Recent reviews by jemjar

Let's be honest, if you're reading the reviews at this point, you're almost certainly a Payday 2 player looking for a good joke or two instead of being a potential buyer. Anyone thinking of buying this will be doing so at this point because they know someone who is a fan who's getting them into it.

So then: Payday 2 was good, then it was great, then it was a horrible micro-transactions player-base-milking exercise, then it was pretty great again, now it's still pretty good. DMRs are still nerfed. LMGs and shotties are still the best call. Anyone with red lasers still needs to be perma-banned. Mallcrashers still doesn't have a stealth bonus.

I wanted to like Shadowrun Returns. It's an interestingly written (if linear) story put into the major achievement : actually building a Shadowrun ruleset into a computer game. But as a Shadowrun novice, I didn't really come to like the world enough to enjoy what I was playing and reading. If you love the setting, I'm sure you'll get more out of it.

The problem is that the level design and some of the mechanics just don't function as they ought to. A few major gripes :

1) It doesn't drop out of turn-based movement when there are no enemies to be seen or the enemies aren't taking any actions - this often leads to painstakingly moving characters up, being obsessed by staying in cover as you do, and wasting too much time.

2) It autosaves whenever you change zone, but this means doing so AFTER you've made all your key decisions in the hub area, notably recruiting NPC allies and purchasing gear. This can leave you horribly set up for the challenges ahead and unable to go back and buy more useful tools for the job. You also do crew recruitment after buying equipment, meaning you can't easily buy a stash of extra consumables to fill the NPCs' inventories with medkits and the like.

3) Zero voice acting - even Baldur's Gate had little voice samples to give players an idea of who they were meeting, some lines still stick in my memory what, 15 years later? Ho there wander, shall we continue your lessons?

4) People grumbling about the RNG: this is a complaint about the reviews rather than the game - the PRNG is solid, but the availability heuristic (look it up) means you remember the times you miss three 95% shots in a row more than you remember all the 95% shots you hit.