
	Platform SNES Genre Roleplaying Publisher Data East Developer Beam Software Released 1993
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Shadowrun

The year is 2050 and the Megaplexes are monsters casting long shadows. When you become a Shadowrunner you live in the cracks between the giant corporate structures.

With those two lines you step foot into the world of Shadowrun, a dystopian future where corporations control the world and criminals, or runners, can be anything from orcs, to elves, to a hyrbrid of man and machine.

When this game first hit shelves in ’93 I was too young to fully understand what was going on in the game, and definitely too young to fully appreciate the idea of open gameplay. So when I popped this game into my SNES the other day, about 12 years after it was released, I was pleased to see that there was something with substance here.

You start the game as a dead man, so from there things can only get better. The story follows some twists and turns as you try to rid yourself of amnesia and recover your past life. While this sounds like little more than a stock story that you’ve seen a hundred times before, the setting in Shadowrun makes it feel fresh. I suppose that might change depending on how familiar you are with the novels and the Pen and Paper RPG, but for the purposes of the game it works well. The main problem is actually in the execution of the story. For instance, you’ll find a scrap of paper amongst your belongings that has an address printed on it. Since you have no other clues, it would seem that the address would be the logical place to go. The problem though is that there is no in-game map, and there are no street signs. So essentially all the address is telling you is that somewhere out there is a place that you’re supposed to be, and the only way to find it is to go door-to-door. In itself that isn’t

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terrible but combined with the fact that in the beginning there is no way to heal yourself, and that enemies randomly spawn in almost every room (and sometimes on the street) and you’ve got a bit of a problem. Add to this the fact that, while I love having some openness in gameplay I despise not being given some kind of direction to go in if I wish to advance the story, and a lot of the time that’s how Shadowrun feels.

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Most of the investigation in the game is done by bringing up a hand that acts as a pointer, selecting the object or person you wish to interact with, and then choosing which of the actions you want to take. This is a system that makes the best of what is available to it but it feels clunky and slow. After a few hours of moving the pointer around you’ll feel like your thumb is going to fall off and have to quit the game for a bit. It’s an annoying problem but since there weren’t any better solutions at the time you learn to live with it.

The combat in the game is fairly fun, though it would have benefited very much from having a mouse. You can buy or find new weapons and amour at various intervals throughout the game. Then you can draw your gun which brings a crosshair up onto the screen. You move this crosshair with the D-pad and center over your opponent then start blasting. This isn’t too bad a system really, especially since the crosshair seems to have a certain amount of auto-tracking built into it. Once you center it on an opponent it is likely to follow him around until you kill him. The only down point is that the crosshair is kind of sluggish and your opponent will often get off a few shots before you even center the crosshair on him.

During combat you’ll earn Karma points that you can spend when sleeping to upgrade your character. There are a few different stats that you can upgrade with these points, including things like health and firearms skills. This makes for a good leveling system in general, though it can be very tedious running in and out of the same few rooms, making enemies re-spawn just to shoot them dead again. Unfortunately it’s necessary to do this in order to bulk your character up enough for some of the battles that you’ll have to face along the way.

The graphics on this game aren’t great for its time but they are certainly serviceable. For this kind of action/RPG as long as you can tell one person from another, or rather one type of person from another, then you’re doing okay.

The sounds and music are fairly standard SNES fare with little exception. There is nothing here to show off to friends but there also isn’t anything that makes you cringe so hard you drop the controller.

All-in-all the best thing that can be said about Shadowrun is that despite its faults it’s a fun game to play, even all these years later. The setting and mood and a pioneering attempt at open gameplay make it worth checking out again if you’ve got it buried somewhere in your collection.

Daniel Mathers

(August 15, 2005)