Shadowrun Chronicles
Developer: Cliffhanger Productions
Price: $30
Platform: PC
MonsterVine was supplied with a Steam code for review
Shadowrun Chronicles, previously known as Shadowrun Online, is the latest game in a recent resurgence of the well known series in video-game form. The game’s been in early access for a while now and it’s finally earned its official “Out of Early Access” stamp.
The game opens up with your character seeking not-so legal employment as a runner for a local fixer in Boston and things quickly escalate when a dragon escapes from an underground facility and pandemonium ensues. That’s the basic gist of the opening of the game, but you’ll encounter things like gang warfare to corporate espionage and more as you play. The story does have its issues though, being that you don’t really care too much about it or the characters around you. Your only bits of plot are given to you as pre-mission directions and the few NPC’s in the hub aren’t interesting enough for me to bother talking to. It’s a real shame because I love the setting and the voice acting is pretty decent, but the writing itself just isn’t very engaging.
Shadowrun Chronicles is a turn-based strategy game and if you’ve played XCOM or the recent Shadowrun Returns then you know exactly what you’re getting into here. You’ll accept various missions in the hub area, select the teammates you want to bring along, and then head off to your mission. A balanced team is key to victory in this game since you don’t want to jump into a mission filled with robot enemies without bringing hackers to bypass their armor. As with any game in this genre, smart positioning and patience is the only way to survive with enemies willing and ready to flank your team and take advantage of your poor positioning. Unfortunately the game is fairly simplistic compared to its contemporaries. Besides moving your characters into cover you’ll only ever issue attacks or buff/debuff commands. There isn’t really any other sort of strategy to employ in the game besides finding good cover and picking the right team for a mission. Now despite its lack of depth, this doesn’t stop the game from being fairly enjoyable even if it gets a tad repetitive at times.
As you play through the game you’ll earn karma which is used to purchase skills in one of the various skill trees in the game. There are your typical shooter trees but there’s also hacking, spellcasting, summoning, melee, and rigging (a sort of drone control) to sink your teeth into. You’re free to specialize in as many skill trees as you want but you’ll only be able to take advantage of two skill types since you can only carry two weapons into a mission. This means if you go into a mission with a shotgun and the hacking tool you won’t be able to use your spellcasting skills if you invested in any. The only downside to this whole system is that most of the skills to unlock are just upgrades of previous ones. While not a big deal, it is fairly disappointing looking through each tree to see what sort of cool late-game skills you can learn only to see it’s a +3 version of the very first ability.
Now the game was previously known as Shadowrun Online and I’m sure many players were misled by that title; I myself steered clear of this game when I heard of it since I’m not a super big fan of MMO’s. Thankfully the developers changed the name of the game to properly reflect how little of an MMO this really is since the “online” part is only in reference to co-op. You’ll see hordes of players in the social hub and you can click on them to view their stats and equipment, but that’s as much interaction you’ll get with other players besides playing missions with them. I do wish they worked out a better way to connect with other players for co-op because the way it works right now is that you simply shoot a message in the global chat and pray someone sees it. I’ve had numerous requests, or just general questions I had, drown in the sea of messages shooting off in the chat. You could also run around the hub clicking on players and requesting an invite but that just comes off as slightly annoying. By the way, for those who prefer to play alone know that you’re perfectly able to do so; instead of playing a mission with other players you’re able to select a variety of henchmen instead.
Now as we all know, no game is without its technical faults and Shadowrun Chronicles has a few. First off it suffers from a few weird visual hiccups that just come and go throughout play. I’ve seen things like a weird dot popping up in the middle of my screen and not leaving until I started a mission, to skill icons moving on top of other skill icons during a battle. These sort of things don’t happen very often, but they do pop their ugly heads out from time to time.
The Final Word
Despite a few slight issues, Shadowrun Chronicles is a fantastic strategy game to sink your time in this summer.
– MonsterVine Rating: 3.5 out of 5 – Fair
