Shadowrun: Dragonfall

This game has a lot of character and pretty good worldbuilding but, honestly, as a game, it’s underwhelming. The RPG element is mediocre, the gameplay is shoddy, and I didn’t find the writing to be compelling nor the characters interesting - perhaps because they aren’t even voice-acted. The artwork is surprisingly uninteresting, the maps throughly bland and forgettable. If you played this blind you’d be forgiven for thinking that it came out in the mid 2000s. In fact, Divinity: Original Sin and Pillars of Eternity came out the year after this.

Shadowrun Dragonfall is a good game with a very interesting setting, taking place in a futuristic dystopian world that combines cyberpunk and high fantasy. The world-building is excellent and the characters are well written and grounded, creating an immersive experience that can increase the enjoyment one gets from this type of game by a lot. The story is great, with plenty of twists and mysteries that keep you intrigued and captivated the whole playthrough. Both main quests and side quests are well written and developed, so most of them do not feel like fillers to pad the playtime of the game. The role-playing elements are also well done, providing the player with plenty of options when it comes to building their character or combat. The strengths of the Shadowrun games are definitely the lore and world-building of their universe, and there is no doubt that Dragonfall nailed these aspects.

However, there are also some cons that keep this game from being a great game. First of all, the combat is just serviceable, nowhere nearly as polished or fun as some turn-based combat games such as the X-Com franchise or Divinity OS 1 and 2. While there are a lot of different abilities, most of them are not very useful or fun to use, making combat repetitive after a while. The fixed camera angle also makes moving around the map extremely clunky. While the aesthetics of the game is great, there are a lot of reused assets. This game also feels way too restrictive which wastes the potential of its setting. While there are different ways to do quests, most of the time it's only 2 paths and ends up feeling too linear. The game world consists of the Kreuzbasar which is the main hub and various mission areas. While the design of most of the areas are great, the game world is simply way too small with very few NPCs inhibiting them leading to them being boring despite having a great premise. Exploration is more irritating than fun most of the time. While I understand that having an open world is not always possible for smaller developers, allowing more freedom in travelling and adding in some random encounters (like in Wasteland 2 or 3 for example) can make the game a lot better than just clicking on the train and getting teleported. This game is also often guilty of bombarding the player with walls upon walls of text which can be very overwhelming.

Despite its flaws, Shadowrun Dragonfall is still a good game that is definitely worth playing for its unique setting and excellent story.