Shadowrun Kickstarter

[malkav11]

It doesn't feel super deep and it's largely linear, but there's a whole bunch of meaningfully different ways to build your character and they come into play in dialogue and investigation as well as combat. And the writing's good and the feel is excellent. So on the whole I'm pretty happy. Especially given the editor and Workshop integration.

[Sno]

I've been hearing lots of good things about it from friends, i'm looking forward to playing it myself.

Pretty excited to see that it's turned out well.

[Dewar]

Guys (and gals,) I'm seriously shocked at how good this game is. If I had to guess, I'm about 1/3 of the way through after around 5 hours and I had to pry my hands off the mouse to get ready for bed.

 

My only nitpick so far is that I wish that the other runners you can hire would get some sort of loyalty bonus (either in cheaper costs or better stats) if you grabbed the same ones over and over again. Actually, maybe they do and I just haven't noticed yet.

[Apelsin]

It really is good.

Love the setting and I am quite happy with the story so far.

 

It does make me long for an Arcanum sequel though.

[voxn]

man this games art is a prime example of the wrong guy for the job. The solid clean painterly look would improve 90% of the games out there but is completely at odds with this games setting & tone.

[Dewar]

^{You think? I thought the neon and chrome juxtaposed with the grim worked really well.}

[Murdoc]

man this games art is a prime example of the wrong guy for the job. The solid clean painterly look would improve 90% of the games out there but is completely at odds with this games setting & tone.

Considering cyberpunk is goofy as hell these days, I think it fits and I rather like it.

 

It at least has personality so if it was realistically modeled and textured I don't think I would be into as much. Granted I haven't played too much of it, but if it was played straight and gritty, places like "organ grinders" and "holy smokes" wouldn't fit, it would just be douchey rather than hilariously endearing of Gibsonesq cyberpunk. Plus, I think it's really well executed, so good art is good art.

 

Though, and I hate to be that person, because as of 2012, I was quite the opposite, I'd really have liked controller support. Once I moved my PC to the living room, playing something like this is hard on the wrists.

[Twig]

I love the art. U:

[Sno]

I absolutely love the visual design for this game, Returns a really beautiful game, i think.

I don't think Shadowrun's original run really ever had a particularly strong visual identity, it kind of always came off as just another dreary, indistinct cyberpunk universe. (Which, for obvious reasons, it really isn't.)

The 360 reboot previously tried to give the series a stronger visual identity, but i think what they've done in Returns works much better for it.

[Gormongous]

Considering cyberpunk is goofy as hell these days, I think it fits and I rather like it.

 

It at least has personality so if it was realistically modeled and textured I don't think I would be into as much. Granted I haven't played too much of it, but if it was played straight and gritty, places like "organ grinders" and "holy smokes" wouldn't fit, it would just be douchey rather than hilariously endearing of Gibsonesq cyberpunk. Plus, I think it's really well executed, so good art is good art.

 

Though, and I hate to be that person, because as of 2012, I was quite the opposite, I'd really have liked controller support. Once I moved my PC to the living room, playing something like this is hard on the wrists.

 

I think the game looks great, but it badly needs just one more usability pass.

• The hotkeys are few, unintuitive, and inconsistent -- G opens inventory, Esc doesn't close all windows, etc.
• You can't select to move to a space behind an ally. I spent two minutes trying, it's just not possible, not even if you click and drag.
• Why do I have to guess how far I can run with multiple action points? Why aren't the distances displayed faded in tiers?
• Doorways and corners don't count as cover, just block your line of sight, the rules of which aren't always clear.
• If a cutscene starts while you're in the middle of a move action -- for example, if guards burst into a room -- your character stops dead and you lose that action point. It's killed my PC at least one.
• Why does the game keep me in turn-based combat mode when I've killed everyone in the entire stage? It's not as bad now that I have three action points, but it took forever before.

Of course, if I'm complaining about the UI and such, it's because I think the game itself is brilliant. Just like with Crusader Kings II, really.

[Sno]

My life is significantly improved for having been exposed to this through the last Thumbs livestream.

[Murdoc]

Yeah I totally agree Gormongous, theres a few odd things in the UI that could be a little more slick, but for a fairly small budget and first game, I give them a pass.

This isn't necessarily a complaint, and since it's the first time I'm actually playing a Shadowrun game since the genesis, but it's a lot more linear than I expected. I understand the divergence is in the choices you make and the class that you are, but the entire game is giving me such a fallout vibe that I really wished it just an open world map and let go of the leash to let me play the game.

I'm still really enjoying it, but I doubt I'll replay it because it seems very on the rails in terms of missions/story. I guess it is a complaint, a small one. Where the old shadowrun games more mission based or did it have a lot more freedom?

edit: oh and I decided to just plunker down xpadder since I'm having this controller issue with a bunch of games, it works and I'm now lounging back enjoying the game. A little finicky, but not so different than playing xcom.

edit 2: Nah, still better than a mouse and keyboard.

[Dewar]

The past games that this one is going to imitate were in theory open world games, but I found it more frustrating than anything as there was really one ever one place to go that was useful, so you were wandering around aimlessly getting in constant fights for little payoff. At least, that's how I felt about the SNES game.

[Murdoc]

Yeah, the more I play the more I kind of just want this to be a different game, I guess. The setting is cool, I really enjoy it, but I'm finding the combat mechanics aren't very interesting (Granted I'm playing a warrior, without realizing it I just though Street Samurai sounded too cool to pass up) and maybe there would be a little more too it as a shaman, mage, or decker (I watched some youtube videos).

 

As a warrior it's basically fallout 1 combat with a "cover" system, sort of reminds of me of fallout tactics a little too for whatever reason. I could be totally wrong, but it doesn't seem like the cover is doing anything, with a UI presentation that screams Xcom to me, it just simply isn't, for a lot of justifiable reasons. I also do't think the enemy UI takes advantage of the cover system, which leads me to believe it's just sort of tacked on and not a live or die thing like Xcom... again they are two different games, so I'll stop comparing.

 

After playing a bunch this weekend, I've played enough Shadowrun Returns this weekend to at least say I appreciate it, but I'm not really having fun with the combat and with the mission structures so overtly (or maybe its my character) of "load up this area and fight, go back to hub, load up the next combat area and fight" system, I'm a bit wore out.

 

With the mission structure as it is, it's sort of lost the immersion for me at some point and is now relying solely on the combat mechanics, which as I just mentioned are a bit dull. The initial "who done it" story was a cool enough set up, but it's not enough for me to keep going. 

 

The oddest thing that happened, is that when I get wore out of SR, I'll fire up Xcom (a game I didn't play much when it came out) to get in a fun encounter. And no, it isn't fair that I compare SR to Xcom, and yes they are two very different games; but my point is, if you make your core game mechanic solely relying on going from combat encounter to combat encounter I'd hope it'd be a little deeper and more fun (which this is totally objective). Granted Shadowrun Returns is sort of a throwback RPG, so they nailed that, it's just with a linear mission selection and "gated" equipment options, your're only going to get a very limited verity in this mission. The variety as it seems is with what class your team members are or what class you are, which makes things interesting, but once you go through the motions a couple times, it doesn't get any deeper.

 

I still really like the art, the mood, and what they were going for, but at the end of the day I think I want to like Shadowrun Returns the game more than I actually do... which pretty much sums up my memory of anything Shadowrun that I tried in the past.

[Gormongous]

I think that's a pretty fair assessment. I beat it last night and came out satisfied, but I'm not going to go back through again with a decker character like I'd planned in the first few hours. I don't like the combat enough, not when the gear is so gated and so linear. Each gun is better than the one before, except for that one revolver, and there's always one outfit you should be wearing. From what I'd seen of the mage and decker characters I hired for runs, they just have more stuff to buy, but not really more options for it.

 

I don't know. I really liked the traditional RPG parts of it. The character building was great, the writing always popped, even with Jordan Weisman's goofy Kickstarter-reward NPC, and I genuinely enjoyed the whodunit. I just felt bored after the first six hours or so whenever combat started, if only because I could blow everyone away but didn't really feel like it. Good narrative-focused modules might be able to fix that, but we'll see what the community puts out.

[malkav11]

Cover affects chance to hit, and the enemies will definitely use it. Moreover, multiple cover-granting objects between you and your target will affect chance to hit for every single one. That said, I'm not sure how large a penalty it is and I kinda appreciate that it's not absolutely mandatory to use it since spirit summon points and ley lines are often not in cover.

 

As far as magic characters go - you certainly don't have a wider array of gear (the gear in general is indeed quite simple), but there's a wide enough array of spells that I think they're much more interesting in combat and I feel like the spirits that my shaman can summon are very potent and fun to play with. But then, I'm enjoying the combat on a basic "making people dead is satisfying" level as it is, even with street samurai, and there are some later combats that are a lot trickier.

[Sno]

I was in the middle of a very, very long battle, much longer than most of the levels in the game tend to be, and a sound effect started looping.

Can't reboot the game without losing all my progress in that fight, so i just kind of had to mute down the volume and deal with it.

I'm enjoying the game, but it still needs a lot of work. The riggers seem very buggy in particular, i've consistently found myself retaining control of drones after spending all of their AP or shutting them down, making me able to move and act infinitely with them. That shit seems straight up broken. Also, with my shaman main character, as far as i can tell, one of my skill tree perks just flat out doesn't work. The thing about being able to summon multiple spirits from a summoning point, the game is either really obtuse about that in gameplay, or it's not working.

I've also quite consistently ended up in situations where characters will stop just one square short of where i told them to go. (Which is pretty horrible if it means that guy isn't getting into cover.) It's happened enough that i'm certain it's not me misclicking or just a random one-time glitch. It always happens in narrow spaces around a lot of objects and at the edge of a character's movement range, it's like the way the game is calculating and displaying the range of movement isn't totally meshing up with the actual movement range of the character or something.

Lots of crappy UI things too, like how it's hard to click on something immediately north of a character, and the pathfinding really, really wanting to send my guys through those shaman barriers i've set up. (There's no way to deal with that, not without simply spending a bunch of extra AP taking multiple steps around those barriers.)

 

The perspective setting for the graphics also just creates tons of weird visual glitches.

ALL OF THAT SAID.

I think this game is loaded with potential, it feels like it's a few small patches away from being pretty amazing. The whole combat system starts out feeling like somebody thought that new X-com game was pretty keen, but once you get deeper into things, it manages to feel like its own thing. It's pretty damn satisfying when you're juggling a soldier and three other characters controlling six different summons across both reality and cyberspace. I also think the story is pretty alright, and it's probably one of the prettiest isometric games i've seen. l just hope they deal with some of these technical issues before they start putting out the other campaigns. (This one, the main one, is supposed to be a spiritual sequel to the SNES game. Jake was the protagonist of that game, if you didn't know. The next campaign is supposedly more inspired by the Genesis game, and so will be more open-ended and a little less story-driven, while featuring characters from that game.)

Also, i've been playing on hard, i think i'd probably recommend that. I think i'd have become bored by now if i was playing on normal.

[Gormongous]

Also, with my shaman main character, as far as i can tell, one of my skill tree perks just flat out doesn't work.

 

Same here, two skills on the Rifle tree never showed up for my character. Like I said before, it's got a lot of weird little usability things that I hope they fix up.

[Sno]

As a warrior it's basically fallout 1 combat with a "cover" system, sort of reminds of me of fallout tactics a little too for whatever reason. I could be totally wrong, but it doesn't seem like the cover is doing anything, with a UI presentation that screams Xcom to me, it just simply isn't, for a lot of justifiable reasons. I also do't think the enemy UI takes advantage of the cover system, which leads me to believe it's just sort of tacked on and not a live or die thing like Xcom... again they are two different games, so I'll stop comparing.

I'll assume that by UI, you mean AI.

So, i'm pretty sure the AI does utilize cover.

Playing as a shaman, i have the ability to place down barriers that damage characters passing through them while also acting as cover points for characters adjacent to them. (The game makes it a little confusing, it won't show the cover icon when you mouse over adjacent squares, but once a guy is in place next to the barrier, he'll be marked as in cover.)

So there's two ways you can use this barrier ability, you can set up traps to slow melee enemies that will race directly at you, or you can set up defensive points for your own team. The risk with the former is that, while melee enemies will charge through and take physical damage and ap damage, enemies with ranged weapons will run over and hunker down next to your barriers and use them against you.

The AI, in general, isn't all that great, but it does have moments where it at least seems to be acting intelligently.

Also, the shaman class is tons of fun.

[Sno]

... And now i'm in what i suspect is the final area of the game, and one of the characters that was assigned to my party does not seem to be able to use one of the spells his inventory says he should have. The game shows that it's equipped, but it also doesn't show up in any of the ability menus.
 

Man, and riggers really are just sort of fucked. In addition to all the other issues, you're supposed to be able to send drones through vents to open up flanking opportunities, but many of the times i've had riggers along in my party, i've seen those vents be just straight-up impassable. Some random map tiles aren't laid out right or something, there's just no way to send the drone all the way through the vent, even though the vent is clearly connecting two gameplay spaces and clearly intended for that purpose. If it was just once, i wouldn't even think twice about it, but i've seen bugged vents on at least three missions.

 

At least it doesn't crash.

[feelthedarkness]

Oh no, my first character is a rigger! It felt so cyberpunk.

[Sno]

The rigger is a really cool class, and i don't think any of these issues i ran into with them are actually game-breaking, but SRR does need some patching.

[mikemariano]

Hey, I'm a rigger, too!  I've only seen vents used in story scenes, not in combat.

 

It is fun to have my two drones open doors and be the first wave assault while I'm just hanging in a corner somewhere else.  The repair costs are adding up, though!

[Dewar]

Hey, I'm a rigger, too!  I've only seen vents used in story scenes, not in combat.

 

It is fun to have my two drones open doors and be the first wave assault while I'm just hanging in a corner somewhere else.  The repair costs are adding up, though!

 

I'm thinking about bringing along 3 riggers on my next run, then they have to worry about repair costs, not me

[Sno]

Hey, I'm a rigger, too!  I've only seen vents used in story scenes, not in combat.

 

It becomes a common map feature in the second half of the game, you're probably still pretty early in the game.