Review - Shadowrun Trilogy... Old School Cyber-Funk

 

Images courtesy of Harebrained Schemes

I think most trilogies try to improve upon their formula with each iteration. This can be seen with film classics like the original Star Wars trilogy, and also with gaming epics like Mass Effect. It's a tried and true method of getting your audience to continue returning. The stakes have been amped up from piece to piece, and we all want to find out what happens next.

    The same can definitely be said for Shadowrun.

    I never had the privilege of playing the original Shadowrun on SNES, but I was pretty excited to find out that some of the original creators of the work landed themselves in Harebrained Schemes to set up the Kickstarter campaigns needed to flesh out a new series for the title. Now, granted, this trilogy came out quite a few years ago and then was ported to current consoles several years later (still a couple years back, by now), but it was a new foray for me into a cyberpunk world the likes I'd never seen before.

    Shadowrun is almost unique enough to be its own genre. It's certainly a different take on cyberpunk than anyone else has really gone into. This is noted quickly in the character creation menu when you get to choose whether you want to be a dwarf, ork, human, elf, or troll. Just like with classic DnD set-ups, these different races have their pros and cons that can be seen playthrough to playthrough. Oh and let's not forget that dragons are a thing. Again, apparently? I say this because the assortment of various races are actually a reintegration into society due to an event from the 2010s that caused the ancient, all-but-forgotten, races of yore to find themselves back into play. This even caused some "goblinization" of humans who'd been living normal lives until a fateful day around 2012 suddenly had them sprouting horns and an extra few inches of height.

    Goblinization and fantasy elements covered? Check.

    Onto the cyberpunk.

    Shadowrun in many other aspects is established just like any true-blue cyberpunk title. You can get your chrome. You can learn how to deck and expand your mental faculties in order to be the best hacker in the business. Or you can be a street samurai (the only choice, let's be real) and let your chums handle the decking and rigging while you swing a katana into some corpo faces. And that's a lot of what you'll be doing in the Shadowrun Trilogy. Each game has its own narrative that rarely, if at all, coincides with the others. You play 3 distinct protagonists, and each one of them ends up in charge of a crew that is meant to "run the shadows" by performing heists and exposing secrets at the top echelons of corporate life. In Returns, the story is more about a small-time runner trying to find out what happened to their friend who ran a foul of some powers that be. Dragonfall ups the stakes as your crew stumbles across a conspiracy meant to wipe Berlin off the face of the earth. Hong Kong's drama is somewhere in between the two. Millions of lives aren't at stake here, but there's definitely the possibility of a pretty awful existence for tens of thousands if you and your crew can't pull a district out of the proverbial fire.

The Good

I think that the best part of the trilogy is the fact that each one improves on the next. This one is tough to say for a certainty because I do believe that the best character and her individual subplot could be found in Dragonfall. It's a marked improvement on the characters and their overall emphasis in Returns, but even Dragonfall's excellent narrative falls just a tad shy of Hong Kong's. 

Just look at Glory ready to wreak some havoc with those claws.

    I'm not sure I can say enough about the narrative choices, here. They really are just incredible. The writing talent at Harebrained Schemes is top notch, and they really fleshed out these characters with fully three-dimensional pasts, presents, and futures. I was impressed. It goes without saying then that if the characters could be that well-constructed, so could the overarching plots at play with each one of the 3 games.

    The gameplay is another plus for the game. It is very straightforward, don't expect anything even remotely close to XCOM-level tactical decision-making, but I believe that its beauty can be found in its simplicity. The combat is done on a grid of squares where you have to use action points to move and throw grenades, shoot various weapons, swing a blade, deck into enemy mainframes, or cast spells. That's right, there's that fantasy element creeping back to the fore.

    

The Bad

Not everything is sunshine and rainbows. Actually, in a cyberpunk world it isn't supposed to be anyway.

    Regardless, there are a few cons to the trilogy.

    Visuals leave a lot to be desired. This is in spite of the excellent artwork going into the background locales and portraits. Those are great. What fails Shadowrun is really the character art of the individuals and NPCs roaming the game. I'm really not too picky on how something looks, but a lot of these little avatars could have been spruced up pretty easily. It doesn't take a massive budget to just make a human look like a human.

    Sound is essentially absent, minus the cyberpunk flavoring added to different locations. There is no speaking or voice-acting to be found, which is fine by me but won't be by many others. There is a lot of reading, and if there was voice acting involved it would only take even longer to get through some of the information that you have to comb over as a Shadowrunner.

The Glory (an homage in more than name to that wonderful character)

Overall, the Shadowrun Trilogy hits a lot of positive marks with a minimal amount of falling short. If you have any interest in the cyberpunk genre, these 3 games are a must-play. Tactical RPGs interest you? Here you go. Could things have been better? Sure. But hopefully Harebrained Schemes will make enough of a return to justify pouring some resources into an incredible sequel or spin-off in an already-amazing world.

8/10

Glorious

If you want to check out my own trilogy with a fantasy-twist, look no further than The Sovereign