While Street Samurai and Mage have fairly obvious connotations, my favourite class has always been Decker. In all cases, after choosing a gender and a race, you’ll be tasked with selecting a class from the list. Everything from the character creation to the GUI is more or less identical across all three games. To be fair, though, the three titles are so similar that they could have been bundled as one game. Not only that, but it has arguably the strongest opening of the three incredibly strong openings. Originally intended as standalone DLC for Shadowrun, it’s a fully formed title in its own right. Having played through most of the Trilogy in one form or another before, I‘ve been mostly focusing on Shadowrun Dragonfall: Director’s Cut. There’s little time for fetch quests and idle backtracking and it’s refreshing to see. You’re usually dealing with life and death situations, chasing down leads and unravelling mysteries. This is a world where side quests make little sense. Often any RPG under 50 hours might as well be a free sample, but in Shadowrun Trilogy that shorter runtime means a more direct experience. Returns is the shortest of the three, but the entire Trilogy together won’t run much beyond 50 hours for most people. While ultimately the choices don’t do much but alter the ending, the story itself does unfold in different ways depending on how you deal with NPCs and which characters you recruit to your little party. Of the three, it’s this title that stands out most for me purely because of the storyline and the greater emphasis on player choice. This narrative sees you looking for your childhood mentor along with your adopted older brother, who works in Hong Kong as a mercenary cop. Shadowrun: Hong Kong has a different setting, and the overall tone is much more urgent and personal. And if you do that, you’ll rarely tell one game from another. Your character is always custom, and so the temptation to just use the same archetype for all three games is real. Yes, they have different stories with ostensibly different protagonists, but they’re presented in such a uniform way that it’s hard to even tell them apart. It’s difficult to talk about Shadowrun Trilogy: Console Edition as three separate games. From the outset you’ll feel that this world is real it has history, and the people within it are products of its dark, fantastical atmosphere. The world building is just fantastic, and nothing seems forced or out of place. It’s all written, with no voice work, but still conveys its simple but effective plot to the point that I stopped noticing how much I was reading. While swears have been swapped out for made-up words a la 2000 AD or Defiance, the actual story is superbly told and the dialogue is excellent. Right away, the writing stands out as something special. Focused on the hunt for a mysterious serial killer using magic to harvest organs, your gun for hire protagonist travels all over Seattle and its underworld looking for answers. It features many characters, events and locations from previous titles but assumes no prior knowledge. Although it sounds like a sequel, it was the first modern foray into this universe. The first is Shadowrun Returns, which as the name suggests served as a return to the franchise as a video game series in 2013. Shadowrun Trilogy presents three games, naturally. It’s also one that developers Hairbrained Schemes explore thoroughly, presenting games that almost feel small compared to many tactical RPGs but which eschew filler content and off-topic side quests for a more streamlined and focused narrative experience. Not only that, but magic has boosted scientific discovery too, allowing for cybernetic enhancements and genetic modification.Īs settings go, it’s one of the coolest and most unique. Taking place primarily in Seattle or Hong Kong, Shadowrun Trilogy: Console Edition explores a world where elves, dwarves, orcs and trolls exist in a near-future society in which magic is often used as leverage by global megacorporations. It’s set in an alternate reality where magic re-emerged into our world around 40 years prior. Established in the before-times of 1989, its universe combines cyberpunk sci-fi, urban fantasy, and magical adventure. While there have been other games in the universe for the last few decades, Shadowrun Trilogy contains the most popular arc. Shadowrun, like Cyberpunk and Vampire: The Masquerade, was a successful tabletop RPG before anyone was turning it into video games.
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