Pen and Paper RPG’s have always been reliable properties to adapt into video games. Dungeons and Dragons, the White Wolf games, and Warhammer all have been digitized at some point, and while a lot of the adaptations are certainly sub-par, many of these franchises have also had some fantastic games. Shadowrun has not experienced this, and I am not sure why. The SNES and Genesis games were fun but one could be forgiving to them for not nailing the setting and feel of the game 100% on the technical limitations of the hardware that was running them back in the day. Shadowrun for the Xbox 360 was an online shooter and is barely worth mentioning other than point out that wasting the Shadowrun licence is not a recent trend. More recently the Harebrained Schemes games have brought Shadowrun back, and while widely successful I feel they are somewhat below average gameplay experiences carried by the brilliance of their setting and strong story telling. As Harebrained Schemes prepares to release its latest Shadowrun game, Shadowrun Hong Kong, they owe a debt of gratitude to Cliffhanger Productions, because their latest release: Shadowrun Chronicles: Boston Lockdown is a all but guaranteed to make Hong Kong look better by comparison.
What do you think a Shadowrunner IS?
Shadowrun Chronicles: Boston Lockdown is not a traditional RPG, rather it is a turn based tatical squad strategy game in the same vein of XCOM or Fire Emblem with a coat of Shadowrun paint on top. In the game you create a runner, and wake up in an intro level that serves as a short tutorial section. After this, the game rewinds to a few weeks in the past, where you arrive to the area that serves as the hub world. There you find out your rookie runner is in Boston with a twinkle in his or her eyes and dreams of becoming a Shadowrunner. This is weird because by the setting’s own lore being a runner is something that the people on the fringes of society do when they are out of options. Your runner also knows nothing of the world, which the game uses to explain everything to you.
Perhaps I am being too hard on the idea of using the player character as an access point for newcomers, but Boston Lockdown has plenty of other failures in regards to how it handles the Shadowrun lore. The first impressions are good. The Shadowrun paint is there. It looks like Shadowrun, the soundtrack sounds like Shadowrun, and the dialogue sounds like Shadowrun, at least initially. But as you play the game you realize the that it is an empty shell. A zombie Shadowrun if it were, it looks the part but it has no soul. Just spending some time with the game you’ll realize that the tone is off, and that the atmosphere is a poor facsimile of the source material.
The creators of the game are eager to show you just how much they love Shadowrun. They have character spout lines like “I hate mages, I always geek those first.” But it feels mostly like posturing. There is no cleverness or subtlety as to how these things are used, but rather they are there because the developers feel like fans expect them to be there. I have no problem with Easter eggs, but the artificial feel of the atmosphere and the delivery method makes it grates more than delight. It doesn’t help that the voice acting is atrocious to boot with the New England accents serving as a particular low point. The female voice for the main character sounds like a bad impersonation of Lois Griffin or a lower register Harely Quinn.
The Red Sox are prominent in the game.
But maybe you don’t care about Shadowrun. Maybe you just really like turn based squad strategy games and need something to tide you over until XCOM 2 comes out. Well, I have bad news, Shadowrun Chronicles: Boston Lockdown is also a bad strategy game. The game is strangely threadbare. There are some abilities, and you can have extra equipment like grenades and med-kits (bring med-kits because the NPC Runners will not) but there seems to be little to do other than move and attack in most situations. There is no defensive positioning, or any sort of over-watch mechanic. Weapons also feel somewhat similar to one another. While they have different stats, there doesn’t seem to be a strategic difference between using a pistol, shotgun, machine gun, or rifle. The strategy is the same for all of them; try to move so you can flank the enemy, and shoot them from cover. There also seems to be little advantage to playing a melee character. Using melee will usually leave you completely open, and it is only really useful in limited situations where using a firearm would work just as well.
The game is multiplayer focused, but it does provide a selection of NPC runners that you can hire in each run. The problem with this is that their focus is too narrow. Riggers will only have drones, deckers can only deck, and mages only have offensive spells. None of them bring any healing items either. This means you have to be very careful who you bring with you. Will you need a decker? Is it worth bringing one if that means losing out on a lot of fire power? This sounds like they would be interesting strategic choices but its only frustrating. Why wouldn’t a decker at least carry ONE weapon to defend themselves?
Woefully unprepared.
The game clearly expects you to team up with other players, which is fine except that the difficulty spike tells me they also expect you to do the same runs over and over in order to level up and tackle your next story mission. This design isn’t inherently bad. Games like Payday 2 and Splatoon are built around similar systems, but there are two key differences. The first one is that in games like Payday and Splatoon what you are playing in order to level up is the actual game. They don’t give you the feeling that you are pausing your progress in the game in order to become strong enough to tackle the next area. It feels like a reward to keep playing the game, rather than an arbitrary wall. The second is that games like Splatoon and Payday 2 are significantly more enjoyable at their core.
Multiplayer works well. The netcode is good and the match making was fast. It was also easy to find and befriend my friends during the game. How this affects the game might depend on your partner. If you have a bad player, it can make the levels very hard, so it definitely makes it better to work with someone you know. Multiplayer also solves the issues with the NPC runners having a very narrow focus and their own items. Players will most likely have a good variety in skills and equipment. The problem with the multiplayer is that the core gameplay is still not fun, even with good friends.
Character customization is great
Boston Lockdown’s best feature lies in its character creation section. You can just about customize every single article of clothing for your runner, all the way down to their skivvies. You can also add tattoos, hair styles, etc… while the character models are determined by your gender, race, and class, I do appreciate that you have the choice of making your character look like whatever you want with no effect on gameplay, though this is facilitated by the paltry armor selection. The game also ran very well for me. While I’ve seen earlier reports of crashes and other bugs, I did not experience any. It seems that those issues have been solved.
At the end of the day Shadowrun Chronicle: Boston Lockdown is a poor strategy game, and a complete waste of the Shadowrun licence. I am not sure I can recommend this to anyone other than the biggest Shadowrun or strategy games fans, but even if after reading this you still feel like you might pick it up, I strongly recommend you wait until its on sale. I am not sure why it has been so hard for Shadowrun to get a great game based on the property, but it looks like there’s nothing to do here but keep waiting.
