Of Shadows...

..and the running through them.

If you are not familiar with Shadowrun, here a short summary:
Shadowrun is a Pen&Paper rule set, tied to its own setting. Cyberpunk, augmentation, hacking, virtual reality, mega-corporations, all the funky near-future stuff.
It also has elves, dwarfes, magic and dragons. The blend of these two is hard to grasp at times, but makes, if nothing else, for some pretty unusual gameplay.

Back to the Topic at hand: Shadowrun Returns!
No, that's not me, exclaiming that Shadowrun has returned and will lead us into a bright future. That's the game's name. I'm not quite sure why, because "Shadowrun" never really went away, but the title could be referring to the previous games in the franchise. Those were, as far as I am aware, mediocre at best. This one is good though!

Shadowrun Returns is a top-down RPG, akin to Baldurs Gate and Icewind Dale. I would compare it to Neverwinter Nights, but NWN had free camera controls, including tilting and rotating. Shadowrun Returns doesn't have that, so there are some minor issues with large structures. If you played Baldurs Gate (or any other Iso-RPG without rotating camera) you know what I am talking about.

The game runs like a charm and uses a surprisingly low amount of resources - I played through both Shadowrun Returns and the "expansion" Dragonfall on the integrated Intel-GPU of my Laptop at highest settings at about 30 frames, which is quite surprising. Why? Because it runs on Unity. And so far, most Unity-games are horribly wasteful with resources. That said: Shadowrun Returns is not a graphical bag of wonders. It looks good enough to get the Job done, certainly.
The only critique I could throw towards their graphics department is the unnatural cleanliness most textures have. Especially the ground looks almost polished in some areas, way too clean for an almost-dystopian cyberpunk street with burning trashcans and their accompanying hobos.

The combat-system is very, very similar to X-COM: Enemy Unknown: Percentage-based chances to hit your enemies that make "95%" feel like "45% - 20", an action-point-system to plan your moves (you go there and do this, you go there and do this), you and the AI take turns (you move all your characters, then the AI moves all it's characters, then you move all your characters, and so on) and the enemies always act first. Which can be very infuriating if you open a door and one of the enemies, previously standing around and staring at a wall, crits your main character for 3/4th of his maximum HP. Even the ammo-system is the same: you have infinite ammunition, but need to reload your weapons, which takes an action. How do you know how much ammo is left in the gun? by a little schematic outline of the gun in side view, with the amount of "filling" inside the gun corresponding to how many actions can be taken with it.
All of this is exactly the same in X-COM: Enemy Unknown/Within. I'm not complaining, by the way - I like the combat. It's simple to understand, you can make plenty of meaningful, tactically relevant choices, and spend minutes thinking about the best way to position your squad.

On to the (most) important part: Story and Characters!
The base game comes with the campaign "The Dead Man's Switch" - takes place in Seattle somewhere around 2075, and goes from "you're a dude, go earn money" to "save this part of the world from certain doom" over the course of a pretty linear campaign. The characters are decent, but nothing I would write home about. It's a good enough story to enjoy, that's about it.

Now, Dragonfall, the DLC-campaign, is different.
Dragonfall starts you off in 2054 with an introduction, a friend from old times and a plot twist that took me completely by surprise. You proceed to your "home" (Detour: Your home is in Berlin. Berlin is a free state, a state governed by anarchy. It's Shadowrun-lore. There's weirder stuff in that setting, believe me), meet a buncha characters you can get to know better - or don't, your decsicion - and do Shadowrunner-stuff. (Second detour: Shadowrunners are "deniable assets" in the Corporation-dominated world of whatever-year-it-happens-to-be-at-the-time-of-the-campaign. They are basically criminals for hire, stealing valuable information, kidnapping people, planting bombs and all those other things you can't usually do without getting shot at some point.)
You have a set goal, an amount of money you want to gather for a specific reason - but until that money is gathered, the game lets you do what Shadowrunners do best: get hired, break in, retrieve something and probably mess up somewhere on the way so you have to fight hordes of security to get out alive.
It's enjoyable, the characters are very good and the story started to narrow down to it's end just as the free-roaming part of the campaign got a bit boring. You even have quite a bit of choice on how the game ends! The ending itself feels satisfying too.

Final verdict: Play Dragonfall.
Play the base campaign if you'd like to know more about the world of Shadowrun if you can't be bothered to read the dozens of books or immerse yourself into the Shadowrun Pen&Paper Ruleset. Definitely play Dragonfall. It's absolutely worth it's money! Should be available as a standalone, not quite sure.

I'm done now!
Onwards, towards a new dawn!