14 DAY TRIAL // There aren't that many actual role-playing games coming out nowadays as many game developers try to blend the classic RPG mechanics, such as character classes, leveling up, or inventory management, with other core gameplay mechanics, such as shooting or brawling.
Fortunately, RPG fans were able to delight themselves this year with Shadowrun Returns, a great revival of the classic Shadowrun pen and paper game by Jordan Weisman and his new team at Harebrained Schemes.
After a rather unfortunate attempt at a revival back in 2007 from Microsoft, Weisman took to Kickstarter and managed to score a lot of money via crowdfunding, proving to many that there is a lot of interested in such a genre.
After some time, the result finally appeared earlier this year, in the form of Shadowrun Returns.
While I had only heard about the universe a few times before, my curiosity was piqued by the new project and I wanted to see just how good a Kickstarter title might be.
I was in for a big surprise, however, as Harebrained delivered a RPG experience that actual emphasized playing a role in the game, thanks to its many highly specialized classes, from Street Samurais, to Shamans, Deckers, and much more.
The rich universe was accurately laid out by the regular story campaign, which had quite a few interesting twists and turns, but what's more important is that Harebrained Schemes also included a special editor that allowed fans to create their own campaigns and mods for the game.
Couple this with the easy-to-use Steam Workshop system provided by Valve, and the result is that quite a few interesting campaigns and projects for Shadowrun Returns are now available to enrich the game.
Throw in the fact that Harebrained will soon deploy the second single-player campaign, in the form of Dragonfall, in January, and this RPG still has a lot of life left in it.