Shadowrun Chronicles: Boston Lockdown review – run and gun

[Jazzy]

Shadowrun’s peculiar mix of Blade Runner and Lord of the Rings is used as the background for a new four-player turn-based strategy.

Maybe we’ve been hanging with the wrong crowd, but we don’t remember Shadowrun ever being THAT popular. Despite dabbling in pen ‘n’ paper role-playing during our youth the original tabletop version of Shadowrun passed us by. We do recall the SNES and Mega Drive tie-ins, just not anyone but us that had actually played them. And yet somehow Shadowrun got an Xbox 360 game in 2007 and this is the third PC adaptation in the last two years.

The odd thing about Shadowrun Chronicles is that it has nothing to do with the two Shadowrun Returns games, with developers Cliffhanger Productions and Harebrained Schemes both working on the licence independently. That’s despite Shadowrun Chronicles being a similar kind of isometric role-player with turn-based combat. Obviously the basic setting is also the same, with a peculiar mix between Blade Runner style cyberpunk and traditional fantasy tropes.

So while the game world has megacorporations and a virtual reality world (called the Matrix, no less) it also has magic and mythological beings like orks and elves. The specifics are a lot more complicated than that but as bizarre as the mixture seems it’s presented in such a matter-of-fact manner you just accept it and go with the flow.

Before release this game was going to be called Shadowrun Online, but presumably it was changed because that makes it sound like an MMO – which it isn’t. But it’s also not a single-player Baldur’s Gate style role-player, as Shadowrun Returns was, and instead the focus is on four-player co-operative battles.

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[Sinon]

They're liars and pricks. I followed the game way back when it was called Shadowrun Online. They purported it was going to become a whole new online multiplayer version of Shadowrun with almost infinite possibilities for randomized missions, characters, items etc.

Now what do we have? A single-player abortion that costs twice as much as Shadowrun Returns did, and has less playability. Bullshit.