14 DAY TRIAL // 
Shadowrun is a science fiction and fantasy tabletop role-playing game that blends many genres of fiction and fantasy and that has enthralled many souls since its inception in 1989.
With its mature themes and unique blend of cyperpunk, urban fantasy and crime fiction, the speculative universe is a rich setting that has served many players through time and has spawned a couple of video games adaptations.
Shadowrun: Dragonfall is a new campaign for Harebrained Schemes' acclaimed 2013 role-playing game Shadowrun Returns, based, as the name implies, on the classical fantasy universe.
Story
Set in the close future, after magic suddenly makes its return to the world in 2012 and technological advancements blur the line between man and machine, the game offers a unique gameplay experience that blends well-written narrative with varied combat options.
Among the powerful mythological creatures awakened in 2012 was the great dragon Feuerschwinge, who proceeded to devastate the German countryside for months, causing a widespread wave of terror before being shot down, an event henceforth known as Dragonfall.
The other dragons have learned to behave, resorting only to manipulating mankind and the other races and using them as their pawns. Elves, orks, trolls and dwarves now share a home with the reluctant humans, and life – like pretty much everything else – has become a simple commodity.
Shadowrun Returns managed to perfectly capture the spirit of cyberpunk, with the convoluted storylines and overlapping – to a certain point – interests of all parties involved in a certain event, the constant discovery that nothing is what it appears at a first glance, the seeping decadence and the all-encompassing decay that starkly contrasts the corporations' glossy veneer and prosperity, everything lined with a glimmer of hope and with a sense of humanity pervading in unexpected places.
You play the role of such a character, down on his luck and running away from his past, ending up in Berlin when an old acquaintance beckons you over for a job. As things often have a habit of doing, a simple asset retrieval goes south and you find yourself leading a small band of veteran shadowrunners fighting for their lives while uncovering a shadowy conspiracy.
All clues point toward Feuerschwinge still being alive, and as such you and your team have to do whatever is in your power to save yourself and the small haven of Kreuzbasar, along with the people who adopted you as their own, from a gruesome fate.
Gameplay
Shadowrun: Dragonfall expands on the original Shadowrun Returns, adding a new campaign and a handful of new features like being able to save your progress anywhere during the game, along with some new enemies and weapons.
However, the most important addition to the original game is new text, oozing atmosphere and getting cyberpunk fans all giddy, throwing jargon around like no-one's business and presenting another interesting story that's even better than the first one.
Apart from a changed setting, the expansion offers little in terms of new, being content with delivering more of the same quality narrative interspersed with not too difficult combat sequences and the same various skill and background checks that open up new dialogue options and new possibilities to tackle a situation.
For instance, you can hack a turret to make it shoot enemies, lock down a door in order to prevent backup, intimidate people into doing what you want if you're strong enough and other such minor choices that add a lot to the game's flavor.
The biggest asset Shadowrun Returns has is the time the developers took to develop memorable characters who, fortunately for gamers, aren't too busy spitting out one-liners. As such, most of them have a past that they may want to keep hidden and that may end up haunting them from time to time and their own plausible personality, aside from character stats and weapon loadout.
The most fun part about Shadowrun: Dragonfall, as was the case with its prequel, is not shooting people in the face but running around and talking to the world's inhabitants, discovering the universe behind the game, reading emails and BBS posts and chatting with your team between missions.
Even though Shadowrun is a small-scope game, the connection with the living world is very well rendered and it provides an immersive journey that gets you invested, with a multi-threaded plot that is revealed in such a way that it makes you want to find out more.
The way the game fleshes out the world so thoroughly despite its limited palette of interactions is via small interactions such as reading an email of two deckers chatting and learning that you can simply outrun some types of IC that may prove too strong for you to take on, while jacked in.
Finding a tap on a relay and listening in on a distant conversation, answering a ringing phone and receiving mysterious emails will all make the world more believable, giving you the almost paranoid sense that your every move is being watched by unfathomable forces and that no matter what you do, you cannot escape the fate of being a simple pawn fitting into someone else's machinations.
Furthermore, most times you're not sure whether you're doing the right thing or not, whether you are simply lied to and manipulated, what to make of the cryptic pieces of information you stumble upon, which altogether offer a great sense of belonging to a world where you are just a cog, relying on your team and contacts as much as they rely on you.
And the missions themselves are pretty well crafted, you get ambushed and you get to make choices that might backfire, such as accepting a corporate job to tie a loose end that comes with a moral warning, only to find out when it's already too late that you are to kill a shadowrunner, one of your kind, instead of a corporate drone.
Choosing to spare his life comes with risks, because you really need the money and don't know whether he'll follow through with his promise of riches. Additionally, unbeknownst to you, a corporate strike team is patiently waiting outside to check whether you are going to follow through with your promise to your employer, and they'll either give you a lead sandwich or a pat on the back, depending on the choice you make.
This to me seems the real game mechanic behind Shadowrun, more so than the actual combat, that's more like some sort of filler between all the storytelling, and a means to identify the bad guys by which way they point their guns.
It's some fun filler, nonetheless, with some deep customization options and a few decisions about specialization and loadout to be made; but it's generally pretty linear and not too difficult, especially if you play slightly cautiously and you choose to be a deadly street samurai or another such character that takes advantage of cover and range.
It's an overall simple tactical turn-based system that unfortunately takes a heavy blow in the form of inept enemy AI that will generally come prancing into the line of fire and miss a lot of shots, not always making the smartest choices, apart from seemingly wanting to generally shoot you over somebody who's actually in range.
That being said, the system is pretty well laid out, with each race having different affinities that impose restrictions on the maximum level attainable in certain areas, the massive trolls being more adept at combat while the frail elves being more in tune with the mystic forces, for instance.
Progression options for weapons are usually in the form of higher damage, with some additional special shots unlocked at certain levels, and a little more varied for spellcasters, but still keeping things simple enough to keep the focus on action.
Visuals and sound
The game looks beautiful, even though its isometric perspective and limited scope don't offer the option of incredible visuals and make powerful graphics cards seem redundant.
Everything is portrayed in incredible detail, from heaps of trash and debris to neon signs, building facades and the impersonally sterile and clean design of corporate facilities.
The character portraits and models are also quite varied and accurately illustrate how people would look given the game's premises, complete with the personal touches made to their environment such as graffiti and various tech scraps, up to collector's items in high class residences.
The sound production is also top notch, and if a good soundtrack seamlessly blends into the experience and makes you stop noticing it even exists, Shadowrun: Dragonfall's musical score is a perfect fit for the game's atmosphere, with its ominous orchestral and synth rhythms perfectly matching the action on-screen, from tense moments when you're a bad dialogue option away from drawing your gun to just walking around the decrepit cityscape.
The only bad side is that the game lacks voice overs for the dialogue, which given its small scope is not surprising, as the volume of in-game text would take a considerable amount of work, but would also contribute a lot to the game's atmosphere.
Conclusion
Shadowrun: Dragonfall, although bringing more of the same instead of something new, fortunately delivers more of the same blend of captivating narrative and varied gameplay that consecrated the first iteration in the series.
The story is even better, going on missions is always fun and you always sort of expect them to take a turn for the worst, although nurturing a slight hope that everything will just go smoothly this time, and offering a great sense of role playing.
Shadowrun: Dragonfall is definitely a worthy successor and a game no good storytelling enthusiast should miss, for sure one of the best representations of the Shadowrun universe, given its scope.
