Shadowrun

"Awesome cyberpunk for the Sega Genesis, but all the "Shadowrunning" can get tedious"

It's been a little while since I owned and played this game, but what I remember of it is as follows. (I'll try to fit format of other people I've seen post, but I won't even attempt to individually score each aspect...the overall score is good enough...this is just a review.)

GRAPHICS - Good

For some reason, the Genesis didn't have games with graphics as good as the SNES, but for the Genesis, I'd say the graphics were good. A top-down view of characters cruising through town looking for the next shadowrun or plot continuation was nice. And the cyberspace scenes were pretty cool.

SOUND - Fair

I believe it was pretty decent for the Genesis. They had a neat ''sanitized'' female voice during cyberspace combat that added to the ambience (''Password Accepted!'').

GAMEPLAY - Good & Bad (see below)

The gameplay was pretty cool. You start off with a schmoe of a character doing small time jobs and with immediate questions related to a plot involving your brother and his death. You cruise around towns and forests kicking butt with weapons and magic. You get and/or hire other characters (sometimes temporary, sometimes permanantly). You do shadowruns to get the yen to get better gear, cyber-implants/upgrades, better cyberdecks to cruise the net as well as programs to crack net securities you come across. The amount of stuff you could upgrade on your characters was awesome (for a cyberpunk Genesis game). Also, the plot sometimes resurfaces. But man did you have to spend forever and a day doing shadowruns just to buy new stuff and get on with the plot! Even with the variety of shadowruns, it got tedious.

PLOT - Good

It was a good plot. All in all, I got sucked in, but you had to run so many shadowruns in order to fund your future equipment and goals that you sometimes forget what the point was. Fortunately they had a PDA (personal data assistant) that you can stumble across in sub-menus to remind you that there is a plot and that you're playing the game because there's an eventual ending...

OVERALL - The Good

The Shadowruns rocked! You start out with cheesy little runs, mostly escorting people or packages from place to place, but by the end, you're doing major jobs! On the the combat-guru side of it, you can take runs requiring you to infiltrate major corporations to ''liberate'' employees wishing to defect. Or to break in and get access to sensative computers which (of course) you have to hack and either destroy or steal info from. As just a pure hacker (and the easiest way I found to fund my little operations) you can take on jobs from the Mr. Johnson requiring you to simply find the nearest data-terminal, dial up the number handed you, and proceed to navigate cyberspace with your archon and decimate ICE while finding & downloading the info needed to complete the job. This was cool because you could not only get the info you had to get, but search around for other goodies and d/l all kinds of stuff you could later cash in on. I'd find a good run and just kept hacking and d/l'ing all kinds of stuff for cash until I got bored, then I'd finally hack in and finish the job like I was supposed to (but not after I milked many files for money from that job, he-he).

And if you get bored with runs, you can find your own action by cruising the streets and getting into tussles (why no, officer, I didn't know there was a weight limit to the amount of guns I could carry inside city limits...), going ghoul hunting in abandoned buildings, or scoping the wilderness for wendigo and such. Or, simply find the nearest data term and hack in! Instant cyber action (and much better than the SNES Shadowrun's cyberspace action, although I prefer the SNES Shadowrun game over the Genesis version).

Oh, yeah, and when it came right down to it, the plot was pretty good, too, but it kept getting lost because....

OVERALL - The Bad

They call it ''Shadowrun'' for a reason...you're expected to do Shadowruns to get money and accomplish goals. But man do you have to ever do a TON of Shadowruns to fund your little band of deviants in order to finally accomplish what the plot intends you to accomplish. I found it necessary to get the best gear in the game (some, like armor, only accessible if you join the right organization...that's right, your even get to affiliate with mobs and such!). Without this god-like gear, I kept getting my nether regions handed to me in the MANDATORY runs you have to do to further the plot. The mandatory plot-furthering scenes escalated in difficulty in stair-step fashion, so you'd have to do non-descript runs in between to build up power to tackle the next plot furthering scene. A bit cheesy, but nothing other console RPG's didn't have going on, too.

While there was a good variety to the runs, there was just no way of getting bored with them after doing them hundreds of times just to save up for good stuff (which was expensive!) The cyber-runs paid off the most, not because the run was worth a lot, but because you could d/l extra files to cash in ON TOP of what the run was worth. But to do them, you had to buy a deck ($), get some programs ($$), then proceed to upgrade your deck ($$$) and programs ($$$$!) as you went along in order to be able to crack better systems to get better files to sell for more money to upgrade stuff even more. It was a continuing cycle and got old sometimes. Not to mention you have to keep yourself well armed ($$$) just to fend off some of the tough enemies on the streets, which meant having to make tough choices like upping your deck to get better files for selling, or getting a better gun so you'll be able to survive the fight down the street to go sell the files.

But when you hit that pinnacle of having the best stuff (especially the deck & programs), you'll get evil grins as you cut through things like a hot knife through butter (Black ICE...no problem! While I could use a program to avoid detection and easilty slip on by, I'd rather confront it and let it know who's in control of the Corporate Mainframe now! For you Shadowrun/cyberpunk virgins, Black ICE is supposedly the toughest stuff to crack through...but not with the deck and programs you can get in this game!)

The other woeful aspect to this Shadowrun game is the major shafting magic-users get. Mages have to have a high humanity (or something like that) to be able to cast awesome spells. But, it goes down when you get cyber-implants. The worse your humanity, the less powers or potential levels your spells have. Plus, using magic drains magic points, so while it can be used in combat effectively, you will run out of spell points and get shafted sometimes, whereas if you have good cyber-implants (slashers, sub-dermal armor & combat reflexes [oh yeah!]), you can ALWAYS kick butt, even if your gun runs out of ammo!

The sad part is you start the game choosing whether to be a mage, a data-hacker or a street samurai (combat-guru). What you end up finding out after playing for a little while, though is that there really is only one choice to make if you want to live and succeed: Street Samurai. Mages are too weak to even make it across the street without dying. Starting with a data-hacker just means you start out with good cyber skills, but your deck sucks so you can't really do good cyber jobs for $, plus you suck in combat and can't walk the streets without getting a severe beating. The end result is, you start with a street samurai just so you can survive long enough to do jobs and make feeble amounts of money. The really sad part is that once you max out your character, there's no difference between starting as a Street Samurai or a Hacker. The reason being you can pump your stats up to be equally good at both no matter which one you started as. And magic? What magic? While Shadowrun table-top RPG is great because it has magic, it seems this game was not tailored to it nor to be very sympathetic to anyone wishing to be a magic-user character. If you become a mage, you will suck at combat because you don't want to get valuable cyber-implants lest your humanity drop. You could get a datajack to be a hacker, but if I remember right, while it barely dents your Humanity, it's enough to keep your from the nigh-omnipotent spell levels. So if you're a mage, you're a straight mage with no cyber so you can become the best mage possible...who runs low on spell points and gets his clock cleaned early in the game....

In all, I think I spent 90% of the game doing runs, and 10% of the game actually following up on the plot. The runs are great, lots of variety, but this game will definitely take some time away from your life in order to complete it.

But there aren't very many cyberpunk RPG's out there, and the amount of stuff you can upgrade on your characters (equipment, stats, skills, cyber-wear, etc) is awesome! As such, I beleive it justifies the somewhat tedious amount of shadowrunning you have to do, and that's why I gave it an overall 7.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 09/12/01, Updated 09/12/01