devonrv

I actually bought this game a few years ago, but I put it off since I planned on playing the Genesis/Mega Drive and SNES Shadowrun games first, similar to how I played all of the Strider games in order (except Osman; yet another game I never got around to playing). However, it’s become increasingly clear to me that that’s likely not going to happen for this one, so I finally decided to stop putting it off.

Just according to renraku.

It being given away for free didn’t help matters, either. Oh well.

EDIT: almost forgot the thing:

  • Shadowrun Returns

    23 hours playtime

    no achievements

Anyway, this is a turn-based tactics game with point-and-click-adventure elements. During non-combat parts, you have to click on a location to walk there (WASD and the arrow keys just move the camera), and the distance from your character to your click location determines how fast your character decides to move. The game also has fog of war, meaning you can’t move to an area that is still blacked out, so even though you go to the hub area multiple times and there’s never combat in said hub area, the game won’t let you single-click to move to where the upgrade shops are since that area gets un-explored whenever you go on a mission. Sometimes, a symbol will show up momentarily on an object when it FIRST comes into your view, and if you click on the symbol, you interact with said object: the hand symbol indicates an item you can collect, and a magnifying glass symbol indicates either world-building descriptions or clues for the point-and-click fetchquests you’ll have to do. My issue with them is that they disappear after a few seconds, and mousing over them sometimes won’t get them to reappear. Sure, you can hold “alt” to make all the ones in your view reappear, but that’s only told to the player during loading screens, meaning it only has a small chance to appear at any given checkpoint. What’s even worse is that if you click on it and get prompted with a choice of “do X” or “take no action” and you click “take no action,” there are a couple times where game will remove the icon even from the alt key, as if you chose to do the thing, at which point you have to reload a save if you finish exploring and realize that you actually do want to do X. In contrast, the intentional puzzles are really easy: computer asks for a name and password (always multiple-choice, by the way), and after getting it wrong, an icon suddenly appears over the trash can with a letter that says “Dear X, don’t forget that your password is Y.” Sometimes the information is a bit more spread out, like in the Universal Brotherhood’s office, but that just makes the switch-hunt longer, not harder. When the game’s puzzles aren’t that easy, they’re even easier: there’s one part where you need to get someone to leave the room, and if you speak to them and say “nevermind,” they say something along the lines of “well, it’s my break, so I’m going to leave the room.”

But okay, I’ve already expressed my dislike for point-and-click-style puzzles in previous posts, so can the combat make up for it? Well, that might depend on your build. The game begins with you selecting your species, class, and dialect: species determines the maximums for your stats, class determines what equipment you start off with (I imagine you can easily change classes after the tutorial battle), and dialect only comes into play for unlocking, like, two dialogue choices throughout the entire game, most of which don’t even provide additional benefit; just slightly different responses from NPCs. I chose a mage, and the game ended up being really easy (disclaimer: I played on Normal mode). Not only are all spells cooldown-based rather than MP based (meaning you never have to worry about conservation), but there’s even an attack spell that (almost) always guarantees a 99% hit chance (the highest a hit-chance can get in this game). That’s something you’ll need to rely on later in the game, because just like in Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon, anything with a hit-chance below 80% is practically guaranteed to miss, and evasion is pretty much the only thing the enemies get better at as the game goes on.

In fact, combat in this game is so easy that the game starts to do cheap things in a desperate, unsuccessful attempt to add challenge. There were only two times in the game I got someone on my team killed: the first was during the tutorial mission since, being used to Advance Wars, I didn’t realize clicking a location counted as using AP (which, okay, that was on me), but the second was when I moved too close to a couple of turrets (this being the first time turrets are introduced in the game), and they had a passive ability called “overwatch” (also the first time it shows up in the game) that has them shoot at me if I get too close. Yup: the first time you encounter this ability is when you take damage from it, and both attacks must have criticaled because they brought my full HP team member down to zero HP. After that battle, seemingly every enemy had that passive equipped, but it never got as bad as two at once (and somehow also dealt far less damage, too).

Another cheap thing the game does is, during the final mission, reinforcements will pop in and move in the middle of your turn, so you suddenly have an extra enemy or two to deal with after spending half of your AP dealing with the current enemies.

But like I said: the game is easy enough that you’ll rarely have a character go below half health, much less get killed entirely. In fact, there are “decking” missions where one character in your team has to go into “cyberspace,” but even though this one character regularly has to go against five enemies at once, it’s still really easy to take out a couple enemies before you might need to heal (and I wouldn’t be surprised if some enemies in cyberspace have a 0% hit chance). The game also tries to be unique by making you hire your team on a per-mission basis, and while it’s an interesting idea, I was never strapped for cash and could always hire a full team after spending money upgrading my own gear.

Overall, this game is hard to recommend. It’s more focused on world-building than game-play; even the final boss couldn’t succeed in killing any of my party members (though one ended up with low health, so I used a healing item, resulting in the first time I used a consumable item in the game). There is a “hard” mode and a “very hard” mode, but according to this post, it only increases the enemies’ chance to hit; of course, that kinda doesn’t matter since you can almost always open a door and move behind the wall to lure the enemies to you to kill them before they can attack (which is what I did most of the time anyway), and the attacks I received during the final boss never missed anyway. It might make cyberspace missions more difficult, but not much beyond that.

vigor

lol, there is this game shadowrun hong kong, I’m stuck on the first zone because I cannot get past some snipers. Not my genre at all.

Arbiter Libera

Big thing with Shadowrun Returns trilogy is AI being purposefully crippled to not use all of their APs aka if they move during their turn they won’t also attack you. There is a fix for this out there if you actually want a fair playing field. Both subsequent games are improvements on this entry, though. Kinda wish the modding scene caught on better.

I chose a mage, and the game ended up being really easy (disclaimer: I played on Normal mode).

Mage is clearly the canonical choice seeing as there are no mage companions in the entire trilogy. Keeping spells up to date can get a bit pricey provided you don’t really on clearly intended “story characters” you can easily hire vs going with actual runners you have to pay.

devonrv

Keeping spells up to date can get a bit pricey provided you don’t really [sic] on clearly intended “story characters” you can easily hire

I don’t know about that. I never bought all the spell upgrades as they became available, but I always had thousands of nuyen left over when starting each run, which I imagine would be enough to hire another full-price runner for each mission (though I admit I never hired anyone from the Nephilim Network because they didn’t have mages).

Also, I imagine keeping guns up to date would be equally as pricey, which reminds me that I forgot to mention how the game never explains mechanical differences between all of the guns available (e.g. whether or not it attacks twice with one AP, why the weaker gun is more expensive, etc.); it’s all flavor text, just like Legend of Legacy.

Arbiter Libera

Yeah, I was honestly referring to its sequels more than base game itself. Having companions who are always “hireable for free” gave developers much more accurate count on the amount of money you’d have at any point in time later on. You’re at least likely to find new weapons, less so with spells. I distinctly remember in Hong Kong you’re scrounging for every nuyen and doing all the optional stuff for it.

Deleted

This comment was deleted over 4 years ago.

devonrv

I think you replied to the wrong post.