Starting out as the first major piece of DLC for the original Shadowrun Returns, Dragonfall went on to get a fully functioning solo upgrade of its own soon after. It changes the setting of our murky world of magic and science to the streets and shadows of Berlin and does things a little differently than before and is all the better for it.
Having fled Berlin after a betrayal, your new character soon
finds themselves on a job described as a ‘milk run’ with an old friend. In
Shadowrun things are never usually as simple as they seem and predictably
things go wrong quickly and keep getting worse. You soon uncover a dangerous
secret and by then it’s too late to back out. Just remember – never cut a deal
with a dragon.
One of the areas where Dragonfall differs from the original
in that you now have a consistent pool of runners to choose before going into
each mission. This means that the writers have been given more scope to build
up the personalities of your team who occupy the now expanded hub area. More
team members can be picked up during missions as well and it means players are
rarely faced with situations that they are completely unequipped for. Instead,
the missions become more about how you want to go about completing them which
removes a lot of the frustration found in Shadowrun Returns where you could
find yourself grinding through with a poorly chosen team.
The mechanics themselves are pretty much the same as before.
The core rule set of the original game was always decent and here you get to
see how flexible it can be as you now have specifically designed characters to
use in levels created for their skill set. Level design is also of a higher
standard for the most part with more optional objectives and a better way of
picking up and identifying side quests that helps to build the illusion of
player freedom.
Unfortunately, the matrix sections are still dull and
uninspired. These needed a complete overhaul from pretty much the first day of
the PC release and have got no better with age. The series really would benefit
from taking these sections back to the drawing board though as they seem to
drag on endlessly and lack pace and excitement. One other minor criticism is
that Berlin looks an awful lot like the Seattle of the first game. It would
have been nice to give it more of a visual identity as it’s certainly an iconic
city. People at least talk in a German
accent for the most part.
On top of this the Switch version has some quite nasty bugs.
From our experience these seem to be mainly restricted to the hub area between missions,
but we wouldn’t bet on everyone saying the same. The frame rate skips badly here,
and players seem to teleport around. You also lose the lock on information for
both objects and people which then involves a little dance as you try and
interact with what you want to. The game also locked a couple of times when
changing areas and once we completely lost the camera which just refused to
follow our movements. We should highlight this was restricted to the hub area, during
missions we found this didn’t happen which at least meant we never died because
of it but maybe that’s just us. It also suffers a bit from handheld play with
some small text and no improvement with regards to colourblind users since the
original game, something that was always a bit of an issue.
Dragonfall is basically more of the same but refined and
improved in a number of key areas. If you liked Shadowrun Returns then you
should love this as just about every aspect from story to mission design is
improved. It does need a patch though as the hub area does just about all it
can to break the immersion currently. If you can put up with that there’s still
a lot to like about Dragonfall, it’s just not the game it was on PC currently.
Overall 7/10
*since this review was written a patch has been issued which does stabilise the frame rate.
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