Shadowrun: Dragonfall - Director's Cut

With the recent influx of old-school, isometric RPGs, I had found myself in the mood to give one of them a shot. Shadowrun: Dragonfall attracted me for a couple of reasons. Its cyberpunk setting is a little less played out than the likes of Pillars of Eternity. The game being both shorter and having a more controlled structure than the vast open-world RPGs of recent years felt rather novel. Despite having recently played numerous RPG heavyweights such as Dragon Age: Inquisition, Witcher 3, Fallout 4, and Xenoblade Chronicles X, Dragonfall easily holds its own with the best of contemporary RPGs.

I am by no means a Shadowrun expert. If you are looking for any kind of breakdown of how this game compares to other entries in the series or how well it follows the rules of the tabletop game, I haven’t touched Shadowrun since college. I also can’t compare this version to the original downloadable campaign released for Shadowrun Returns.

If you’re not familiar with Shadowrun, take Dungeons and Dragons, mix in Neuromancer, hit frappe, and enjoy. It’s a universe where your party can consist of an elf hacker, a human magic user, and a dwarf with half a dozen cybernetic implants. There be dragons in this universe, but some of them run corporations. Thankfully, Dragonfall does not require an intimate knowledge of any existing lore. The game doesn’t so much stop to explain the universe to you, but eases you into it through both exposition and dialogue.

Dragonfall takes place in Berlin. You play a Shadowrunner who has been brought in by an old colleague to help on what’s supposed to be a simple mission. Naturally, things go awry, and you soon find yourself thrust into something beyond what you signed up for. While the setup might sound fairly standard for the genre, the plot defies quite a few genre conventions. Your character and your fellow team members have no interest in saving the day. Rather, the setup is this: you’re in a bad situation. You need a lot of money, and you need it fast.

If you like RPG stories with plenty of morally ambiguous choices, you’ll love Dragonfall. Whereas the vast majority of RPGs give you little motivation to engage in repugnant activities, Dragonfall is an actively harder game if you try to play your character as a straight-laced do-gooder. There isn’t so much a set path you go down if you want to play such a character versus if you want to play kind of a jerk. The missions are what they are. The objectives are what they are. If your conscience won’t allow you to engage in certain activities, you won’t get the money and karma points associated with it. It’s as simple as that. Your situation is bad, time is short, and you need to weigh each situation as it comes against your need for resources.

Much like in a tabletop campaign, the game is of a set length with a set amount of missions. Between missions, you return to the game’s hub, the Kreuzbasar. Because you can’t grind, you need to carefully decide how to spend both your karma points, Shadowrun’s equivalent of skill points, and how to spend your money. Throughout most of the campaign, both of these will be in short supply. Around the point the game’s final act begins, you’ll have just about enough money to afford most high-level equipment if you pinched pennies throughout the game. This goes doubly so for skill points. When I finished the game, I wasn’t even able to max out my decking or rigging skills even after putting almost all of my points into the related trees.

There are a lot of advantages Dragonfall enjoys thanks to having a more fixed structure. While open-world RPGs certainly enjoy their fair set of advantages, they often suffer from bloat. Large sections of these games can feel aimless, and often times the pacing of sizable sections can feel off (Witcher 3, Dragon Age: Inquisition, I’m looking at you). Even if you do everything in the game, Dragonfall clocks in at about forty hours. Throughout that time, everything feels meaningful. The missions themselves often feature multiple paths and options based on your character build. This is not me saying this is an inherently superior design path to open-world RPGs, but games like Dragonfall do remind you there have been trade-offs as the Skyrimification of the genre has occurred.

The game has no shortage of potential character build options. One area where Shadowrun is a bit unique compared to other RPGs is you don’t so much pick a class, but you have the option to pick an “archetype.” Archetypes are essentially just pre-built starting characters. Deckers are your hackers, Shamans, your mages/summoners, and so on. You can also forego picking an archetype and make a completely custom character. It can be a bit intimidating if you’re not familiar with Shadowrun mechanics. While it might sound like this gives you a lot of customization and it does, you need to keep in mind this is not a game in which you grind. You want to set out with and stick to a plain for your character or you might get yourself into a situation where later missions are far more difficult.

While the game does a good job of accommodating a variety of builds, there are some abilities that do get short-changed. For instance, when you invest in the charisma stat, you get to pick etiquettes which allow for special dialogue options. While there were a number of occasions where, for instance, Security and Academic proved useful, I think I saw a prompt for “Shadowrunner” once during the entire campaign.

Other builds tend to compliment your party members better than others. I played a Decker/Rigger build. While there were numerous role playing opportunities where decking allowed me to avoid a fight or to skip tracking down a password, the game didn’t make the best deck available until very close to the end of the game. Meanwhile, the Decker in my party received it maybe four or five missions before that point. It was frustrating watching said Decker surpass my own character in the primary skill I was building around for a good twenty percent or so of the game. With that said, given the wide variety of builds the game allows for, there was never a moment where a section was impossible so long as I continued to focus on my build.

One final note on builds: the game is inconsistent on letting you use your party members to pass skill checks. While this makes sense during dialogue conversations, it is rather frustrating having a Shaman in your party who should be able to pass the spell casting skill check the game presents only to be artificially denied by the game.

Dragonfall’s combat is a bit of a mixed bag. I really liked the overall theory of what the combat system was, but, in practice, it could often be frustrating. Combat is turn-based and sort of a cross between SRPG and XCom. You move characters around and take actions using action points. There is a cover system. On top of reducing chance to hit, cover also has the potential to reduce damage by a percentage. If an enemy has 80 HP, has heavy armor, and is in half cover, they can be pretty resilient. Grenades have a hit percentage as well and also can’t destroy cover, so they aren’t necessarily the solution in such cases. So what you ideally might want is to do is move your party into a flanking position. However, for most of the game your characters only have 2 AP per turn. And taking out even the most standard of enemies often requires three to five attacks of some kind to connect. The result is this weird sensation where you’ll be trying to approach combat tactically, but the RPG elements of the game sort of deny you what you think should work. It’s a bit difficult to explain, and it’s not something that will necessarily bug everyone.

The combat scenarios themselves suffer a bit from a lack of variety. Most encounters put your team against three to six enemies, typically in a rather small room. Some scenarios chain together several such encounters into a larger one. In a departure from the genre’s norm, the computer’s units get the first turn in most encounters. While sometimes this turn will consist of moving units into cover to set up the encounter, it often times results in the computer getting several free shots at your party while they’re in the open. This might not mean as much if you’re playing a beefier character, but if you’re playing a Shaman or a Decker, two free shots can leave your character near death.

My feelings towards Dragonfall’s combat mechanics are complicated. In the end, most combat sections boiled down to stunning enemies through grenades and abilities during my first turn so I could slowly eliminate them one at a time. Perhaps the game’s engine simply couldn’t accommodate the scope of what Harebrained was aiming for. I did enjoy the game’s combat mechanics more than not though. However, I should caution that gamers who dislike random elements in combat might come away frustrated with the game. While I will not make any claims the game’s stated accuracies are off, I missed enough shots at 80% or greater accuracy throughout the campaign that I can see it frustrating some players.

That being said, Shadowrun: Dragonfall is still a fantastic game. Whether you’re looking for something a little more old school, a little different, a little more streamlined, or just a plain good RPG, it is well worth checking out. The game holds up well even if you lack nostalgia for either older isometric RPGs or even the Shadowrun series itself.