Cyberpunk

First, let me say that I don't play turn-based strategy games. I'm not a fan of them and also I'm terrible at them. But I am a sucker for cyberpunk and this is Shadowrun so I felt like I should at least try. So I had bought the first two games (Returns and Dragonfall) around the time they released and then... never actually played them. To be fair, I tried playing Dragonfall once, died on the first mission, and gave up. Ten years later (about a month ago), the third game was on sale so I decided to buy it and give the entire trilogy another shot. This time I was able to beat all three games. And now it's time for me to ramble about my thoughts.

I will say that the first game (Returns) was definitely the most janky. I got soft-locked multiple times where an animation would play for the enemy phase and then the game just... wouldn't give control back to me. There were also times where I'd be in the Matrix, walk through a portal, and the game just... wouldn't do anything. And then sometimes I'd Alt+Tab to look at a walkthrough, then Alt+Tab back into the game, and it'd crash. In every case, reloading my last save would work but there were a lot of times where I had forgotten to save for awhile and ended up replaying more than I would've wanted. Overall though, the story here was my favorite of the three.

When I moved on to Dragonfall this time (after my shameful rage-quit a decade ago) I discovered that the first mission was an ambush that you were supposed to fail. Oops. The problem was that all members of your team had to escape (for plot reasons) so the goal was to run away with all members surviving. I hadn't realized that on my first playthrough because every time I lost a single character I'd get a "mission failed". So I had been trying to beat a mission that was designed for me to lose. After finally escaping that first mission, the rest of the game wasn't too bad. They fixed a lot of the jank from the first game so I never had any issues with soft-locks or crashing. Personally though, I wasn't a fan of the story this time around. This might just be me, but I don't think Shadowrun games should have "save the world" storylines. The story was fine, it just had too high of stakes in my opinion. The stakes can be personal to the team, but I don't think it should be world-ending. Others might disagree with me though; I'm no expert on Shadowrun.

The third game, Hong Kong, had some amazing improvements over the first two games. The Matrix sections in this one were really fun because there were now IC Watchers with a vision cone that you could actually avoid. So rather than being forced into combat, you could sneak past IC and keep your detection levels low. I liked that. Again though, the stakes in this game were even higher than the last one. More "end of the world" stuff. Also, maybe I was just tired after playing these three games back-to-back but I didn't care to read all of the lore and talk to all of the characters in this one. It probably deserved more than I gave it.

In the end, I had a good time with the entire trilogy. I set all three games to Easy mode this time (which I probably wouldn't have done a decade ago) and I was able to beat all three. It was definitely a struggle though.

I do recommend picking up any of these three games when they go on sale. Just be sure to save often in that first game. And hopefully you're better at turn-based combat than I am. https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/26635/Shadowrun_Trilogy/

One last thing... Each game has its own Workshop of free user-generated content on Steam and someone recreated the entire Shadowrun SNES game in the Dragonfall engine. I'm seriously tempted to give that a try despite being terrible at these games.