SHADOWRUN RPG trilogy released on console

It's taken a remarkable amount of time, but the Shadowrun RPG trilogy has finally arrived on console. Shadowrun Trilogy: Console Edition launches today on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox S/X and Nintendo Switch, as well as Xbox Game Pass.

Despite being called a trilogy, these three game are actually independent, self-contained titles. In each game you create a new character in the Shadowrun setting - think of a mash-up of Dungeons & Dragons and cyberpunk, with fantasy races and magic existing in a technologically-advanced near-future - and then embark on a story packed with puzzles, companion characters, dialogue and turn-based tactical combat.

The three games are Shadowrun Returns (aka Dead Man's Switch), Shadowrun: Dragonfall and Shadowrun: Hong Kong. Each game takes around 15-20 hours to complete, rather more if you go for a completionist playthrough, and they are all well worth your time.

Shadowrun: Hong Kong

2056. A youngster from Seattle, raised in tough conditions and left behind when their foster-father, Raymond Black, moved to Hong Kong, is summoned to a meeting with him. Also attending is Duncan Wu, another orphan raised by Black. The meeting turns out to be a trap set by corporate police. Soon both of Black's wards are on the run. Their only hope is a disreputable triad boss, who agrees to help them on the condition they accept a new life as shadowrunners in their employ.

Hong Kong is the third game in the Shadowrun Returns series of games, following on from Dead Man's Switch (2013) and Dragonfall (2014). Like those games, Hong Kong is an isometric roleplaying game where you create and develop your own character, interact with others and carry out missions using tactics of stealth, frontal assault or hacking (or some combination of the three).

If you've played the previous two games things will be familiar, bordering on the identical. The game is bigger than the original game and perhaps matches Dragonfall in size. The story, which is more personal and complex to the player, is actually stronger, as is the writing. The rich background of the pen-and-paper Shadowrun roleplaying game is called upon to provide depth and backstory to the setting, which works pretty well.

Combat is still turn-based, tactical and fun. The other key mechanic, decking or hacking, is much-improved. The original decking mechanic was a bit dull but it's now been replaced by a new version in which you have to stealthily move through the Matrix to find the information you are after. Once you reach your objective you have to use a key-memorisation routine to actually get the info. Failure at any point triggers a response from the automated security systems. It's an entertaining way of handling hacking, certainly a big improvement on the previous two titles, but it also feels a little more cumbersome and time-consuming, especially when most objectives can be achieved through combat or dialogue instead.

The characters are highly memorable this time time around, with your band of adventurers consisting of Duncan Wu, a tough fighter with a chip on his shoulder; a genius dwarf hacker named Is0bel and an orc mage named Gobbet. Optional additions to the party include Racter, a fanatical transhumanist rigger living in the cargo hold of a grounded boat (which serves as your party's HQ). It's the strongest cast assembled so far for a Shadowrun game, with the characters each having fully-fleshed-out backstories and motivations for doing what they do.

The main mission hub is a floating criminal town, which is great. Running across the huge map between your base and the subway does get a little old, however.

For the unimaginative, Hong Kong does pretty much the same stuff as Dragonfall and the original Dead Man's Switch, so if you really liked those games, get this one. It isn't perfect, however.


First up, the game felt a little easier that is predecessors on the equivalent difficulty level. It definitely required less constant updating of equipment or armour than the previous games. I only upgraded my gun to a new one once, and I updated my armour only twice in over 15 hours of gaming. Despite this, enemies remained relatively unchallenging throughout and even the end-of-game boss (who you cheekily have to kill three times to make sure they're actually dead) was a relative pushover. If you want more of a challenge, Hong Kong may not really provide it.

Secondly, the developers went back to Kickstarter to ask for more money to make a bigger and deeper game. They definitely made a bigger game, with some truly huge environments and more NPCs in each area. However, there isn't a lot more actual content. The game takes roughly the same amount of time to complete as Dragonfall, there aren't much more quests and the number of talkable-to NPCs and interactive elements in each location remains fairly low. A struggle of the series has been that it's fairly sparse in terms of things to actually do in the game apart from to follow the main story. There isn't a lot going on in terms of optional missions or little moments of side-flavour. What is there is excellent, well-written and atmospheric, but it's having to support quite a lot of time when you're doing nothing more than running across the huge hub area for the fiftieth time.

If Hong Kong (****) is pushing the limits of the game engine and design to breaking point, at least it remains mostly entertaining when doing so. It's a well-designed, well-written and fun game which is certainly well worth playing and doesn't outstay its welcome. However, I hope it is the last game in the series on this engine and future Shadowrun games will be a little more ambitious and rich in content. It struck me while playing Satellite Reign (which came out a week after Hong Kong) that if the designers of the two games could join forces and combine the gorgeous Satellite Reign engine with the combat and writing of the Shadowrun team, they could produce something really impressive. Hong Kong is available now on PC from Steam.

New BATTLETECH game announced

Harebrained Schemes have announced the development of a new BattleTech game, which they will be funding through Kickstarter this autumn.

Harebrained founder Jordan Weisman is noted for creating the Shadowrun roleplaying game in 1989 and being behind the recent Shadowrun Returns franchise of Kickstarted RPGs (consisting of Dead Man's Switch, Dragonfall and the imminent Hong Kong, slated for release on 28 August). However, he is arguably even more famous for co-creating the BattleTech miniatures game in 1984 and its spin-off RPG line, MechWarrior. The MechWarrior RPG spawned a successful four-title videogame series in the 1990s and early 2000s, with MechWarrior 2 and 4 being particularly acclaimed.

The new BattleTech game takes things back to the beginning. This will be a strategy game featuring turn-based combat as well as RPG elements and the ability to create new mech designs. The game will also be open-ended and will draw inspiration from Mercenaries, the name of the expansions to both MechWarrior 2 and 4. This sub-series features player choice and a branching storyline with multiple endings, as opposed to the more linear storytelling of other games in the series.

BattleTech still has a large, dedicated fan following and following the impressive success of Shadowrun Returns, I suspect this will be one of those Kickstarters which is funded almost instantly.

Shadowrun Returns: Dragonfall

Forty years ago the great dragon Feuerschwinge went on a rampage across Germany, destroying vast areas of land. It was finally killed by the Luftwaffe, working in concert with a dragon-slaying scientist named Vauclair. This event, the Dragonfall, was soon overshadowed as other, even greater disasters threatened humanity.

A band of shadowrunners in Berlin uncover evidence that Feuerschwinge is not dead, and may soon return to destroy the Flux-State. They also discover that something is wrong in the Matrix, with deckers dying whilst trying to access information related to the dragon. The shadowrunners may soon hold the fate of Berlin, and possibly the wider world, in their hands.

Dragonfall is the first expansion to last year's Shadowrun Returns. Calling it an expansion is to actually do it a disservice: it is a larger, more satisfying and better-written game than its forebear. It clocks in at between 15 and 20 hours in length (compared to the original's 10) and addresses most of the first game's technical issues as well as its creative ones.

Once again you start off creating a new character from scratch (you can't port over your character from Dead Man's Switch, the original base campaign) and receiving a message from an old friend. This time you team up with an established band of runners trying to carry out a heist at a remote mansion. Needless to say, things go wrong and soon your band of heroes or, more accurately, morally ambiguous protagonists are laying low at their safehouse. After initial resistance, you manage to take command of the band and have to find out what happened at the mansion, who wants you dead and what the hell is going on. Unlike the original game, you have a full band of runners who accompanies you through the game (though you can still recruit more skilled - but expensive - runners for hire if you really want). This immediately leads to much richer characterisation and character interplay, with you able to check in with your team between missions, learn more about them and help them to deal with their own problems.

Early in the game you are floundering in the dark, so have to take on side-missions to raise funds to hire a data expert to work out what's happening. This gives early missions a sense of freeform structure, with you both heading off to other parts of the city on missions and helping out in the deprived neighbourhood where your base is located. The neighbourhood is home to all manner of individuals and taking the time to get to know them early on pays off later, when you can ask them for aid or get additional missions from them. The game is still linear, but it hides its linearity much better than the original campaign, with you able to tackle missions in a variety of different orders. Completing runs gives you karma points which you can use to upgrade your main character's skills. Again, success is not dependent on combat and, indeed, resolving situations without resorting to guns can give you more karma points then wading in and shooting everything in sight (though this also works).

Dragonfall is a more confident, assured game than its forebear. The writing is stronger, the dialogue smarter and funnier ("Can you sing?" "I was the frontman for a punk band. No, I cannot sing,") and the characters are much more complex, messier people. The game acknowledges that people who'd rather hang out in grotty bars and risk getting killed for a living are likely to have severe issues, and exploits that to provide some rich (and occasionally disturbing) backgrounds. The game offers up a lot of moral quandaries but these are often even nastier and more difficult to deal with than the previous game's, with plenty of moments when it feels you are trying to make the least-worst choice rather than a 'good' one.

The better writing (and the original was pretty good) accompanies some very wise gameplay improvements from the first game. You can now save anywhere, with both quicksave and regular saving options on top of the autosaves. You can even save mid-combat. This eases frustration in the later, epic-length battle sequences. These improvements are also retrofitted into the original Dead Man's Switch campaign. The game also takes you out of turn-based mode once all the enemies in battle are dead rather than forcing you to laboriously move around locations character-by-character, which gets old quickly. The decking sequences in cyberspace are also more optional than necessary, making tasks easier rather than them being mandatory.

On the weaker side of things, the game is still focused on combat. There's more ways to avoid it than before and more satisfying conversation options, but almost all of your skills are based on their value in combat. Given that the pen-and-paper Shadowrun RPG is based more around small-scale heists, trying to extract information without the enemy ever being aware of your presence and fighting in the shadows, Dragonfall's emphasis on combat and massive explosions over stealth is a bit odd. There's also the fact that, for the second game in a row, you are trying to save the world, which is much higher stakes than normal for the setting. At least this time around the plot ties in with a core part of Shadowrun lore and is set up from the off, rather than Dead Man Switch's abrupt and unconvincing stakes escalation in its closing hour or so.

Dragonfall (****½) is not flawless, but it builds on the impressive foundations of Shadowrun Returns to deliver a well-written, compelling adventure. Much-improved gameplay systems make the game far more rewarding, with some very memorable characters and very satisfying combat. It is available now via Steam.

Details emerge on SHADOWRUN: DRAGONFALL

Harebrained Schemes have released some new info on the first major expansion to their recent hit RPG, Shadowrun Returns. Formerly entitled Berlin, the new expansion has now been renamed Shadowrun: Dragonfall, though it will still be predominantly set in Berlin.

In addition to the name change, the expansion will feature upgrades to the engine, including the much-requested ability to save anywhere (this feature will also be patched back into Shadowrun Returns itself). The expansion will differ in format from the linear main game and will instead be based around hubs where, as well as pursuing the main storyline, the player will be able to pursue a large number of optional side-missions.

Shadowrun: Dragonfall will be released in January 2014.

Shadowrun Returns: Dead Man's Switch

The mid-21st Century. The world has been changed by an extraordinary event that has returned magic to the world and transformed millions of people into other races: elves, dwarves, orcs, trolls and other creatures of myth and legend. Technology and magic coexist in the shadow of vast skyscrapers, used by both the super-corporations that are supplanting the nation-states of the world and the shadowrunners, agents and mercenaries working for hire. When an old friend dies and sends a message from beyond the grave, you are called upon to run the shadows once more and find out what happened to him, and why.

The story behind Shadowrun Returns is almost as interesting as the game itself. Not satisfied with the course of the Shadowrun RPG franchise on computers in recent years - particularly the poor action game from 2007 - the franchise's creator Jordan Weisman licenced the rights back to his world and set about funding a new, 'old-school' RPG set in the world. This would be a somewhat small-scale game that eschewed modern, cutting-edge (and very expensive-to-create) 3D graphics in favour of story, writing and a more stylised art style. It would also be made for fans and funded by them: Weisman raised just under $2 million for the game via Kickstarter. A number of other companies have followed suit, but Shadowrun Returns is the first major Kickstarter-funded CRPG to make it to release.

Shadowrun Returns consists of two elements. The first is the base game code and a built-in editor, with which you can make your own campaigns. The editor is quite powerful, and allows for more elaborate campaigns than the one that ships with the game. Thus, new campaigns or modded versions of the base one will be released in the coming weeks and months. Amongst the listed projects are a remake of the famous SNES CRPG from the early 1990s, for example. This will extend the game's longevity extensively.

The second element is Dead Man's Switch, which is the campaign that ships with the game. Limitations in budget and development time have restricted the scope and scale of this episode, but it's still more than 10 hours long and features a large number of locations and characters, as well as a huge amount of writing. Rather like the Neverwinter Nights base campaign, Dead Man's Switch can be seen as more of an extended demo of what the editor is capable of, although it is certainly better-written and more entertaining than that older game's base campaign.

You start off by creating a character and choosing your race and gender. There are no classes as such, but archetypes that automatically set you up as a warrior class (a 'street samurai') or a cyberhacker ('decker'), a user of drones ('rigger') or a magic-user ('mage'). You can ignore these and funnel points into different skill as you see fit, to create a combat-focused character who can also do a bit of hacking on the side or a rogue-like character who can drop the occasional healing spell. This allows for a great deal of variety in the way you play the game. Your skills are reflected in dialogue choices, some of which open up equipment and even quests that are otherwise unobtainable in the game. Other skills can be used to open up alternate routes through maps, allowing players to bypass combat.

Completing missions (or 'runs', in the game's parlance) results in the player gaining karma points, which can be used to improve their skills and learn new ones. Karma points are only gained for achieving objectives, not engaging in combat, which means the traditional RPG standby tactic of killing every enemy in sight (regardless of it being necessary or not) to help level up is unnecessary. This allows for a greater focus on roleplaying, conversations and characterisation than on simply wasting everything in sight. Combat, when it does happen, is pretty solid. It's a turn-based affair similar to the system used in last year's XCOM, allowing for the use of cover and a mix of movement, firing and going into overwatch to guard against newly-arriving enemy forces. You can use magic, guns, swords, drones and thrown weapons (like grenades) in combat, making it varied and entertaining. For extra variety, deckers (or characters with hacking skills) can sometimes use computer terminals to hack into and turn defences (like turrets) against enemy forces.

You can only create and consistently use one character, but you can hire additional help for runs. Some other characters may also volunteer to join you. Hired help require funds to pay for them, and along with a steady stream of weapon and armour upgrades (which, in a refreshing change, have to be bought from vendors rather than found on dead enemies) this makes for a more involved money-management system than in most roleplaying games. That swanky new shotgun or suit of body armour may be awesome, but buying it will also mean having to do the next run with only three people rather than four. Shadowrun Returns is a more thoughtful game than most recent RPGs when it comes to managing your resources and it's possible to make some serious mistakes, so be careful with the decisions you make.

The game's storyline is fairly basic (a colleague's murder automatically triggers a message from him asking you to investigate) but unfolds with a number of intelligent twists and turns. The writing is above average for this kind of game, helped by the fact that there's no expensive voice acting. This allows for much more dialogue than normal in these sort of games, which opens up a lot more information on character and worldbuilding. The bouncer at the nightclub/bar which serves as your HQ for most of the game is more fleshed-out and has more of a personality than many major characters in AAA RPGs, for example. Unfortunately, the story takes a turn for the bizarre rather later on and the introduction of a previously-unknown power group who helps you out for the final mission, whilst a treat for long-term Shadowrun fans, feels like an unsatisfying deus ex machina for newcomers to the franchise.

The good writing (a ropey ending notwithstanding), solid characterisation, satisfying combat and great artwork are let down by a few problems, however. The game sometimes gets confused about your characters' placement and it's not uncommon to click on an enemy to fire at them and instead send your character running towards them. Killing all of the enemies in a location often doesn't end combat as it should, forcing you to undertake the rest of the role-playing-based exploration of the area in turn-based mode, which is slow and labourious. The game is extremely linear, not allowing free exploration of already-reached areas (so make sure you've combed every single location for potential items of interest before moving on). More annoying - to the point of losing the game half a star - is the absence of a 'save anywhere' feature. The game saves on loading new areas, but not necessarily on area transitions. There is no quicksave or manual save option. The game's linearity doesn't make this too much of a problem until the final few areas, which are both extremely large and packed with combat encounters. Bad luck can force you back 15-20 minutes to the start of the area, which is frustrating and unnecessary.

Shadowrun Returns: Dead Man's Switch (****) belies its low budget with impressively stylised visuals, great combat and good writing. Seeing the return to the deeper and more interesting RPGs of a decade or so ago is satisfying, but the game confusingly also embraces some of the more irritating weaknesses of modern RPGs: an iffy ending, relentless linearity and checkpoint-based saves which are often badly placed. Overall, though, the game is a lot of fun, its low price, focus and intriguing setting overcoming some minor frustrations. The game is available on PC from Steam right now. A second official campaign, Berlin, is due for release at the end of the year.

Trailer for SHADOWRUN RETURNS

Shadowrun Returns is a Kickstarter-funded, turn-based RPG based on the Shadowrun franchise. A mash up of cyberpunk and fantasy, Shadowrun Returns is set in a future where magic has returned to the world, along with non-human creatures like orcs, trolls, dwarves and elves.

Funded mostly by fans and created by Jordan Weisman, the original creator of the Shadowrun world and game, Shadowrun Returns is the the first major Kickstarter-backed video game to be created and released (FTL was also Kickstarter-funded, but only after most of it had already been finished), and is being seen as an important litmus test for the whole notion of crowd-funded video games. The second such game, Wasteland 2, will be released at the end of 2013, followed by the first half of Double Fine's Broken Age early next year.

Shadowrun Returns is looking good at the moment. It will be released on 25 July and will be available through platforms such as Steam.