Shadowrun Returns

[Iron Dragoon]

Okay. so.

Shadowrun Returns. Played it. Beat the main campaign. Took around 13 hours, with about 6 character recreations (me trying to figure out what I wanted to play). Relies on community generated campaigns after that.

tl;dr: Good game over-all. Short main campaign. That'll change when the community starts getting stuff out there. Character skill/ability system is simplified from the pen & paper. Has a few issues in the main campaign. Dekkers are almost useless as a player character.

So, long version. Game is good. I enjoyed it. Story-wise, the main campaign is pretty good, if predictable. Currently there's only two additional mission packs put out by the community. One has loading issues and some rough quest initiation stuff. Other one (A Lost Lamb) is put together much more smoothly. I won't go much into the campaigns because they're both short and dependent upon the community to be generated.

The character skill/ability tree is much more simplified than in the pen & paper. In this, you have your basic stats: Body (Constitution), Quickness (Dexterity), Strength, Intelligence, Willpower, and Charisma. Each of these stats, and their sub-skills, are improved via karma points. Karma points are awarded based upon interactions and quest completion/milestones. Each skill has increasing costs, so level 1 is 1 point, level 2 is 2 points, ect.

Each of these stats has a sub-tree of skills, excepting body. Body governs your HP and that's about it. Quickness governs all the gun skills, Strength all the melee skills, Intelligence is dekking and drones, Willpower is spells, and Charisma covers shamanistic/summoning stuff.

As it stands, Dekkers aren't worth playing in the main campaign. You don't get a lot of use out of it, about five actual dives worth. And each of those you have a team for so you can just hire a Dekker and save yourself the difficulty of splitting your karma to cover both Dekking and combat skills.

Shamans suffer the same way from karma splitting, but make up for it with utility from spells. I personally *always* run with a shaman. Made things so much easier. Everything else, at a decent level, just flat out butchers the world. (I played a Dekker with split skill into Shotgun.)

I played with shotgun as my main weapon and I was cutting people down like wheat. Rifles and SMGs are basically the same, except SMGs do bursts for cheaper AP, at a little reduced damage. Pistols get good later, but are dependent upon crits or they otherwise have low damage. Thrown weapons (grenades) have their own skill tree, you can use it or not as you please, but I wound up selling all of my grenades and never looked back.

Your character can equip up to three weapons, the slots being unlocked as you advance through the skill tree. Note that if you want to do Dekking or Rigging and use drones, both use weapon slots. Shamans can summon spirits, but they need item tokens, which get consumed upon the summoning. Beyond that, having more than one weapon is sorta pointless, as you don't carry ammo; ammo is basically limitless barring reloads.

Over-all, I'd say the most powerful classes would be Street Samurai and Mage. Mage might come out on top due to having the ability to have utility spells, and no wasted AP on reloads, just a series of cool-downs.

As it stands now, I would peg the value of the game at around $10-15. The game, as it stands now, is only about 10 hours of game play, and there's not much replay value in the main campaign. Granted, that'll change with community effort, but that comes with it's own possible pitfalls. It's quality is dependent upon the creator, and while there are a lot of good GMs out there, there's also a lot of *bad* ones. Further, while I haven't messed with the content creator, if you're a great GM, but not great at tile set stuff, your abilities are going to be cut off at the knees.

[Rezantis]

I'd pretty much agree with what you said above.  It's worth playing; short but overall quite decent.  I liked it; it's reminiscent of Fallout but it's just not quite that levelnot old-school Fallout quality.  Good atmosphere though, and scratched an old itch!

I was a bit disappointed it was so heavily divested from the P&P game mechanics.  I don't know why.

We'll have to see how the community modules pan out; there's no change of it getting to the same size of Neverwinter Nights - I just don't see it happening - but we will see!