Variety and difficulty in playthroughs is largely up to us, and Shadowrun Returns facilitates that with an excellent risk-reward setup. Likewise, only a couple of optional side-missions popped up, giving me the impression that even if my next playthrough is as a straightlaced male troll Decker instead of my wisecracking female elf Street Samurai, events are going to play out pretty much as they did the first time through.

For the most part it's window dressing, there purely to let our characters display the professional, sleazy, or good-hearted attitude we want them to. But very few of my decisions in dialogue trees had any significant impact on how events played out. There are a couple of well-done puzzles that require information-gathering detective work, and a handful of areas have problems that can be solved in at least two ways – reprogram a blank access card or steal one, for example. 'Cherry Bomb's pretty face is hard, armored in lipstick and low expectations.'Even though it attempts to create the feeling of an open-world RPG like Fallout and Fallout 2, in reality it's disappointingly linear, directly funneling you from one mission to the next. The text could definitely use a copy editor, though, and its many grammar errors and typos can get distracting. Though its characters aren't particularly novel, they are colorfully written in a style that matches their expressively drawn portraits and compensates for the lack of voice acting. The Dead Man's Switch's story briskly and entertainingly twists itself into something much bigger and more sinister than the whodunit it begins as. The differences are mostly cosmetic, and playing as a massive troll or ork certainly makes me feel more intimidating than a human, elf, or dwarf, even if characters don't react to me differently. Racial bonuses for the five fantasy species aren't dramatic, amounting to just a point or two, but a dwarf's higher willpower ceiling would make him a slightly better fit for a mage, for example. I soon grasped that I'd only need to worry about a small part of the tree with any reasonably specialized build, though. Skill points are doled out regularly, creating a good sense of constant progression.

At first glance its RPG system looks promising – intimidating, even, due to a list of skills and abilities so long and complex it requires quite a bit of scrolling to get through. Shadowrun Returns isn't a very pretty game, but it does make effective use of its simple graphics, in part by preventing us from zooming in for a close look. Thanks to a shared minimalist style, its sparsely detailed 3D characters fit in well as they run around on a respectable variety of painted 2D backgrounds representing a noirish vision of 2050s Seattle. Some jerk's snatching Seattle's organs.Shotgun-toting elves fighting side by side with ork mages and dwarf hackers certainly isn't the typical take on fantasy, and that lends Shadowrun's setting an edge.

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