June 12, 2007 - As a person who enjoys movies immensely, there's nothing more I hate than seeing a trailer that gives away everything; the premise, the plot twists, the characterization, the set-pieces and the conclusion. But it happens. In fact, Hollywood will show you anything to get you into theaters even if the end product is not as good as its own trailer. Well, Shadowrun suffers a little from this as well. The box art will tell you that you can play against Windows Vista gamers, that you can share wealth with teammates, it'll give away a few of the magic and tech skills and it'll even try to woo you with its Survivor-like motto: Outwit to Outlast. The box art will even goes so far as to convey a semblance of a storyline (a gross misrepresentation of the facts) and then even repeats its own data points into beefing up it's word count. The problem is that Shadowrun has nothing else hiding in the wings waiting to surprise you. It's a shallow game that has very little content and unfairly wants you to pay full price for. As a budget title a few cut corners would have been easier to overlook, but as it stands, Shadowrun is one of the worst deals on the console market.

Shadowrun may have a healthy RPG background on other consoles, but as an Xbox 360 title, it's a pure multiplayer affair with nary a single player portion to speak of besides bot matches that simply simulate multiplayer gameplay anyway. Yes, there is some attempt to wow you with talk of history and ancient lore and reawakened powers, but at the end of the day, the concept is this: the game has a tutorial (six levels) and then three modes of multiplayer play which you can simulate using bots. No more, no less. If Shadowrun had to be compared to something else, it would be the love-child of Counter-Strike and TimeSplitters 3. The team-based gameplay (while nowhere near as good) is akin to CS while the graphic style and character design draws parallels with TS3. This isn't a bad thing though if Shadowrun could find enough new ground to forage on its own. Unfortunately, besides some clever new magic skills and techs, there's nothing here that hasn't been done before.

The rock-paper-scissors gameplay of Shadowrun hinges on its perfect (yet ultimately dull) balance of race, weapons, techs and magic. There are four playable races each with their own obligatory weaknesses and strengths; the humans have more starting and suffer no Essence penalties for using techs while the Elves have lower health bars but can use this same Essence (Mana is your will) to regenerate health. The Elves are also faster but large weapons, surprise, slow them down. On the other hand, Trolls (is this starting to sound Tolkienesque to anyone else?) are slower than Elves but can easily wield the heavier weapons, absorb tons of damage (which is quite an impressive sight actually) but all at the cost of Essence. Finally, Dwarves (yep, definitely Tolkienesque) have Essence to spare. Sure they regenerate it slowly, but they can literally suck it out of almost anything magical (items or players).

Essence is truly the gel that holds Shadowrun together. And it's the proper use of it, planning of it and distribution of it (and the abilities it powers) that separates all players. You see, besides the standard weapons (of which there are only eight, plus grenades, none of which are truly memorable except perhaps the too-often-used Katana) techs and magic are what truly separate every character in the game. This is doubly more important when you realize that everyone in the game looks the same and there is absolutely no personalization to be done herein at all except skill/ability choices. Wow, anyone else not impressed by this? Abilities come in two forms and are the highlight of Shadowrun; Tech Abilities and Magic Abilities. Much like the races in the game, abilities have a distinct rock, paper, scissor feel to them (much like an RTS game) since for every one good ability that has the potential to blow you away, there's an equally damaging (but generally boring one) that cancels it out.

Tech Abilities include the Glider ability which allows you to soar through the air for a short while, Enhanced Vision which allows you to send out a pulse that will identify targets around you (unless they're using Smoke), AntiMagic Generator which, shocked expression, rips magic constructs to shred and sucks Essence from players, Smartlink which gives a zoom ability to all weapons (or secondary zoom to those equipped with zoom initially) and also smartly keeps you from accidentally shooting teammates (it's a little like a Robocop Prime Directive taken to the next level) and Wired Reflexes which generally makes you faster and more athletic (and complements the Kanata quite nicely for blocking bullets).