Shadowrun Chronicles: Boston Lockdown Review

"Weaker Shadowrunning"

Campaign

I'm quite a fan of the Shadowrun type series with its lore and history which is quite rich. The cyberpunk world of the future where magic has re-awakened and has caused mass havoc is great to build from. There's been many side ventures from this series in recent years as Microsoft has been letting some PC groups build games in that universe. I'd rather they handle it themselves as I loved the FPS console game on Xbox/Vista a few years back. Though anything from the series is great for me. In this iteration we have the chronicles which I would say leaves room for other titles and this takes place in Boston. There's this central hub station which was rather drab where you basically collect missions and level your character. The depth in character customization was fantastic and my character was getting quite stylish very quickly. Being a class game, you see some variation between the races though really not as much as there should be to make them entirely unique. In order to move across missions or levels you'll be going on runs which is the whole basis of any story in Shadowrun. Once complete you'll be given points in order to level up extra skills or buy new weapons to improve the situation. It's actually a fairly hardcore strategy game with a turn based style of play. Positioning your characters, yep you will have some extra AI to bring along though they're boring and always fairly much the same. Hide behind areas and use turn moves wisely as enemies will flank or devastate you if left vulnerable. It's about finding the best angles and combat spots to complete the objective. I also noticed that you must take great care as it's rather difficult and some missions even at the start took many tries to progress. While bringing some variation to levels I couldn't help but feel it was repetitive at times which was disappointing to me.

Gameplay

The gameplay is done in a turn based strategy style where you position characters in anticipation to enemy movements. It's rather difficult and death comes very easy in the title. I also was quite disappointed with the graphics which looked alright sometimes, but were mostly very poor. The comedic aspects and combat were both well done along with character customization though the world that surrounded them was dreadful.

The Conclusion

While there's lots of things to do in Shadowrun Chronicles I couldn't help but be disappointed by the overall aspects. It was fun to play though really didn't hold much of my attention and I can't say I'll be too interested in playing it further. The price is also fairly high, but compared to campaign length I suppose it's decent. At this point I'm still looking for my definite Shadowrun game and this doesn't hit that mark despite having some promising features.

Shadowrun Chronicles: Boston Lockdown for PC
Review code provided by Evolve PR

Rating Overall: 6.7