Shadowrun: Dragonfall Review

Shadowrun: Dragonfall is Harebrained Schemes’ first and so far only expansion to 2013’s Shadowrun Returns, and a definite improvement over the original decent-but-perfunctory campaign. While the character progression, tactical combat, inventory and world interactions still feel a bit lightweight compared to both the slate of upcoming role-playing games and Shadowrun Returns’ forebears, the vast improvements made, both in terms of content and utility features, make the campaign worth playing for anyone who enjoyed the original title.

You can find my original take on Shadowrun Returns here.

No Such Thing as a Milk Run

Shadowrun: Dragonfall takes place in Berlin, 2054, in what’s called the Flux-State or F-State, a sort of anarchistic playground where corporations and political powers don’t hold quite the same position of power as they do in the rest of the world. As yet another shadowrunner escaping from their past, you’re tasked with helping with what’s supposed to be an easy mission, a “milk run” as your associate and friend Monika Schäfer calls it. Needless to say, things turn out to be much more complicated and quickly spiral out of control, forcing you to protect yourself from a well-armed and mysterious faction with an unsavory but not quite clear objective.

I won’t spoil more than what little I had to say for my synopsis, but suffice to say, the title “Dragonfall” is appropriate in more ways than one. Just as with “Dead Man’s Switch”, Harebrained Schemes’ writing team has penned a pulp magazine-like story without a hint of self-importance but with plenty of self-awareness, filled with twists and turns. Differently from the original campaign, though, they’ve managed to structure the plot in a way that feels far more consistent and engaging. There’s simply more space for side characters and plots to breathe, and the finale is just altogether better, a more properly foreshadowed, natural escalation of the themes and hooks set up at the beginning of the game, rather than the abrupt tonal shift of the original title.

Another way Shadowrun: Dragonfall differentiates itself from the original campaign is the emphasis it places on companions. Throughout the entire game you run with a crew of shadowrunners (you can still hire mercenaries for a fee, if you really need to round your team, but there’s not a strong incentive to do so), each with a unique personality, look, and background. Exactly like in many other role-playing titles of this ilk, you can decide to help them with their (many) issues and learn a bit of their past in the process by talking to them at your home base between missions. However, I found occasional moments in which they interjected on current events or gave their opinion on a past run more interesting, as they examined otherwise unseen aspects of their personality in a more natural manner. Overall, Harebrained has done a fine job with them: they might be not the most original and complex characters, but they’re sufficiently fleshed out and present interesting takes on otherwise well-worn tropes.

There are other aspects of the game’s writing that are arguably disappointing. For a large chunk of the story the main antagonist is a forgettable ork who has a unique portrait but not much else going for him. He simply never utters a single memorable line, and doesn’t fare much better as a boss fight. The atmosphere of Berlin also doesn’t feel quite as accomplished as Seattle’s. Perhaps it’s down to assets re-use, but the two cities don’t look or feel different enough, and in spite of how many times the characters repeat that the Flux-State is unique, that ever shifting anarchist hub that the game promises superficially never quite materializes. Finally, while the game features an extensive playable epilogue, there’s no way to know the far-reaching consequences of your choices. Perhaps it was just better for Harebrained to leave things unclear so that they don’t interfere with the setting’s canon, but it left a bitter taste in my mouth.

The Credstick Conundrum

I have to admit, Dragonfall didn’t make a great first impression. The start of the game is painfully telegraphed story-wise and fairly threadbare design-wise, especially considering the majority of players will probably already have played Dead Man’s Switch and possibly a few mod campaigns by that point, meaning they’ll be ready for more complex content right from the start. Once I got past the first few missions though, the moment I was tasked with raising enough money to obtain the services of an information broker, to be precise, the game opened up. Side quest opportunities started to pop up, together with more lucrative and substantial (but still not mandatory) runs, and each and every one of them feels unique and properly fleshed out.

The best part is that each of them feels a lot more open-ended than they did in the original title. Areas are larger, skill checks are more plentiful, combat encounters are more interesting, main objectives are more varied, and side objectives pop up regularly, rewarding thorough exploration with extra karma points, more loot and alternative solutions to problems. More than a few missions also offer multiple routes (extremely savvy players could manage to make an entire building of a megacorp explode without ever being spotted, for example, but most builds won’t manage) and moral choices, although, to be fair, not the kind that will keep you awake at night thinking about whether you did the right thing. Having to kill a fellow shadowrunner for botching a run would be a lot more questionable, for example, if the person in question wasn’t revealed to be a bloodthirsty madman.

That said, there are still significant design problems that the team hasn’t managed to completely overcome. Dialogue checks are still not perfectly balanced. There are more of them, and most now rely on charisma, making characters with poorly selected etiquettes more useful, but this also exacerbates the problem with the etiquette checks that are actually present, which are simply not balanced to reward each choice equally. I’ll offer a concrete example: I don’t think I’ve ever seen a check for the Socialite etiquette, but I saw Gang, Corporate and Security options pop up so regularly you’d ask yourself why they even bothered to put other etiquettes in the game.

Outside of dialogue skills, there’s a variety of checks that involve attributes, skills, race and even items. Priority seems to have been given to skills that otherwise wouldn’t feel too valuable, like Bioware, though, to be perfectly honest, I still wouldn’t argue those skills are viable choices. It’s also worth noting that the game seems to have taken a page from Fallout 2 and gave your companions a chance to make some checks for you. On one hand, it makes sense and reinforces the pen and paper narrative feel the campaign is trying to evoke, but on the other hand, it also lessens the impact of your character’s build. There’s always a straightforward way to complete most tasks anyway (usually involving plenty of combat), so perhaps being more restrictive would have actually helped each playthrough feel more unique. Finally, it should be noted that, just like the original game, all these interactions are handcrafted, and combat remains the sole activity to be strictly system-driven in the title.

Complaints aside, there’s one thing I want to stress about the mission design in the title: it keeps getting better as you progress. Most games, including the original Shadowrun Returns, tend to peter out after the middle section (if not, sometimes, right after the beginning), but Dragonfall manages to introduce new plot points and challenges with ease, without relying on cheap gimmicks or corridor battle maps. It’s an enormous improvement over the first campaign’s ending, and bodes well for the developer’s future.

Watch Your Back, Shoot Straight, Conserve Your Ammo

Combat encounters are also better designed and more varied than in Dead Man’s Switch, but still err too much on the side of caution in terms of challenge. I died about two times in the entire campaign (I played on Normal) despite playing with a character that wasn’t particularly optimized for combat (I used a high charisma Shaman), and both times were entirely due to my carelessness. In fact, in some instances the game has been made easier, as a character that falls in battle is automatically revived by the Trauma Kits in their inventory. It’s also worth noting that, despite the side objectives, special mechanics and additional fail conditions that are often attached to the encounters, the relatively short length of the campaign (18/20 hours for me, if Steam is to be believed), and the new critters that have been added to the title, the combat still ends up feeling repetitive after a while. I’d honestly recommend trying to not purposefully get into combat encounters too often because, despite Harebrained’s best attempt to shake up things (which were mostly successful, credit where credit is due), there’s simply not enough meat to sustain the interest of a combat-oriented player for the entirety of the campaign.

That’s not to say the few new additions are bad, though. Sniper rifles are extremely powerful weapons that give their best at long ranges, incentivising the player to better study the layout of the area. Grenade launchers are far more situational, but there’s no denying that lining up a shot when enemies are clustered up in the same space is satisfying. Throwing weapons aren’t quite that useful in my experience (though I admit I might just not have learned how to use them properly), but at least it’s now possible to build a character that uses Throwing Weapons as their main combat skills, given it now governs more than just grenades. Adepts’ abilities have also been improved, and now sport passive bonuses that make the archetype far more playable. The new monsters that have been added by the expansion, while not as unique in behavior and abilities as I had hoped, at least offer that little bit of visual variety that was sorely lacking from the game at release. Even when put together, these additions aren’t exactly game-changers, but it’s that Dragonfall didn’t only add a new campaign, a few portraits and some environmental assets.

I should also say that pretty much all the companions you run with are fairly useful in combat, although, unfortunately, there’s no way to tinker with their gear and progression. At most, a player can give them additional quick-slot items to utilize during a run (you can’t even take away the items that they already have to redistribute them). It’s true that I never felt the need to give my companions more powerful gear and spells than what they had, but an additional layer of customization would have been well appreciated, and would also have given me an excuse to spend some of that excess nuyen I had earned, thanks to the game’s excessively generous economy. Speaking of the economy, I unfortunately have to admit the gear progression in Dragonfall is just as uninteresting and linear as in the original campaign, with only a few, disappointing sidegrades to break the monotony. Alas.

Usability and Technical Improvements

While they technically have been introduced by patches, I can’t conclude this review without talking about the game’s quality of life improvements. Chief among them is the ability to save manually. This feature, pretty much a standard for most RPGs but strangely absent from the original title, greatly improves the flow of the game, and freed the developers to design larger, more complex areas with more opportunities for interactivity and more combat encounters. Harebrained Schemes also took advantage of their manual save system to place more autosave triggers, usually before and immediately after important quest developments. I still wouldn’t recommend anyone to rely solely on autosaves, as occasionally the designers seem to have forgotten to place triggers after important mission-critical dialogue (see, for example, the final sequences of the APEX Rising mission), but there’s no doubt that the game’s saving system has been dramatically improved.

The stuttering I experienced during the original campaign has also been greatly reduced (though unfortunately not completely eliminated), but I also have to note that loading times seem to have been drastically worsened. There’s also a new high-resolution scaling mode for the UI, new translations for the game that can be selected from the options menu, and the game switches back to free movement in between encounters, so you won’t find yourself locked in turn-based mode in the larger combat-based areas. The game just feels overall more polished, and is far easier to recommend for a purchase now than it was at release.

Conclusions

Shadowrun: Dragonfall won’t change the minds of those that hated the original campaign, but is likely to please all those who enjoyed it. Simply put, Harebrained Schemes has managed to polish their title and outclass their original content output, to the point that I’d recommend new players to start from the expansion rather than from the original campaign.

And it has a dog companion. Yes. A dog companion!