Shadowrun Chronicles: Boston Lockdown, formerly known as Shadowrun Online, came out of Early Access last week. The tactical turn-based game is the latest set in the cyberpunk Shadowrun universe and the second that takes a crack at multiplayer. As a fan of the setting, I decided to take a close look at the game and see if it was any good.
For those unfamiliar with the Shadowrun franchise, its origins are traced to a tabletop role-playing game set in a world where magic, technology and intrigue are central to the experience. Expect cybernetic limbs, futuristic weapons, corporate espionage, magic, the usual fantasy races as well as dragons. We've previously gotten the rather fun Shadowrun Returns and Shadowrun: Dragonfall on Linux and will get the upcoming Shadowrun: Hong Kong - these games have many fans and have gotten positive attention. Shadowrun Chronicles is made by a different studio than those games but is part of the canon. The game is set years after the events of the previous entries, meaning that there are nods and hints for veterans but it is still accessible for those playing a Shadowrun game for the first time.
It might take a bit of time for new players to make sense of what kind of build they want to make when creating a character. There's descriptions in the creation screen but there's a lot of choices and it isn't always clear how the character types work. The skill trees with different categories aren't exactly intuitive either. The player is given ultimate freedom in picking from any amount of categories so it's easy to take skills from different categories that don't mesh well together.
The gameplay of Shadowrun Chronicles consists of main story missions and side missions that play out in a turn-based manner with players and AI sequentially issuing orders. The core of the system is very similar to the XCOM reboot: characters can generally perform only two actions per turn, moving and using an ability. Depending on where the characters' experience has been spent on the skill tree they have access to different abilities. With missions only supporting 2 or 4 characters, it's generally important to have characters that complement each other in types of damage they deal as certain enemies aren't affected by certain damage sources.
Missions can be played alone or with a group of players. I mostly spent my time playing alone and the game fortunately provides premade henchmen that can be placed in the player's group for missions. I tried playing a mission or two with players and found that to be a more or less seamless experience. With a shared player hub between missions, where players can buy equipment and take side-quests, and a global chat, it's easy to find a group to tackle a mission together. I appreciate the effort the developers made to make the game perfectly enjoyable either alone or with friends and this system is one of the better parts of the game.
However, the core gameplay is essentially troubled. It's way too repetitive. Despite different objectives for each mission (interact with x object in level, find person y, eliminate all enemies), the game inevitably is about killing enemies. There is virtually no avoiding combat. And it always plays out the same way. There are no different elevations of terrain and almost no alternate routes, meaning that all tactical positioning and flanking occurs in the context of moving around bits of cover in the combat area. Occasionally enemies will come to you and sometimes even spawn behind the team's position but instead of this being an extra challenge it mostly is a minor annoyance. What matters most in combat is staying in cover and establishing local numerical superiority.
The various skills characters have are or limited importance. On occasion a door can be opened or a container unlocked. At most you can avoid a small group of enemies by using a skill. There's no real stealth in the game and there's no chance of a peaceful resolution in missions. The game assumes that there'll be combat sooner or later. In fact, outside of the hub, players are stuck in the turn-based movement mode even when there are no hostiles in sight, making controlling the team tedious. Having a balanced team is important because combat isn't easy but by the time the fourth or so mission had come around I had found a team combination that I could take into any situation and expect to come out on top. By taking my time and picking away at small groups of enemies throughout levels there was practically no chance of my failure save for a large string of unlucky missed shots, my own boredom, or server issues.
Another large shortcoming is that there's basically nothing to do or get immersed with outside of combat. A few logs can be found here and there on missions, providing a little background fluff for what's going on. Other than that there are a few NPCs in the central hub and they mostly sell equipment or give out side-quests. Occasionally, after a story mission, they'll have a dialog bubble above their heads and they will talk about whatever is going on in the world. These conversations are completely linear and the player never has a chance to affect dialog. Maybe I've been spoiled by games like Pillars of Eternity or Shadowrun: Dragonfall but it bores me when I'm in the passenger seat when it comes to interacting with NPCs in what is otherwise a role-playing game.
The plot to the game isn't bad but it isn't particularly gripping either. Any Shadowrun veterans will see the development coming from a mile away. I didn't really care about most characters that were introduced and I certainly didn't care for the, at best, mediocre voice acting. Flat deliveries made the voices dull but the out of place accents irked me. Despite the game being set in Boston I mostly heard Australian and anything but New England/Bostonian. Shadowrun is about a globalized world and many foreign words and new slang has shown up so maybe this was a conscious lore decision. Either way, I eventually muted the voices.
Graphically, the game isn't very pretty. Certainly not when compared to the 2D art style of Shadowrun Returns. This is a 3D game with a rotatable camera and with plain-looking textures and player models. It's not an eyesore but it definitely isn't charming or unique by any stretch. There's variety of environments but I never once stopped and thought that the game looked good. Tolerable, like much else in the game.
Music and sound effects aren't bad and sound appropriate to the setting and weapons. The soundtrack has the expected cyberpunk vibe but it's ultimately just plain forgettable.
The game has had its share of technical issues since launch. It's to be expected in any release but it was so bad that it took several days of patience to finally get in enough play time to do this review. The main issue was server load - it translated into plenty of lag between when a player clicked on something and an action was executed. Several patches and sever reboots later and, as of the time of writing this article, the problem seems to be mostly gone. There aren't any really big performance issues in the game otherwise and I got a more or less stable framerate save for the busy hub area where it would sometimes dip quite a bit depending on how many players were on screen.
Overall, I think Shadowrun Chronicles is a very flawed product. Any good points it might have are drowned out with the overwhelming mediocrity of everything else. Missions can be both challenging and fun, particularly if played with a group of people you know, but the combat is neither as refined or varied as the combat in XCOM. Neither is the storytelling particularly good and any interest I might have had in seeing things through evaporated as I realized how many similar missions I would have to go through to make it to the end. The final nail in the coffin for me was that side missions gratuitously reused areas from main missions, usually filling them up with a swarm of enemies to kill. It wasn't worth the grind to get the meagre experience to improve my character.
Gamers with a high tolerance for repetition, love of combat and looking for a multiplayer Shadowrun experience can get quite a bit of mileage out of the game. There's more than enough story missions and side missions to keep players occupied for hours upon end. Those looking for either a good tactical game in the vein of XCOM or a solid story-driven RPG experience will be likely be deeply disappointed. For now it seems that those looking for a good Shadowrun experiences on Linux will have to stick to Shadowrun Returns and Dragonfall by Harebrained Schemes. If Shadowrun: Hong Kong is anything like their previous two games, then we'll soon have three modern Shadowrun games that are vastly superior to Shadowrun Chronicles.
You can get Shadowrun Chronicles on Steam where it's currently discounted for a few days, or grab from Games Republic to support GOL. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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It might take a bit of time for new players to make sense of what kind of build they want to make when creating a character. There's descriptions in the creation screen but there's a lot of choices and it isn't always clear how the character types work. The skill trees with different categories aren't exactly intuitive either. The player is given ultimate freedom in picking from any amount of categories so it's easy to take skills from different categories that don't mesh well together.
The gameplay of Shadowrun Chronicles consists of main story missions and side missions that play out in a turn-based manner with players and AI sequentially issuing orders. The core of the system is very similar to the XCOM reboot: characters can generally perform only two actions per turn, moving and using an ability. Depending on where the characters' experience has been spent on the skill tree they have access to different abilities. With missions only supporting 2 or 4 characters, it's generally important to have characters that complement each other in types of damage they deal as certain enemies aren't affected by certain damage sources.
Missions can be played alone or with a group of players. I mostly spent my time playing alone and the game fortunately provides premade henchmen that can be placed in the player's group for missions. I tried playing a mission or two with players and found that to be a more or less seamless experience. With a shared player hub between missions, where players can buy equipment and take side-quests, and a global chat, it's easy to find a group to tackle a mission together. I appreciate the effort the developers made to make the game perfectly enjoyable either alone or with friends and this system is one of the better parts of the game.
However, the core gameplay is essentially troubled. It's way too repetitive. Despite different objectives for each mission (interact with x object in level, find person y, eliminate all enemies), the game inevitably is about killing enemies. There is virtually no avoiding combat. And it always plays out the same way. There are no different elevations of terrain and almost no alternate routes, meaning that all tactical positioning and flanking occurs in the context of moving around bits of cover in the combat area. Occasionally enemies will come to you and sometimes even spawn behind the team's position but instead of this being an extra challenge it mostly is a minor annoyance. What matters most in combat is staying in cover and establishing local numerical superiority.
The various skills characters have are or limited importance. On occasion a door can be opened or a container unlocked. At most you can avoid a small group of enemies by using a skill. There's no real stealth in the game and there's no chance of a peaceful resolution in missions. The game assumes that there'll be combat sooner or later. In fact, outside of the hub, players are stuck in the turn-based movement mode even when there are no hostiles in sight, making controlling the team tedious. Having a balanced team is important because combat isn't easy but by the time the fourth or so mission had come around I had found a team combination that I could take into any situation and expect to come out on top. By taking my time and picking away at small groups of enemies throughout levels there was practically no chance of my failure save for a large string of unlucky missed shots, my own boredom, or server issues.
Another large shortcoming is that there's basically nothing to do or get immersed with outside of combat. A few logs can be found here and there on missions, providing a little background fluff for what's going on. Other than that there are a few NPCs in the central hub and they mostly sell equipment or give out side-quests. Occasionally, after a story mission, they'll have a dialog bubble above their heads and they will talk about whatever is going on in the world. These conversations are completely linear and the player never has a chance to affect dialog. Maybe I've been spoiled by games like Pillars of Eternity or Shadowrun: Dragonfall but it bores me when I'm in the passenger seat when it comes to interacting with NPCs in what is otherwise a role-playing game.
The plot to the game isn't bad but it isn't particularly gripping either. Any Shadowrun veterans will see the development coming from a mile away. I didn't really care about most characters that were introduced and I certainly didn't care for the, at best, mediocre voice acting. Flat deliveries made the voices dull but the out of place accents irked me. Despite the game being set in Boston I mostly heard Australian and anything but New England/Bostonian. Shadowrun is about a globalized world and many foreign words and new slang has shown up so maybe this was a conscious lore decision. Either way, I eventually muted the voices.
Graphically, the game isn't very pretty. Certainly not when compared to the 2D art style of Shadowrun Returns. This is a 3D game with a rotatable camera and with plain-looking textures and player models. It's not an eyesore but it definitely isn't charming or unique by any stretch. There's variety of environments but I never once stopped and thought that the game looked good. Tolerable, like much else in the game.
Music and sound effects aren't bad and sound appropriate to the setting and weapons. The soundtrack has the expected cyberpunk vibe but it's ultimately just plain forgettable.
The game has had its share of technical issues since launch. It's to be expected in any release but it was so bad that it took several days of patience to finally get in enough play time to do this review. The main issue was server load - it translated into plenty of lag between when a player clicked on something and an action was executed. Several patches and sever reboots later and, as of the time of writing this article, the problem seems to be mostly gone. There aren't any really big performance issues in the game otherwise and I got a more or less stable framerate save for the busy hub area where it would sometimes dip quite a bit depending on how many players were on screen.
Overall, I think Shadowrun Chronicles is a very flawed product. Any good points it might have are drowned out with the overwhelming mediocrity of everything else. Missions can be both challenging and fun, particularly if played with a group of people you know, but the combat is neither as refined or varied as the combat in XCOM. Neither is the storytelling particularly good and any interest I might have had in seeing things through evaporated as I realized how many similar missions I would have to go through to make it to the end. The final nail in the coffin for me was that side missions gratuitously reused areas from main missions, usually filling them up with a swarm of enemies to kill. It wasn't worth the grind to get the meagre experience to improve my character.
Gamers with a high tolerance for repetition, love of combat and looking for a multiplayer Shadowrun experience can get quite a bit of mileage out of the game. There's more than enough story missions and side missions to keep players occupied for hours upon end. Those looking for either a good tactical game in the vein of XCOM or a solid story-driven RPG experience will be likely be deeply disappointed. For now it seems that those looking for a good Shadowrun experiences on Linux will have to stick to Shadowrun Returns and Dragonfall by Harebrained Schemes. If Shadowrun: Hong Kong is anything like their previous two games, then we'll soon have three modern Shadowrun games that are vastly superior to Shadowrun Chronicles.
You can get Shadowrun Chronicles on Steam where it's currently discounted for a few days, or grab from Games Republic to support GOL. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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This was a very well written review, BTRE. Covered all aspects of the game from graphics to audio, gameplay to story, systematically breaking down the game to the components within and pointing out the flaws therein.
Keep up the good work, this is how a review should be!
Keep up the good work, this is how a review should be!
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Oh and the name doesn't mean anything but coincidentally could be pronounced as "Buttery" which suits me just fine.
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