Percent chances were a mistake.

• Shadowrun: Dragonfall
  

  46 hours playtime

  12 of 39 achievements

This is a turn-based tactics game. Similar to its predecessor, you use the mouse to move and examine icon-laden objects outside of combat, use AP to move and attack during combat, and create your character at the beginning of the game (with all the same options from before available and exactly zero new ones). There are some notable changes, though: in the last game, examining an unimportant object would just have a yellow text window appear for a few seconds rather than display a proper text box that you could take your time reading. In this game, not only is that exactly the same, but it has also been extended to combat abilities, so you either need to be a quick reader or you’ll have to mouse over the same icon a couple times just to know what the move does. The game still has fog of war, but now you can click in the darkness, which makes navigating the hub a bit quicker. On top of this, the point-and-click elements seem to have been toned down (at least in comparison to that one segment in the Universal Brotherhood in the last game) while the combat throws more units at you (and said units use AOE attacks more often). However, the most major change is how progression is handled. The previous game was more linear, with only the occasional side mission. This game, on the other hand, is only half story missions, while the other half is you taking on side quests until the game decides you can continue the campaign. Also, only some of the side quests count toward progression while the others are just optional (though they can unlock things like more items in the shops or upgraded attacks). This game also has far fewer team members to choose from, but you do have a few core members that don’t cost any money to hire.

Knowing how easy the last game was, I decided to try out hard mode. However, it turns out I misinterpreted the Reddit post: the game might increase the enemy’s hit chance, but the more blatant and further reaching consequence is that YOUR hit chance DECREASES. Rather than the 99-70% range that normal mode had (and 70% is already pretty bad; just ask Fire Emblem fans), hard mode’s range is closer to 40-70%, and that 70% is rare and only if you get at point-blank range and use the “increase hit chance” spell. It’s so bad, I got the “land a shot with less than 30% hit chance” by accident because that was the best hit chance I could get at the time. There was even a point where I got game over because none of my team members managed to hit the last enemy in the group. If you read my last post, you might remember that one of the spells has a super-high chance to hit (not that the store description tells you this). Well, that spell goes from being your best attack to being practically your only viable attack (and the hit chance drop is so bad, even this move can drop into the 80s at times); the only exception are AOE attacks since, even if they “miss,” there’s still a small chance that they land close enough to your target to deal damage. I literally just ignored all the other attack spells because of how unreliable the hit chance makes them.

So yeah, combining all that with the fact that the game has more enemies and that said enemies use AOE attacks more often, I did have to use healing items more often. However, this is only because of artificial difficulty rather than any kind of proper challenge. No amount of tactical skill in the world will save you from the game randomly deciding that none of your attacks hit; if it weren’t for that, the game honestly wouldn’t be that much harder than its predecessor. Seriously, this is worse than the hard modes that only increase enemy HP and attack power.

Hard mode notwithstanding, there are some improvements to the last game. For one, enemy reinforcements don’t pop in during the middle of your turn, and outside of the very last battle, they show up far away enough that you actually have time to react before they attack you, which is nice. There are even a few parts where enemies are smart enough to avoid being baited into other rooms where you can just swarm them with your own attacks. There are also timed missions (whether you just have to survive for a certain number of turns or win before then), and while they’re fairly uncommon, they help add a bit of variety. Most Decking segments are still as easy as ever despite hard mode, but there are more opportunities for you to use a Decker, and there’s even an actual boss fight within the Matrix (though you only have one character to fight said boss with, and in hard mode, your hit chance rarely goes above 60% for this part).

Unfortunately, level design is as plain as last time, with the only tiles being ground, wall, and cover (which is the same as wall but presumably provides some kinda defensive bonus if a unit is next to it). This also leads me to another issue: in the previous game, attacks either did normal damage, half damage, or critical damage, while in this game, there are a whole bunch of unexplained factors that could result in the attack doing any number of damage, usually ending up being lower than the stated damage (with critical hits being the only exception). You can flank an enemy and deal less damage than a frontal attack. You can land a hit, but still do no damage because the attack was randomly “blocked.” It’s impossible to anticipate what will happen.

The final battle is also a huge difficulty spike compared to the rest of the game. After a needlessly lengthy segment where you only fight enemies specifically designed to be weaker than the other enemies you’d fight at this point in the game (and that only show up in this mission), you’re greeted with what’s basically an open room with little cover and only three enemies. When you’re around halfway done with those enemies, a swarm of reinforcements show up, and they get first move, meaning you’ll be attacked by enemies that you may have expected, but didn’t know where they’d show up. Also, the mission is timed (8 turns), and the actual final boss only shows up when the timer is around half-up (and of course, he shows up with more units of his own and all of them also get first-turn advantage). Even knowing about the reinforcements ahead of time, I’m not even sure if this battle is possible unless you have the summoner on your team to give you an extra party member, but even then, each turn, the summon has a percent-chance to escape your control (it’s low, but it only needs to happen once, and it goes up each turn). Oh, and let’s not forget that, of course, the final boss has more health and attack power than the surrounding enemies, and you only have a few turns to kill him, and let’s also not forget that even if you do everything right, you still need the game to let your attacks hit.

So yeah, I wouldn’t recommend this game, either. There are some minor improvements to how the game handles its combat, but it still only exists to appeal to those who treat gameplay as a means to be more immersed in the narrative rather than those who expect the gameplay to be engaging by itself (why have actual difficulty when you can just make it feel hard by lowering all the player’s hit chances?). It’s everything I don’t like about RPGs rolled into one package.