It's a rarity for me to finish a game due to one) lack of skill and two) drifting away to do something else but those who saw my status a few days ago know I've got another under my belt. But I wasn't that happy. Shadowrun Returns (I just wanna quickly point out this is the base original game, and not the Dragonfall version that came out soon after. It might be better) So, Shadowrun is an amazing setting. For those who don't know it's a Cyberpunk RPG setting but mixed with fantasy, so there is magic, elves and dragons around. SR seems to be based on the same rules for creating your character, though I can't be 100% sure as it's almost a decade since I played the pen and paper version. The gameplay itself is mostly turn based combat, based by the looks of things on the X-Com engine. Which mean, and those who play X-com will see this complaint coming, the Random Number Generator is EVIL! Or at least seems to have rounding errors. I tried to follow the hit/miss ratio for attacks, and there does seem to be an imbalance with what it says the odds are. A 66% chance seems to miss half the time, 75% is closer to two-thirds. And a 99% chance, which should be 1 miss in 100 attacks, is practically 1 miss in 20. The combat AI is also messed up. If you try to play tactically, putting your characters into cover and stuff, the enemy will just run up into your face. Plus, because of a lack of information displayed (compared to, say, Fire Emblem: Awakening, which is also Turn based tactical combat and one of my fave games) I never feel like I can make informed actions, and coupled with the Leeroy Jenkins AI and the RNL plotting against you, combat becomes a boring slog. The lack of info is also notable in the character creation/upgrade screen. The Quickness stat for example increases your chance to hit with ranged weapons and chance to dodge, but it doesn't tell you by how much for each point. So is improving your chance to dodge better, or upping your Hit Points? It tells you how much your HP increases by, but not your dodge. And then you have skills like Drone Control, which tell you exactly what each point in the skill does (+3% accuracy for drone, +1 armour etc) As for the campaign, well, it starts great. A sort of Noir detective story where a dead friends hires you via a prerecorded message after his death to track down his killer. That section of the story is fun and entertaining. Then, once you've tracked down the killer (spoiler time but it's pretty obvious)you find someone was behind him. At which point the story goes insane going from this killer plot to a 'you have to SAVE THE WORLD' plot which had only one tiny hint at, and that hint didn't give any indication how *bleep*ing silly things are. I would say the plot would be something you'd expect to see in Doctor Who, but Dr Who already DID the story. Okay in one of the audio dramas but still.... But there are gameplay issues with it too. One mission requires you to enter cyberspace. Now, you're not told beforehand it's required, but you are given a character who is able to do so. But, unless you brought another character with the ability to enter cyberspace, she'll be overwhelmed by the defences, and you;re stuck. And that's in EASY mode. One mission restart required! (Or would be if I hadn't cheated and given my character full XP points) And on the last mission, hope your character knows how to use shotguns. Cause the bad guys you fight are only hurt by this one special weapon which is a shotgun. And you only get three in your team of four. And, at best they give you a 75/80 chance to hit, which is closer to 2/3rds. Oh, and it gets worse. They only get two shots before needing to reload (each character gets two or three actions, so at best two shots and a reload) And the bad guys are only vulnerable for one turn. So... 60% chance to hit, two shots each, one turn. And it takes three shots to kill the badguy. Awkward if you're swarmed by..well... more than one of the bad guys. I don't want to hate this game, I enjoyed it at the start. But when the plot went crazy, and the difficultly jumped up, it just became a chore. If I didn't know exactly how far I had to go I would have quit without finishing and not gone back.
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