YouGamers.com

Reviews

Shadowrun

When FASA Studios announced that they were working on a new Shadowrun title, every pen-and-paper geek's mind immediately conjured up an epic role-playing game with technology and magic, mixing up cyberpunk with elves. When FASA continued by stating that the game would be a team-based first-person shooter, many of those geeks immediately accused FASA of blasphemy. "Shadowrun is an RPG - you can't go around messing up things like this". Now that Shadowrun is finally available, the jury is out considering the sentence.

To make things absolutely clear, I reacted neutrally to the announcement revealing this Shadowrun title would be a first-person shooter. There's nothing wrong with making a good shooter out of an existing franchise, regardless of the subject matter. I wouldn't have minded a modern Shadowrun RPG as I have many fond memories about the Super NES Shadowrun title from way back, but I didn't see the point in judging the FPS concept as a failure before seeing what FASA could cook up with this unorthodox approach to the Shadowrun mythos.

To make things even tougher, the Shadowrun team went for the impossible. They stated they would also tackle the task of developing the first console vs. computer cross-platform online FPS game. FASA claimed that they had mastered the Secret Sauce that would allow the Xbox 360 pad jockeys to compete on equal terms with the headshot-happy masters of The Way of the WSAD and The Mouse. Understandably, the reaction to this lofty goal was immediately dismissed by the PC gamers with a snappy "Yeah, in your dreams".

Shadowrun is set in the near future, with magic and "meta-humans" such as elves and trolls mixing up the usual futuristic setting. The manual goes to great lengths describing the deep lore behind the game setting, but most of it is of no consequence for the actual gameplay. The game places the security forces of RNA Corporation against Lineage "terrorists" for the control of ancient artifacts around different sites set in and around the massive South American city of Santos. Shadowrun happily blends futuristic nanotechnology with all the magic-user cliches from the traditional sword and sorcery-type RPGs, and it does this very well, creating a very unique setting.

In practice, this Shadowrun game is pretty conventional team-based shooter bearing more than a passing resemblance to Counter-Strike. Two teams, up to eight players per team, battle it out on small maps. If you die, you are out for the round (unless a teammate resurrects you, but more on that later), and each round lasts up to a few minutes to keep the action fast-paced. Nothing earth-shattering, but the concept has been proven to work in many similar games.

Page 1Page 2Page 3Page 4Page 5Page 6Page 7

Related Stuff

Tags