I just bought and installed Shadowrun Dragonfall Director's Cut. I have zero knowledge of this game other than from reading the reviews of it here on GOG, and watching a few youtube videos about it, and playing it for about an hour.

At first, the game guided me along with simple directions (i.e. "enter the building") as I would expect in the starting/tutorial area in most games. But after about 10 minutes, all of a sudden I'm in a firefight with enemy characters, and the game tells me nothing other than, "keep everyone alive." I found that to be a highly useless instruction. Obviously I want to keep everyone alive, but I have no idea how to do that, because the game didn't give me any tutorial.

Therefore, everyone in my party died. That was frustrating because I do not understand much about why that happened. I don't even know what most of the icons on the screen mean. Hovering the cursor over the icons for explanations doesn't make their functions clear. I lost the fight because I had no idea what was going on.

Did I somehow skip over the tutorial area? If not, why isn't there one? Does anyone else find this game to be very user-unfriendly?

How am I supposed to learn how to play?

Dragonfall is the second game in the series, maybe they made more assumptions about what people would know.

A couple of piees of advice:
You canuse coer to help your characters survive.
Try to get your team working together, each enemy you take down is one that doesn't shoot at you.
The enemies spawn in the same pattern, after you've died a ouple of times you should be able prevent being flanked somewhat.
Play at an easier difficulty level until you're used to the game system, especially if you're not playing a gunslinger type character.

best advise i can give is to use cover to reduce the enemies chance to hit you,
but keep in mind that they are able to move and cover only applies in a one in
the direction from your character that the object providing the cover is
so be aware of the likely spots an enemy can move to whenever you move yourself and any teammates you have

if you have learned the ability overwatch on your gun users (ranged combat level 4)
it lets you take shots when enemies move
helpful if they are under cover and your chance to hit is lower than stormtroopers shooting down a hallway

also you can destroy some objects used for cover. grenades work well for this :)
just be careful since you wont be able to use the object for cover later

some cases you can start fights from a different direction depending of whee you enter the fight zone from

There should be a way to bring up some brief slides on how to play the game from within the game. Haven't played this in ages, but I'm pretty sure it can be accessed from the menu or something.

You can access the in-game manual by pressing escape and selecting the question mark. It's pretty short though.

I started this game yesterday and found most of the gameplay fairly intuitive.
Some tips:
- When it's your turn, your whole team acts, followed by all enemies. You can decide the order in which your team acts; simply select another character at the top of the screen.
- Every character has 2 Action Points (AP) per round. An action costs 1 or 2 AP, indicated at the bottom of the action icon.
- The figure at the top of those action icons indicates the cooldown (CD) for that action to become available again, once used.
- At the bottom of the HUD are the actions you can take. Hover over them to read a description.
- The left half is associated with your equipped weapon. You can switch weapons (for free) using the icons in the bottom left corner.
- The right half is associated with your inventory or special skills. Switch between those on the bottom right. Glory may be the only character with a unique skill at the start.
- When you hover over an enemy, you see your chance to hit with your current weapon/spell. You may see more info, depending on your skills. You can use Glory to check current/max HP of enemies. The white dots represent armor.
- When you hover over the ground, you can see how much AP it costs to move to that spot. A shield icon indicates cover and will protect you somewhat. There's light, medium and heavy cover.
- If you're a Mage, you might see patterns on the floor: these will provide bonuses to magic spells.
- Even more powerful are spots with white skulls: these provide a free spirit to summon, if you have the skill. Dietrich can see the spots and summon those spirits. They are extremely powerful. Dietrich can also use a fetish from his inventory to summon a spirit.