Strip down! Shake down! everybody get down!
The reason this game falls short for me is that there is nothing to this games engine but a combat and dialogue system. Every character can have every class tree so a maxed out character is going to be a mage, a shaman, an adept, might be a rigger and a decker plus street sam all in one.
and ya theres no skills at all in this game minus etiquette. Now if you just casually played the pnp game or were just picking up the game for the first time that would be fine. There are many groups that ran like that.
Unfortunately those are always the groups our guys ripped on as most of the time they played the game like dungeons and dragons. You kick open the front door, slay the dragon and save the princess and go home.
After our first campaign our game changed forever. We realized that shadowrun was all about planning and trying to avoid combat and creating these crazy plans and schemes while our players plotted against one another.
This game just feels like you walk in talk to guy, choose dialogue option a, or b, then shoot the guy in the face and that's pretty much it for the entire game. The character sheet was obviously pulled from the snes version and not the sega version or the pnp and it just doesn't feel like you have any real options even amongst the limited ways to deal damage.
The matrix was tacked on at the very last second (and it shows) and is basically just an expanded combat system, there is no astral plane, the cyberware is terrible and doesn't even look close to the gear of the pnp, riggers aren't riggers etc etc.
And many of you will be thinking that ive forgotten about srr's biggest selling point: the editor (which the main game is basically nothing but a demo promoting the capabilities of rather then make for decent game on its own). Well ive got more time then most in the editor, and will probably continue to work with the editor for some time.
That having been said the editor does allow for a lot of things, but just drawing the environment and mapping out every single trigger everywhere for every little thing you want to do that you have to know basic coding to get to work to begin with is a very time consuming process that becomes tedious. The editor is more of a mission editor then a campaign editor and I would say the program itself is more like a Rube Goldberg machine then a content builder. You have to build these uber complicated interlocking triggers that just end up being a nightmare to try and manage unless your mission is ultra simple.
Small maps will take you a very long time to get anything out and most people that make stuff just make these crappy little one off runs that get boring very quickly and don't really give you much choice in anything or sense of story or much else and trying to code in more quickly becomes a tangled mess to try and code yourself.
There are about 3-4 other mod teams worth watching, but even those are going to take months to get finished and will end up still being relatively basic.
I cant help but look at another game that had a similar budget and wondering what these guys worked on with their time.
Wasteland 2 comes out soon and looks to have everything that this game does not mechanically (like stealth, skills, intractable props and environment etc etc. If its got an editor, even if it sucks and is hard to work with, we may be making a shadowrun campaign for it instead.
I just cant figure out what they invested their time on in this game. Everything just feels like they got about 65-75% of the way and just quit. Supposedly this game is getting a dlc soon that is supposed to add all kinds of options, but it would take a miracle at this point for us to get what we really wanted from a real shadowrun game and I just don't think its coming.
sry, but srr doesn't deserve more then a d rating. Its just too short sighted at every turn.
EDIT: and if this is the game for you tho and you play with the editor, id recommend picking up our Sprawl Maps pack. Will save you a long time even if you change it up a lot and has some cool stuff in it already. Just look for the one with the Neo Anarchists picture on it ^^