The year is 2054 and your old friend Sam has been murdered in Seattle. You’ve been hired to find the killers and bring them to justice, one way or another. Soon you’ll be embroiled in a mystery that expands from missing organs, an antagonistic detective and biker gangs all the way up to the dynastic control of one of the largest Megacorps.
If the game did not suffer from game breaking bugs I would have rated it 6/10. Unfortunately I was forces to load a previously saved game because the game stopped responding to input or I couldn't pick up a mission-critical item.
Other reasons why I gave Shadowrun Returns only a 5/10, even though I mostly enjoyed the playthrough:
- Lacking in depth. Class and race choice don't seem to matter. Very little use for skills of which the player can expect to open up alternative possibilities.
- Extremely linear game, both in dialogue and 'physical' routes. Alternative routes are offered only once in the whole game. To use them the player needs to have drones with him/her in the party, else he/she still has only one route to follow. Because of the linearity the game feels more like an interactive story instead of a game in which the player's actions have impact on the world.
- The levels, both indoor and outdoor, feel very empty. The NPCs are all static and there is no ambient sound.
- 'Hard' difficulty, on which I played the game, is not hard at all. I did not die once and actually never came really close.
I just started playing the Steam workshop entry 'Shadowrun Unlimited' and from what I have read this fixes quite a few of these problems. The mods may add (higher quality) replayability, so that's a pro for the game as user generated content platform.