Reviewed: June 14, 2007
Reviewed by: Mark Smith

Publisher
Microsoft

Developer
FASA Studio
Microsoft Game Studios

Released: May 29, 2007
Genre: FPS
Players: 1

8
6
7
4
6.7

Supported Features:

This game is so marvelously constructed and intuitive to play that anyone with any level of FPS experience can dive right in and be competitive. Shadowrun is also much more complex than your standard online frag fest, making it a challenge to communicate just how intricate the game actually gets.

We start with a collection of character races; human, troll, dwarf, and elf, each with their own advantages and drawbacks. The game also mixes in Magic and Tech to go along with the standard arsenal of weapons. Prior to each match you will get to shop and purchase weapons, spells, and tech items for use in the upcoming battle. You'll earn additional money during the match that you can use to buy new stuff between rounds.

Weapons include a pistol, SMG, Shotgun, Sniper Rifle, Mini-gun, and the Katana - sword of the Samurai. Tech includes several ingenious devices like a Glider you can activate at any time to perform a rising jump and glide maneuver. Smartlink is a great tech item that enhances all your weapons by preventing friendly fire, reducing drift on automatic weapons, and adding an extra level of zoom to scoped weapons and one level of zoom to all the others - even the shotgun.

The Katana is a special weapon and really the only way to get up close and personal with a target. It is also the only weapon that offers you a third-person view of the gameplay. If you can sneak up on an unsuspecting player you can get a special stealth kill that is quite messy, and if you are using Wired Reflexes you can actually deflect bullets – more on that later.

Enhanced vision is a useful bit of tech. It gives the player a few seconds of X-ray vision allowing them to pinpoint enemy positions and distances with a thermal vision visual effect. An interesting exemption to this enhanced vision are any players who currently have Smoke equipped.

Wired Reflexes is a useful enhancement that functions in both a passive and active mode. Just having this item equipped grants you faster movement speed and reload times at the expense of faster essence drain. If armed with the Katana and directly facing the enemy you can also block a majority of incoming bullets. You can also switch to active mode which allows you to move a super speeds, but the physical drain will cause health damage.

But nothing is faster than a good old-fashioned Teleport. When you activate this ability you will warp 8-10 feet in the direction you were moving, even while gliding. Jump and teleport to reach higher ledges and indoor levels, or crouch and teleport to sink to new depths. Teleporting can be refined into a powerful battle tactic by rushing toward and enemy then warping in behind him for a glorious back shot.

Anti-magic generators are sticky grenades that you can throw to generate a dampening field that drains Essence from everything in range. Essence is the driving force behind all tech and magic use in Shadowrun. The amount you start with is based on your class and it will slowly replenish itself over time. The exception to this is special magic and tech that allocates your essence and doesn't release it until certain conditions have been met.

Magic is very specific to the combat nature of the game. Strangle creates a cluster of spiky crystal shards in an area you designate. These are useful as barriers to protect key locations or just slow down the enemy. Two pips of essence are reserved until the Strangle patch has been destroyed.

Summon Minion is one of my favorite spells. It creates a giant shadowy demon-like creature that you can assign to defend an area or target an enemy that it will pursue relentlessly until the target or the Minion is dead. One interesting feature of the Minion is that it will immediately disregard all previous orders if it should encounter another Minion - even one of your own creation. Only when your Minion dies will the allocated essence pips become free. Minions are magical beasts and susceptible to AM grenades and the vampire-like influence of Dwarves.

Gust is a useful spell that generates a powerful surge of air or shockwave that repels the enemy, great for blowing them off catwalks and ledges. It can also cause physical damage to an enemy if they are in Smoke form. Smoke is the nifty ability to turn your body into vaporous form making you invulnerable to conventional weapons. The only thing that can really hurt you is getting hit with Gust, plus there is a short delay transitioning back into corporeal form where you cannot access tech, magic, or weapons. Smoke also grants you the passive ability to become invisible to people using Enhanced Vision. Smoke lasts until you turn it off your run out of essence.

With so many spells and tech gadgets available in Shadowrun it can become quite challenging to master all their uses, especially when you are only allowed to equip three at any given time. Your weapon is always assigned to the right trigger leaving the bumpers and left trigger free to assign any magic or tech you have available. You can reassign these commands during the missions but you’ll have to do it in real-time, so make sure to hide first.

The races each lend their own unique traits to gameplay and strategy. The Human is the well-rounded fighter who can do it all but excels at nothing. The Troll has the unique ability to strengthen as he takes damage. He will convert essence into skin hardening, which makes him more resistant to damage but also slows down his movement.

The Elf has a very fast movement speed and many more essence pips than other races. He is weaker than the other classes, so he takes less damage and slows down when wielding large weapons like the mini-gun, but he does have the ability to heal by merely standing still away from any combat.

The Dwarf is a crafty little race and offers some of the best strategy of all the races. First, he is short, offering a much smaller target profile, but he is also slower when moving around. He is resistant to a single headshot that would normally kill any other race, and last but certainly not least, he can drain essence from anybody and anything on the battlefield by merely getting close to it. This makes him the ultimate weapon against Summoned Minions, the Tree of Life, or enemy players. In order to make the Dwarf a viable team player he has to get much closer to friendly targets before he drains their essence. The Dwarf starts with a much larger essence bar but regenerates essence at a greatly reduced rate.

There are two other key elements to Shadowrun that have to deal with team tactics and player health. The Tree of Life is a magical tree you can summon that will heal anybody (even the enemy) as long as they stand within its glowing sphere of influence. It will remain until destroyed or all of its healing energy has been absorbed by injured characters. Think of it as a natural healing station.

Players can also Resurrect other players, assuming the enemy didn’t obliterate the body entirely. If a player is resurrected they are “magically” linked to the person who healed them, so if that player should get killed the other will start to bleed out at an alarming rate. The only way to stay alive is to get re-resurrected by another player and become linked to them. It’s a very cool concept that can actually strengthen a bond between two players, since it is now in your best interest to keep your benefactor alive for as long as possible.

But once I graduated from Shadowrun Academy I realized there wasn’t much for the solo gamer to do other than practice for online play with a bunch of bots. And when the thrill (such as it is) of killing bots ran out I had to venture online where I immediately got my ass thoroughly handed to me on endless silver platters. To make matters worse, this is the first title to make use of Windows Vista cross-platform connectivity, so even PC gamers got to thrash and trash me.

For a game that targets the online crowd Shadowrun lacks numerous features, both common and expected by the Xbox Live community. Where are the leaderboards and persistent stat tracking? Where is the semi-intelligent game matching system? Nowhere to be found – that’s where. Instead we get some nebulous ranking called TrueSkill that attempts to match players of similar ability. And if you want to hook-up with your friends you can create private parties but you can’t guarantee you’ll even play on the same side. And perhaps the worst online sin of all - when the host drops out the entire match shuts down.

PC gamers can at least created dedicated servers and browse lists, but 360 players are forced to subject themselves to quick matching, where you never know who you are playing or what their connection speed is. At least you can pick preferences for maps and game modes, but beyond that Shadowrun returns to the primitive roots of online gaming.

For those worried about the PC crowd having an unfair advantage with their mouse and keyboard combo, rest assured, the aiming and weapons system are as equally as clumsy on both systems, and once you unlock the achievement for playing cross-platform you’ll probably end up filtering out the PC gamers to avoid some serious lag in gameplay.

I was content with the limited maps in the preview, knowing it was just that, a preview, and once those new maps started appearing during the release tutorial I started to get excited, but that excitement quickly turned to dismay when I realized just how few maps are actually included in Shadowrun. The game supports downloadable content and they had better start releasing some new maps if they want this game to succeed, even up to the point of the Halo 3 release.

Game modes include all-out deathmatch, team deathmatch, and a cool new Raid mode that is essentially Capture-the-Flag. In this variation of CTF one team is assigned to guard the Artifact, a glowing staff, while the other team is supposed to steal it and take it to a designated escape point. As the defenders you can setup Strangle and assign a Minion to guard the Artifact, or you can take up a sniper vantage point and pick off the other team one by one. Offense will want the benefit of fast players like Elves or powerful battering rams like Trolls to blast through to the Artifact then run like hell to the escape point avoiding enemy contact.

When playing with bots, there is a command cross system in place to allow you to give rudimentary commands to your AI teammates. The AI is quite good on its own, but responds nicely to your commands and AI soldiers don’t require a lot of baby…err…bot-sitting.

While not very technical or skinned with flashy with textures, the architecture is some of the best I’ve seen on the 360 to date. There is also another level that is more of a futuristic office lobby. It too has multiple tiers, stairs, and plenty of verticality for challenging gameplay. Levels seem to be tailored to the various game modes creating unique strategies for each level and each mode you might play on that level.

Special effects can often steal the show with some really flashy visuals and screen effects that light up the environments with ripples, lighting, and particle effects. It’s great stuff and also good for distracting you from the gameplay at times.

You’ll probably want to keep the sound levels down to coordinate with your teammates using your Xbox Live headset. Expect a lot of trash talk from just about everybody currently playing this game online. Shadowrun seems to have a fairly juvenile and unsophisticated group of gamers playing right now.

This is a hard recommendation. The game lacks modes, maps, and reliable online play. Other than completing the training missions, all achievement rely on online gameplay, and some are ridiculously difficult to earn. I can see people paying $30-40 for Shadowrun but not $60 – that’s just a rip-off, given the game is incomplete out of the box.

I really enjoyed the creative gameplay and clever balance of magic, weapons, and integration of teamwork and the various character classes. All the basic concepts are here and fantastic, but the resulting game is just a failure on multiple levels. Shadowrun is a nice diversion for now but will quickly be forgotten when heavy hitters like Halo 3 and Unreal Tournament 2007 dominate the online community later this year.