Shadowrun: Dragonfall-Director's Cut

Shadowrun is a role playing game from the late 1980s to the 1990s set in a fictional alternate universe. It communes cyberpunk and fantasy themes in a near future in which magic and magical creatures have returned to the world and coexist with advanced technology. It was originally a tabletop game, although there was a SNES video game was released for it in 1993. Normally in a Shadowrun game, you are a shadowrunner, a criminal mercenary that is usually paid by corporations or governments to steal from other corporations or governments. In 2013, a video game was created by Harebrained Schemes called Shadowrun Returns, which introduced the Shadowrun concept as a current turn-based strategy game. It was set in Seattle in 2054 and had it's own story involving the player character hunting a serial killer. It also included the tool that the developers used to make the game, allowing players to make their own content and stories. Shadowrun: Dragonfall is an add-on for Shadowrun Returns with it's own story, set in Berlin, and both stories were complex, involved important characters from the Shadowrun fiction, and had multiple endings depending on player choices.

The Shadowrun: Dragonfall Director's Cut was released on September 18th, 2014 as a separate game from Shadowrun Returns and the original Shadowrun: Dragonfall. The original Dragonfall improved on the ideas from Shadowrun Returns by giving you a permanent team that you could choose from for missions in addition to hiring others,  adding new weapons, items, spells, and cyberware to fit with the new setting, although most of them have the same basic function as their Returns equivalent. Dragonfall also had it's own story and every character has their own backstory that you could learn by talking to them repeatedly. The Director's Cut improves many of the above, especially the story. In the Director's Cut, there are 2 new endings, both of which are very different from the preexisting ones, and 3 of your team members now have their own missions that can be played after they're talked to enough, and a fourth new mission gives the player a deeper understanding of one of the organizations in the game, along with what high-class society is like in the Shadowrun world. The weapons, spells, and items from the original Dragonfall remain mostly the same, but the fifth new mission unlocks new cyberware. However, one of the best new features is the new team system, which allows you to choose one of two upgrades for each team member at certain points in the game (for example: the first choice for Eiger, your weapons specialist, has you choose between a sniper rifle ability and a shotgun ability). Each team member also gains a new ability or piece of equipment after you complete their mission, and the fourth team member (who doesn't have a mission) still gets a new ability in a normal story mission. You can also loan team members equipment if they have the inventory space for it and meet the prerequisites. Finally, the game developers redid the AI and armor and cover systems, making those systems much more important than they were before, and making the AI much more intelligent. This makes the Director's Cut much more tactically challenging, as gunfights can drag out for a while if both sides are well equipped and have good cover, and the AI punishes the player for making stupid decisions such as having their entire group standing in around a doorway, allowing the enemies to throw multiple grenades in their turn and hit the entire group with them.

Overall, the Shadowrun: Dragonfall Director's Cut greatly enhances the Shadowrun games, improving the original's story and gameplay, along with providing a greater tactical challenge. It's largest problem is that the main story does end, and although you can bring your character into other players' content, you can't do the same for your team members, and the team customization  was one of the greatest improvements and made me want the ability to continue using that team. However, the game was still excellent and the story was probably one of the best I've heard in a video game.