Shadowrun: Dragonfall - Director's Cut

Maybe my expectations were too high for Dragonfall, but the amount of glowing reviews this game has received all over leaves me scratching my head now that I've beat the game. I love the Shadowrun lore references, cyberpunk theme, techno soundtrack, and the quality of the writing... but every single 'EA/UBI streamlined multiplatform RPG' convention is followed TO THE LETTER. In a PC-only game! Why?! The limited freedom to do ANYTHING makes games like Mass Effect (or even BG2) look positively 'open world sandbox' by comparison. The entire game world is lifeless and stale, with almost no accessory dialogue or interactions. There is almost nothing to read or research outside of the main dialog trees, and the game doesn't even keep a text log or journal of what is happening. There's no backstory beyond what is exposed through text dialogue/load screens (there's not one line of voice in the game), and more than any RPG I've played recently it is the most simplistic 'connect-the-dots' exercise in moving item A to location B, kill NPC 1 to finish quest 2, all with the game tightly holding your hand, with almost nothing thrown in for flavor or even variation. The meat of the game is combat, and the combat is the most simplified TBS system ever. Flanking is calculated wrong most of the time, the RNG frequently spits out a dozen melee misses in a row against stunned enemies, and enemy AI does idiotic things in combat the majority of the time. The graphics are stale 2D repetition and the interface is simplistic bordering on rage inducing. I can't count the number of times I had to reload because of cursor world misalignment -- and that's another thing, for the simplest RPG in years this game has some of the most fraudulent load times in memory. Loaded onto a brand new Intel 730 it still takes over 20 seconds to load a save game, no matter how many times you reload it, or how far in the game you've reached. Absurd. Oh well, at least the hotel had a reference to Fastjack.

This new adventure is better than the original, but it's still far from what is supposed to be a Shadowrun experience. It feels linear and I don't think it has several endings (uninstalled the game before half of the story, was sick of the combat arenas). We are still limited to combat arenas over and over again. Very few puzzles, negotiations, diplomacy, bargaining, arguments, flirt, no stealth to avoid combat, etc. What happened to the term SHADOWrunning? In this game it feels more like gunsblazinrunning. All is about killing stuff, and it's quite redundant after a while... but not as much as the first story. So I don't call this a role-playing game, but a tactical combat game with a story. Calling this a rpg is a mistake, there is little to no role-play in it, most of things are imposed onto you, you have almost no freedom of choice. it is still palyable, but only buy if you like tactical combat over and over again, because there ain't much to it than that, especially in the first story that came with the original game.

i was a shadowrun returns kickstarter. i haven't played the pen and paper RPG since sometime in the early 90s, when i was still in college, and even then not much. my circles of friends tended towards D&D, battletech, car wars. but i was a fan of the setting, and it stands behind many of the mash-up custom settings i've run since then. when shadowrun returns finally came out, i enjoyed the deadman's switch campaign immensely. i've run through about ten times, playing different races and classes, discovering more of the hidden world. when dragonfall came out, it was altogether bigger and better, and i've run through that about ten times, too. slapdash ftw. the director's cut of dragonfall may be as big a step beyond dragonfall as dragonfall was beyond the deadman's switch. the new missions add as much to your team of runners as the missions in dragonfall added to the world, and give you some new options for them. the user interface is substantially better, and the combat AI has gotten pretty good. like i said, i've played dragonfall a lot, and the director's cut has kept me on my toes. although there was this one time that a knight errant guy took cover behind the same desk i was behind. like, hi. bang, bang, drekhead. it was funny. i've finished my first run through, elf samurai spec'd with rifles, and i cannot describe how much fun and awesome it was. it was like a new game, with a few familiar faces to say hi to. or gun down, whatever. i've started my next run, human decker with a shotgun, and plan to take advantage of ezkibel's cheap bioware this time. and i'm totally looking forward to it all. i'm not sure there's a better endorsement than that. stay frosty, chummers.

"condition people to expect nothing and the least little something gets them all excited" - Jane Lane, Daria "it's better than bad, it's good" - Log ad, Ren and Stimpy Those quotes adequately explain the insane disproportion of positivity in relation to the relatively unremarkable offerings of the new Shadowrun franchise. But relativity is what makes objectivity in reviews so elusive. Shadowrun was the first taste of traditional cRPGs that most of us had sampled since the Infinity Engine was still current...or at least relevant. To many that's enough to merit a 5 star rating a glowing review. To me, the memory of Black Isle's/Bioware's living worlds inhabited by engaging, sympathetic characters; memorable plots; and writing/design that truly let you feel like you were playing a role is still too fresh to think much of Shadowrun's bare-bones world, interesting-if-not-endearing characters, and feeling that your role was that of an information-gathering machine whose only choice was the tone in which to deliver queries. Everything from the hub-and-mission style progression to the pathetic sparseness of the hub save for quest/item vendors made me perpetually aware that I was playing a game with very simple and obvious mechanics. What makes the 90s cRPGs legendary is their success at transcending their medium and giving you a personal experience in a rich, complex, fantasy world...which is why Shadowrun's relative game-y-ness and shallowness in every RPG aspect was such a disappointment. There are some for whom mechanics alone define an experience (looking at you: Icewind Dale players) and if you're such a person, you may very well find something to love in Shadowrun. If, however, you crave immersion, an engaging world and endearing characters, just play through the old classics again.

Well this is a weird one. The beginning was gread compared to Shadowrun Returns. You have a personality and party NPCs with their own agenda and character. You have you own homebase and the starting quest are very motivating. But after a while the fascade will break down. Your NPCs are shallow (with one acception) you can't build a real connection to them. The quest are getting long and tedious. I was playing on hard. And believe me if you have a 75% chance to hit your enemy,...then you are wondering why just 2 of 6 attemps will succeed. This drags on, the quest are just filled with facless enemies and at the end you encounter a gaming breaking bug (ATEX level) Just with using cheats I could continue one only do discover that your choices doesn't matter at all. You get a random text - thats it. After the second Shawdowrun game I am not interested in more of the same (Hong kong)