Returns, following a tensely delayed release, is sitting pretty in the top five of Steam’s Top Sellers list for almost a week straight now.  And while Mechwarrior Online was a proof of concept that an old game, a much beloved game, could be updated and re-released to accolade, Shadowrun Returns is something more: it’s an original take on a notoriously difficult to translate pen and paper system that, gets a lot right and promises quite a bit despite presenting relatively little content out the gate.  Shadowrun Returns is a qualified success and, with some caveats to be defined later, a property to watch over the next few months.

Some background, for those who don’t want to backpedal and read my previous entries on Shadowrun: I love the Shadowrun Sega game, and I’m fascinated by the Shadowrun tabletop system (though I’ve never played a pen and paper Shadowrun game, I’ve used character generators and poured over the source material, which is impressively rich and nuanced).  I have an emotional investment in Shadowrun as a property, though less than most: I wasn’t upset over the multiplayer Shadowrun game that flopped a few years back, but I am excited whenever I see rumors of a Shadowrun RPG on the horizon.  So when Shadowrun Returns appeared on Steam, I pre-ordered a copy.  I wasn’t deep enough in the know to put down money when it was still coming up, but I was psyched at the prospect of a new Shadowrun RPG.  When Shadowrun Returns dropped, I settled in and marathoned for two hours, which just narrowly cleared the character creation and tutorial portions of the game.  Then I settled in to the game itself, and fell for it.  Hard.

To the thoroughly uninitiated: Shadowrun is, first and foremost, about a world where magic and technology have blended.  Two unseen worlds, the spiritual Astral plane and the technologically created Matrix, parallel the mundane physical world, and while these planes don’t usually overlap on their own, they collide quite frequently in daily life, where a hacker with metal legs and a tattoo covered Bear totem shaman might stand back to back mowing down hordes of corporate guards.   Underneath this overarching canopy of “magic and technology” there is much, much more to the game and its world, much of it meticulously detailed and frustratingly complicated.  Key components include combat oriented around guns, spells and swords, and a set of six basic archetypes that can be cleaved to or mixed together in creative, though often ineffective, ways.  There’s a lot of potential for funny stuff to happen, a focus on social interaction and covert action.  For a Shadowrun game to be a Shadowrun game, you should be able to talk your way out of fights, hack your way around them, or blast your way through them.

Shadowrun Returns delivers on these most fundamental portions of the game, constructing six broad archetypes that gameplay fits around. Deckers are essentially hackers, the Rogues of the Shadowrun universe.  Mages cast spells that impact the world directly, Shamans summon creatures and use magic to alter the battlefield and the people fighting on it.  Street Samurai focus on ranged or melee combat, depending on their build, and are presumed to have some sort of technological body modification that interferes with their ability to use magic.  Adepts are entirely focused on melee combat, and use magic to bring the hurt on their enemies.  Riggers lack a parallel in other RPGs, controlling a number of combat drones that do things like shoot enemies and heal allies, depending on what’s called for.  It’s tempting to relate them to Necromancers in Diablo 2, but the analogy is weak at best.

Shadowrun enthusiasts might be disappointed by the archetypes Shadowrun Returns presents.  They’re not exhaustive: the Face archetype (a seventh archetype I didn’t list above, because I was really just trying to list what this game is doing right now) is absent, and rightly so.  There’s no real call to have a Face archetype in a computer game, despite the fact that I understand that they can be pretty boss creations in the tabletop game.  The Face abilities are all rolled into the Charisma statistic, a core attribute for Shamans (who don’t necessarily identify strongly with the Face role in Shadowrun pen and paper) and manifest themselves primarily in the form of Etiquettes that players select as their Charisma score increases.  More on Etiquettes in a bit, the key thing to take away from this is that there are no proper Faces in Shadowrun Returns.

Riggers and Adepts are also a great deal more narrowly constructed than they are in tabletop play.  A tabletop Rigger can be a drone piloting badass or a nervous, twitching getaway driver, ready to bolt at a moment’s notice.  Since long-form transit isn’t a terribly interesting thing to play in a top-down tactical RPG, it’s understandable that Harebrained Schemes wouldn’t invest time in creating a “Driver Rigger” gameplay element.  What’s less understandable is the removal of Gunslinger Adepts, Adepts who use their Chi focus abilities in ranged combat.  Adept skills are exclusively tailored to making individuals better suited towards melee combat.  Most of them involve some kind of special melee range Chi strike, and the ones that don’t do things like increase movement range or magic resistance, which helps melee fighters a great deal more than it helps the already-in-cover ranged combat fighters who will be taking advantage of the X-Com like cover system that Shadowrun Returns has in place.

Both of these omissions are understandable: Harebrained developed this game on a very limited budget and in a limited time frame, and they’ve also established a framework for it to be expanded by the community base, but the lack of ranged Adept options is a bit conspicuous for me, largely because that  class interests me a great deal.  These are, of course, nitpicks.  Overall, the class archetypes are lovingly constructed, and well tailored to the gameplay model that Harebrained Schemes built Shadowrun Returns around.

And what a curious gameplay model it is!  Drawing heavy inspiration from recent turn-based-classic-intellectual-property-resurrection-darling X-Com, Shadowrun Returns plays as an isometric, cover based strategy game in combat.  Each side takes its turn all at once, and can do things like set overwatch, hurl grenades, heal teammates  and use elements of the environment to summon Astral spirits.

It’s no mistake that only one of these things doesn’t precisely parallel X-Com’s combat system.  Character progression, in many ways, is modeled off of X-Com’s: accuracy slowly increases, characters acquire new abilities in combat tailored to their combat specialization.  But the feel of it all is quite distinct: where X-Com radiated a certain desperation behind every action, Shadowrun Returns is brimming with excitement at the things you can do.  The potential to lose characters permanently is there, and the agonizing map exploration mechanics are there as well, but there’s something about the manner in which combat functions, about how the math of damage and recovery is done, that makes the stakes seem lower, and the process of fighting more exploratory than anything else.  The summoning is also not insignificant.  While you can play through the entire game without running afoul of summonable creatures, you’re missing out if you do.  The mechanics of Rigger Drones and Shaman Spirits are wonderful to uncover, and twist and reshape fights in ways I would never have imagined.  Also, summoning the spirit of disease from a biohazard bin is a nice surprise, something only Shadowrun would ever deign to show me.

But even then, the mechanics are all more or less the same.  It’s the game outside of combat, which, thankfully, is the bulk of the game, that really diverges from the X-Com model.  You’ll spend a great deal of your time wandering about, exploring the environment and interacting with various people.  In these moments you can talk your way around or through certain situations, but for the most part you’re just occupying a particular character in a particular way.  Honorable street lifer or money grubbing high society aspirant, you’ll reach the same end point and have a very different experience doing so.

But alas, these social mechanics are not without issue.  The game is, as many have noted, quite linear, and the social interactions present alternative routes to objectives, sure, but for the most part they do little to actually change the course of the game.  The exploration process is tied heavily to the Decker skill, so players with points in Decking will get more money and learn more about the world around them faster.  I’m playing through for the second time as a Decker, and while I feel like I didn’t miss as much as I thought I did the first time around, it’s tough to avoid that completionist pull that so many RPGs impress players with.  Shadowrun tries to eschew this trope nobly, through a combination of impressively solid writing (the best I think I’ve ever seen in a game, Torment included) and wonderful art saturating every aspect of the game.  It also never gates progress around a single required skill and then holds that skill out of reach (though a plot critical mission does require a Decker, and many of the Deckers you can hire to assist you on that mission are, simply put, teh sux).  Players can inhabit whatever character they like.  But curious players might find themselves frustrated by the manner in which exploration unfolds.  Likewise, the social mechanics are a little wonky: certain etiquettes are incredibly valuable, while others are all but useless.  In two playthroughs, I only ever once saw a Street etiquette check, and selecting it didn’t seem worth the bother.  Ditto for the Gang and Socialite etiquettes.  Security, on the other hand, is incredibly useful.  Is that a problem with the game?  Maybe not, especially as modders develop new modules for the game that employ a broader set of etiquettes, but it’s certainly an issue in the single player campaign.

All this said, Shadowrun Returns is actually pretty excellent.  The game world is vibrant, the conversations are superlatively written and, design hiccoughs aside, the game itself is really solid.  I’ve been playing through the campaign with different classes to see how each set of mechanics functions, and it’s tremendously enjoyable.  There are shortcomings, sure.  The single player campaign that the game shipped with is short, a little shy of twenty hours, and it suffers from Neverwinter Nights syndrome in terms of exploration (must have rogue skills to explore!!!). But it’s wrapped in an original set of mechanics, and comes with a vibrant set of modding tools that already promise oodles of user created content.  There’s nothing yet, but give it a few months: I’m confident that veteran Shadowrun DMs will want to share their passion sooner than later.

And all this from Kickstarter.  It’s still a work in progress in many ways (as seems to be the case with nearly every Kickflarped game I play) but it’s a brilliant work of passion which, for all its seams and flaws, remains more compelling than most triple A titles I’ve run across in recent memory.  If you like turn based RPGs, if you like Shadowrun, if you like new experiences that mirror old ones, try Shadowrun Returns.  There are many, many worse ways to spend $20.