Best of all there’s often multiple ways out of each situation, from simple violence to an emphasis on hacking, stealth, charming your way out of trouble, or a location-specific puzzle. You aren’t just stomping round Neo-Berlin fighting monsters, you’re breaking into secret labs, outfoxing government agents, and defusing bombs. Where Dragonfall begins to go above and beyond its remit is in the long sequence of set piece moments that draw together the story. We’re not sure what the developer was thinking with the latter, especially as the game was never that hard, but you can now save whenever you want – although the option does seem worryingly glitchy at times. It helps that the writing is actually very good, much better than the parent game, and a further aid to obfuscating just how fundamentally silly everything that’s going on is.Īs well as the writing the expansion quickly sets about righting the most obvious wrongs of the original, with a lot more focus on free exploration and a proper manual save system. What transpires is filled with cliché from half a dozen genres and media but as is Shadowrun’s forte the mixing of them all together is so brazen you can’t help but admire it. The specifics of Dragonfall’s story revolve around a super powerful dragon called Feuerschwinge (the campaign is set in Berlin). The specifics are a lot more complicated than that but as bizarre as the mixture seems it’s presented in such a matter-of-fact manner you just accept it and go with the flow. So while the game world has megacorporations and virtual reality (called the Matrix, no less) it also has magic and mythological beings like orks and elves. The Shadowrun universe itself is very different though, a bizarre mix between Blade Runner style cyberpunk and traditional Tolkien-esque fantasy tropes. As well as the usual problems it was very linear and had a terrible save system but otherwise it did pretty well in appealing to nostalgia over the original Shadowrun pen ‘n’ paper role-player game and the SNES and Mega Drive tie-ins from the ’90s. To be fair though Shadowrun Returns was already one of the better games to emerge from Kickstarter’s fan-funded bosom. That fact is made even more plain when the pressures of pleasing Kickstarter funders is relaxed, because Dragonfall is absolutely the game that Shadowrun Returns should have been. When almost all the games turn out having identical issues – that they’re frustratingly short and obviously rushed – it becomes clear that there’s some factor at work beyond just the ability of the developer. It’s obvious there’s a fundamental problem with Kickstarter. Shadowrun: Dragonfall (PC) – sci-fi trolling in Neo-BerlinĪfter the disappointment of the Kickstarter-funded Shadowrun Returns its expansion pack proves to be everything the original wasn’t.

Which shadowrun game is best