Shadowrun Returns Review (Freeman0916)
I thought this would be a good place to start playing a bunch of recent CRPGs because I remember it was a pretty successful Kickstarter and sorta responsible for the resurgence in interest to the genre. THAT was a bad decision. It came out in 2013 I think and yet feels worse to play than Baldur's Gate 1. Literally just clicking around the map and trying to interact with stuff was such a chore, half the time when you click someone to talk to your character just turns to them and the dialogue box doesn't even open. Then in combat the UI is atrocious where entire classes are devoted to using spells but all of your spells are in a drop down menu with no ability to hotkey them, requiring so many clicks just to cast a spell that could've been bound to Q and done on a hover-over mouse target.
The story was shockingly simple for having the possibility of sci-fi and fantasy to draw from. It's also shockingly linear. I thought a defining point of this genre was being able to tackle problems from multiple angles, but almost every mission has exactly 1 solution, you gotta talk to this one guy and get a thing to put next to the thing and sneak in, no you can't talk your way in, no you can't brute force your way in. I feel terrible for anyone who wanted to engage with the game's one sorta unique feature, hacking, because there are literally like 4 places in the entire game where it can be used whatsoever, and only if your main character is the hacker because a hacker party member is, for some reason, unable to be used unless you're in combat. Not that they're any fun to do because they play the exact same as combat, just spam clicking on enemies as you shoot whatever your default weapon is, occasionally clicking through 3 drop down menus to cast a buff spell if you feel like it. By the time you finally have a party, which is like half-way through the game, you end up just forgetting about cover and spells and drones and all that shit and just hire a ton of dudes with shotguns to blast apart anything that walks your way. No point in having a balanced party for skill checks because only your main character is allowed to interact with objects, so why not just spam AoE infinite ammo no cooldown guns?
I got about 75% of the way through the game and was just trying to get through the arduous combats as fast as I could until I encountered a bug where I became unable to pass my turn or take any actions during the final encounter of a huge area, and the game has NO quick save feature (or rebindable keys for that matter holy shit) so when I reloaded I had to do the entire mission again. Fuckin abysmal, I threw in the towel. Story, characters, setting, controls, combat, RPG, everything a waste of time. 1/10.