Well, just finished the minicampaign . Cant say I'm impressed but at least it comes with a better closure to the whole game(and I find the campaign to be much better compared to the base game).

Actually the wealthiest companies don't give a damn about their customers. It's only the smaller ones who start off nice, but they'll go dark side eventually.

And I was worried you wouldn't show up here! :P And what a pleasant surprise was it, seeing your nickname! ;)

I will start by saying, I really, really enjoyed the game. The base game as well as the bonus campaign. The engine and content felt polished, on the level (or maybe a little better than Dragonfall) and the writing was also extremely good in my opinion. I play for a mix of story and tactical combat, and the game shined in both areas.

I have heard some criticism about pacing and having too much text to read, and while can understand that to a degree, I would suggest that much of the conversations that can 'bog things down' are not critical to complete the game, and can be safely avoided without losing too awful much on the mechanical benefits side of things.

The dialogue, in my opinion, does really add/reinforce the fully rounded and contextual richness of the Shadowrun setting, and brings a personal connection to the characters which really enhances the story and immersion. It brings the game elements together for me... but then again, I don't mind spending 20 minutes between missions running around talking to people and reading all the text to get the full treatment of those characters.

At least, I didnt mind it on my first playthrough... and it wasn't too bad on my second. I switched up my characters outlook from good guy, to straight-up mercenary, to selfish bad guy in order to experience the consequences of different choices.

Without spoiling too much, I will say that the mini-campaign has some very cool and funny moments if you accept the 'Deal' offered by the end boss of the base game. They managed to make that choice matter, at least a bit (though it was nothing drastic, in all honesty).

After that, I started quick-clicking through all of it, because it wasn't new anymore, but I still wanted to make sure all the scripts were fired for setting conversation variables.

I have finally completed my playthroughs as a Mage, Decker/Rigger, Unarmed Adept, and Rifle/Shotgun Samurai.

The bonus campaign is definitely intended for your high-karma character after finishing the base game, but even so I found it to be tuned to a higher level of difficulty. For example, teammates like Gaichu who were pretty reliable late-game in the base campaign with hit percentages in the 80s, slowly started to see their hit rates dropping on the enemies in the mini-campaign. By the end, Gaichu, Racter/Koschei, and even Duncan (whose only mechanical purpose is to be good at shooting things) were showing lackluster, unreliable hit percentages - I started getting excited when I saw 70% after casting an aim buff - which was a little frustrating and disappointing overall.

I don't mind a characters chance of success being unreliable when they are out of their element, but when they are in their personal wheelhouse, they should be able to complete normal tasks and achieve success reliably (such as a shadows-hardened ex-cop rifle expert being able to shoot a corpsec punk who is standing 40-ish feet away out in the middle of the street) with only a rare failure - unless they face some exceptional difficulty. When the exceptional difficulty becomes commonplace, it detracts from the fun and the feeling that the character is actually competent.

With this increased randomness applied to the success of characters who are engaging in an activity they are supposed to be really good at by this stage in the story, as well as the incdreased health and armor of the enemies, all it takes is a few bad rolls and you may find yourself reloading from save. Some folks do like that unpredictability and risk of failure to keep a feeling of challenge.

For me, a turn-based tactical game like this derives a good portion of its 'fun factor' from rewarding skillful play, but there is not much you can really do when you are investing AP into aim buffs and even Hyper-Ex for increased hit chance and still seeing only 70s or maybe low 80s if you are lucky - the cost of missing (without buffs) would have been the APs you 'wasted' on casting those buffs, and even after the buffs you still stand a significant chance of missing anyways. Made me a little sad.

Tactically, you may find that you are forced to rely more on Damage Mitigation to increase your odds of success. Cover becomes not just smart, but pretty much essential. This tends to punish Melee Samurais who often cannot benefit from cover while attacking, and they lack the Adept's spell for gaining a cover bonus in the open - leaving them vulnerable to crits and often requiring defensive buffs or heals to keep them up in tough fights.

In addition, some of the fights in the mini campaign involve being ridiculously outnumbered (even moreso than the Whistleblower mission in the base game when you can choose to fight the Tsunami Mercs and the Seoulpas at the same time) and if your party lacks a significant AOE threat to punish the AI for clumping up, it is extremely easy to get overrun (especially because in one such mission you find yourself needing to spend a lot of APs moving to escape a room, and the only route of escape is right into the near endless stream of groups of enemies spawning faster than you can take them down. I will say that there are some tricks you can employ to help a little bit (one of the NPCs you get is a mage who has decent AOE capability for instance, and another is to leverage the environment) - so skillful play can mitigate things a little... but you may feel like I did in that even at your best Sun Tzu tactician mindset with your min-maxxed and geared-to-the-nines badass character, the outcome of the fight is still very much in the hands of RNG. From my point of view, top-notch play should all but ensure victory.

Then again, maybe I just stink at the game... but I suspect not.

Also, watch out for corpsec with two weapon types. The Stun Batons, and the Assault Canons (they look like rail guns style sniper rifles and fire a large projectile). Getting hit by those will, to quote Ten-Armed Ambrose, "seriously slot your runners' day."

Saving regularly is a large help, but for some reason (on of my small gripes about the engine) it takes a very long time to load from save - and I don't understand why (sometimes up to almost 2 minutes even on a decently beefy gaming rig --quad-core Core i5 Sandy bridge with 16GB of ram and a 7200RPM HDD). My only guess is maybe an SSD would speed it up... but other games load from save nice and fast on this rig.

Last note - consider investing in the Cyber Affinity skill, even if you are a magic user. Getting 6 Body and 6 Cyber affinity can grant you 2 free points of 'essence' to slot cyberware without hurting your magical abilities. Some of the cyberware also costs 0 essence, so you can get some very nice bonuses by investing nothing more than nuyen (and wired reflexes for 3k nuyen and 1.5 essence is capable of granting +1 AP which is a very valuable and difficult thing to increase).

Bottom line, the mini campaign is free, and the base game is *well* worth the price. You will probably love the game. And if you know what you are getting into difficulty wise, based on above comments, you can have good expectations which will protect your enjoyment as you progress.

Overall 8/10.