I didn’t know much about the Shadowrun IP before this, the most I remember about it was playing that multiplayer shooter in 2007 which seemed to be quickly forgotten. But now the franchise was revived as a series of CRPGs that focus more heavily on the narrative potential of its world and characters. And after playing it’s clear that was the right direction since Shadowrun’s universe does really stand out with its interesting mix of cyberpunk and fantasy elements

Dragonfall is the second entry set in Berlin, though it’s standalone and from what I’ve seen was the recommended starting point. The main story itself was solid, but it was the character interactions that make up the best part about the game

While there’s no voice acting, dialogue is well written and your companions are all interesting to talk to and learn more about after each run. The quality of the quests is pretty strong too, and it’s fairly concise for an RPG like this at about 20 hours or so. There’s a limited amount to do, but it’s all worthwhile and some of the quests tie into your companions and their backstory

The turn based combat is basically the same as XCOM, especially having your characters often miss their high hit chances as that’s known for… Mechanically it’s solid, though my issue with this type of combat system is when you’re fighting a bunch of enemies at once and have to slowly watch everyone make their turn animations over and over, which always gets tiring. A way to speed this up would’ve been appreciated, but otherwise combat was fine

And aside for some clunky inventory management and minor bugs, the console port was polished and translated pretty well to a controller