Your tattooed, skinhead, fiercely anti-specist shaman used to be the lead singer in a British punk band. The rest of your team are a great case in point, and evoke Bioware companions at their best, even if they are realised in far more limited and ultimately brief way. It enjoys them and entertainingly embellishes them rather than tries to hide or overcomplicate them. It creates tone rather than distracts from it, and bar a few instances of getting too carried away with itself, the writing seems to understand that it's essentially working with genre stereotypes. Reams of hard-bitten, colourful-but-not-too-colourful dialogue frames all of this, and I found it agreeably, enjoyably pulpy in its take on noir meets fantasy quest. Bad Shit promptly goes down, and you find yourself in charge of this small gang of underground ne'er do wells as they attempt to Uncover Secrets! / Defeat Conspiracies! / Protect The Innocent! / Save The World! / Find And Stop A Bloody Great Dragon! / That Sort Of Thing! (Shadowrunners are basically the A-Team, only they'll work for bastards too). You play a character of your own creation (I went for a fight-fighting magic dwarf, a sort of half-height Iron Fist), newly recruited to a team of Shadowrunners led by an old friend. But then, that's basically what we expect of cyberpunk worlds, isn't it? In Dragonfall, the setting switches from Seattle to the Free City of Berlin, which turns out to look a lot like Bladerunner's Chinatown. The elevator pitch is the same as last time around: elves, dwarves, trolls and orcs living (slightly uncomfortably) alongside humanity on a near-future Earth, where the lines between technology and magic are blurred, and crime - street, organised and corporate - is rife. Now's the time to play Shadowrun Returns, basically, but please, start with this. Really, though, this is the point where new players are best off getting involved - a new, superior campaign with no ties to the last one, and quite a few of the major problems dealt with. Choice! Side-missions! A hub! A strong supporting cast who are up for a bit of a chat! Little-to-no mandatory decking sequences! A mother-lovin' save (almost) anywhere system! Shadowrun Returns: Dragonfall being 'just' DLC for last year's cyberpunk/fantasy mash-up RPG is bittersweet, because it may well be that only existing Shadowrun Returns owners give it a spin.
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