The game has an amazing atmosphere, story and setting but has some pretty annoying issues as well. 1. Some of the social etiquettes are completely useless. For example "street". You only get to use it once to buy some stim, while the gang and corporate etiquettes come up all the time. This was very disheartening as you can only pick one and cannot change it down the line. This means most dialogue options will be unavailable for you if you choose the wrong one. 2. The street samurai class is an incredibly dull class that is incapable of any diplomacy, stealth or decking and if you pick this one you need to go through the whole game via sheer brute force which can get very boring. 3. The targeting system is not very good. It's simply unreasonable to have a system that can cause you to miss three times in a row when the target is sitting adjacent to you, no cover. These are supposed to be trained killers and missing like this is lame. When you have to deal with dozens of enemies missing all the time is very boring and makes you want to press alt+f4. Other than that it's a cool story, in a cool and original cyberpunk setting and is fun to play. Runs great on Linux too. As long as you keep the aforementioned issues in mind, the game is quite fun.
If you care about the story element in your RPG this isn't for you. The story of this game is literally this: "The bad guys escaped from their bad prison place and you need to stop them". Aside from lacking a story, I found many gameplay issues as well: First the game forces you to start at normal difficulty which is extremely easy and boring if you have any experience with hack n slash. All of the enemies and bosses on normal difficulty are extremely easy except for one cerberus who was only difficult because it was 12 levels above the character for some reason. After I completed the normal difficulty I was so bored that I didn't want to play anymore. The enemies are so easy that you don't even need to collect the high level items which kind of demotivates you to play. The merchants almost always only carry stupid items so there's nothing to spend your money on which is pretty demotivating. There are only 2 or 3 types of quests - "retrieve the item", "defeat the boss" and "find a npc". Very repetitive. Not a great variety of enemies, as you traverse the game you keep fighting the same satyrs and centaurs and skeletons and you seem to be expected to replay the same zones over and over to farm for armor sets etc. Yeah, no way. I completed the whole game with just 4-5 spells, I didn't even bother to unlock the secondary class. Yeah I get it, once you beat the game on Normal you are supposed to go on higher difficulty and unlcok more items and spells, but honestly it's just too boring to replay. The game seems to be designed to encourage you to replay it over and over at higher difficulties to collect all the sets and unlock all the spells., but honestly with enemies being so easy, quests so boring and story non-existing I found it hard to complete the game the first time so replaying it is out of the question. I am definitely not buying the expansions.
I really enjoyed the game. The story is engaging, the character options are unique and interesting and the turn-based combat style is simple but interesting nevertheless. I haven't had so much fun with a game for a while. I am just about to start the sequel Shadowrun Dragonfall now. Enjoy this game!
