Training

Though Shadowrun is essentially a multiplayer-only game, there is some single-player content by way of eight chapters of training missions. Each chapter is themed around particular spells, tech items, or races, progressing from the most basic and essential abilities and working up to those requiring the most finesse. The first chapter deals with the glider, teleport, and enhanced vision, which are essentially the workhorse abilities of mobility and awareness in Shadowrun. The latter three chapters deal with the three non-human classes--dwarves, trolls, and elves--each of which has its own unique racial abilities.

Each training mission has the player completing a number of tasks illustrating how to use a particular ability or character. At the end of each chapter there is a bot battle designed to allow the player to effectively use the techniques taught in that chapter. Bookending the chapters will be contextual fiction presentations. Though there is no narrative progression in this game, progressing through the training missions will give the player a more concrete sense of the Shadowrun world and the events that led to the game. One reason for some of the breaks between this Shadowrun and previous incarnations is that the shooter is set some twenty five years before the events of prior Shadowrun products. Upon being told by an event attendee that this means the setting is not true Shadowrun, Gitelman returned, "If this isn't a Shadowrun setting 25 years before, then Knights of the Old Republic isn't a Star Wars game 5000 years before."

Still fun

Despite its various controversial aspects among certain groups of gamers, based on my experience with the game so far, Shadowrun remains a creative and well crafted multiplayer shooter. Abilities such as teleportation, which at first seem to make gameplay overly haphazard, are actually very well integrated and quickly become a crucial part of movement. Other more minor skills have their own less obvious uses, and it is likely that a frequent topic of internet forums will be how to combine them in new ways to strategic effect. For example, one developer pointed out two combinations involving the gust skill, which is fairly unassuming when used on its own. A player might cast a group of strangle crystals, which damage players who come in contact with them, then gust an opponent directly into the patch. Skilled players can also practice throwing a grenade and gusting it, greatly increasing its potential distance.

Shadowrun's cross-platform multiplayer may prove to be a great boon in the modern gaming era, which has seen many formerly PC-heavy gamers migrate to consoles--most commonly to the Xbox platform in the case of PC gamers. Gaming communities such as that of this site may benefit from the ability to keep from being splintered with multiple versions of the game.

All in all, my outlook on Shadowrun remains essentially unchanged from that of last September. The game's appropriateness to its source material is an open debate, and one I am ill-equipped to address, but as its own game it is refreshingly inventive and seemingly quite well executed.

FASA Studio expects to ship Shadowrun for Windows Vista and Xbox 360 in the first half of 2007.