Shadowrun: Dragonfall - Director's Cut

The best writing short of Planescape: Torment. A vast collection of skills and weapons for your character. A detailed world in a well established franchise. Multiple goals and approaches for every problem. Tons of sidequests. Very detailed backstories for each of your party members you may delve into if you wish. What's not to love? Dragonfall is the followup to the franchise revival Shadowrun Returns, which was a decent but flawed game. Dragonfall fixes almost every issue SR had. Better writing, better skill balance, better economy, party members can be used for skill checks, decking is actually useful now, party members now have detailed personalities. Etc. Special mention has to be made of how much variety the game lets you take in each mission. The whole good/evil choice has been played out forever in RPGs, but when Dragonfall does it, it manages to throw genuine moral curveballs at you each and every time. This is especially noteworthy at the end. No other video game has handled its final villain encounter as well, not even Planescape! There are a couple minor gripes, mostly the flaws from SR that they never fixed. Shaman magic is still worthless. The Matrix portions are still just a reskinned version of regular combat. The actual hit percentages are still way lower than what is shown (you miss way too many 90% shots to chalk it up to simple bad luck). Other than that though this is up there with Planescape and the original Fallout games for best traditional RPG of all time.

Alright, this is going to be a long one. First off, I loved the original Shadowrun Returns. The campaign was interesting and tons of fun, even if the second half took an odd turn. All in all, the system was fun, the campaign was well designed, and the editor let truly creative people make some amazing content. As Dragonfall, I originally started with the expansion but didn't get overly far. Before I could get much passed the beginning the director's cut came out and I started over. A fantastic idea, I must say. The upgraded graphical tricks, the post-processing, the new animations, it's all great. The new UI is so much more intuitive and the improved combat system adds a ton of strategy that simply wasn't there in the original system. Placing your runners requires a ton of fore-thought and really impacts the battle, not to say there was no strategy in the original, but now cover and the added flanking system really do add a new layer. The story in Dragonfall is awesome and far surpasses the original Dead-Man Switch campaign. The Director's cut even adds new missions (though I'm not sure what missions or if I even played them) all for the same price (or free if you already bought the expansion). That's another thing, if you already bought the expansion, there's no need to buy it again, they give you a key to get the director's cut for free. Shadowrun Returns was awesome, introducing a great system and a great base for new content to be made. Dragonfall took it a step further with a far better story and better use of the system's components. The director's cut went a step further, stepped up the engine and added new features for all the shadowrun enthusiasts. As you can probably tell, this game comes highly recommended. As Harebrained schemes said "The definitive Shadowrun RPG experience on PC".

Arguably the best of trilogy, I liked this game adaptation of the Shadowrun RPG. Great story, compelling dystopian world, lovable characters and enjoyable turn-based tactical missions (with RPG elements, of course). Must recommend both this one and its sequel (Hong Kong), but for the first one (Returns) don't expect such depth as here.

My biggest and probably only overall complaint about the game is that there seemed to be too much of it at places. The best part for me, and the part that certainly didn't feel bloated, are the characters. You get four bona fide companions who join your crew. They are very engaging. Narratively, their characterization and stories are both grounded enough to be relatable but unusual enough to be interesting. Mechanically, they cover all the main combat archtypes, so you can be pretty much any class you want and have a well rounded team. These companions are very engaging, but it's not just them. In the main hub location that you visit between missions, there are other secondary npcs with solid character development. The over effect is that the game world feels very much alive. The downside of that is the mercenaries that you could still hire feel completely unnecessary. There is actually one mercenary whom you could talk to in the hub location. She seems to be interesting too, but I never found the justification to hire her. Not sure if it would have made a difference. Another unintended consequence of the engaging characters is the plot points, whether it's the main plot or mission-specific plots, often feel banal. You have your unethical bioweapons, genocide, mad scientist who mistake madness for a higher calling, petty gang wars, and the obligatory post neo-nazi racists set in Germany. To be sure, they are varied and do reflect the banality of modern real-life conflicts, but I can't help but feel a video game can do better. I was still going to give Dragonfall 5 starts, until the last mission where there is a console with some game lore. You cannot read much of the lore unless you have 5/6 points in biotech. Other parts of the lore are gated to spellcasters or those with high intelligence. When I saw that, I was suddenly reminded how different parts of the game seem to want you to play again with different skills, but Dragonfall isn't that replayable.

This game is a positive example of what can be done with what appears a relatively small budget. While this game doesn't have anything great it also doesn't have anything terribly wrong with it either, except maybe the battles that can feel tedious after a while. You also can't really take cover behind walls so you'll just end up standing awkwardly instead of having a nice field on view of the adjacent room. I didn't particularly liked the combination of fantasy and sci-fi but to each his own. I liked having a drone as a companion more than a dog, which says a lot about my soul :( Cons: dull combat. Rating: three fireballs because we ran out of bullets. https://pixelloot.com