3 hours in and I agree with all of this. If you don’t expect something it is not, I would recommend it despite the save points and linearity. There’s no big sprawling open world bits or drastically diverging storylines - it’s more like a crime novel with tactical combat. Well, at least there’s none until some crazy Shadowrun fan makes a campaign like that.
I’m having fun with it, so far.
Waiting on the iPad version…it needs to hurry up.
Still playing, still loving it…just wondering if anybody else is having the same problem I am: it won’t let me spend Karma anymore. For awhile I was able to, but now when I go to the “Spend Karma” screen and select the next box in the progression, then click the go button, it takes me back to the screen showing all my attributes and they’re still where they were before I spent the Karma.
This is becoming a problem because I"m getting into tougher fights and need to increase my attributes. Not sure if it’s a glitch or if I’m doing something wrong.
Are you sure you have the prereqs for what you’re trying to buy? I spent a little bit of time trying to figure out some of the weirdness, and some “boxes” are tied to “meta”-boxes. For instance, you have to buy the 4-karma intelligence before you buy the 4-karma decker/rigger skills. Likewise, the ranged weapon talents seem to have a 3-tier hierarchy, you have to buy the Quickness slot, followed by the “ranged weapon” slot, followed by the specific weapon – so assuming you have your rifle skill at level 3 it actually costs 12 karma to get the level 4 rifle skill, not 4. If you already figured that out then… no idea.
Does anybody know how to swap out decker programs? I can’t seem to find a way to actually access my deck. But I haven’t actually jacked in to anything yet, maybe you choose them then.
I enjoyed it. Took about 11 hours, and I was pretty thorough.
The last fight was pretty intense. I lost my support mage in the fight, but I figure that’s just one less person to split the money with.
The last fight got pretty hairy for me, too.
Also, confirming that you do swap your deck programs at the start of your jack-in.
Also also, while you can swap out/upgrade most cybernetic mods, it appears leg mods are bugged and can never be swapped out – if you buy the basic set you’re stuck with them the entire game.
Played through as a decker, I think I’m going to start again with a mage or adept.
I found the shaman party members to be pretty chaotic. Seems you’re meant to banish your minions after a few rounds of usefulness or else you end up fighting them, too.
I’m looking forward to some more content; this campaign ended before I could become a total badass 
Any idea how to use ley lines? I figure the mage gets some sort of bonus for standing on it, but the tooltips never said anything other than I was standing on one.
A brief sort-of review:
Basically, what you get is not a full game so much as an excellent game engine for top-down turn-based RPG play, plus a starter scenario, short and linear but fun. During even that brief story you earn enough Karma to be pretty darn good at about two careers. I played a decker with gun and dodging skills. In a fuller adventure I shouldn’t wonder if you could become at least mediocre at everything, like in the Fallout games.
I don’t care for systems where you can’t save freely. There is some kind of ‘copy’ function, but no clear instructions on what it means to copy a save. The checkpoint system seems to have only one save per checkpoint, so it does not appear that you can have a set of saves for each identity, as in games like Mass Effect. I went back to a previous save to redo a section only to find that a previous version of my party occupied that autosave, not the one I was currently running. You can’t see any information on which save version you are loading except date. It would have been nice to have icons that represented each party member, like in Baldur’s Gate.
Occasionally, randomly, dialogue options did not show up in balloons unless you floated the cursor over where these were supposed to be, and did not have words in the balloons even then. In general, this made very little difference, as the responses are more-or-less the same anyway.
Playing on Normal, I didn’t break a sweat in combat until toward the end, when suddenly it mattered that the game was built with tactical possibilities. The AI wasn’t hard to make a chump of, once I settled into conserving resources and making each move count. If you have a doorway, your enemies will almost always follow you into an ambush waiting on the other side. And once you’ve got 3 AP to play with a round, you can run to an open doorway, shoot, then duck out of sight again.
Clearly the game was intended for fan expansion, but that will take a while to seriously kick in. In the meantime, the length of the scenario makes it feasible to play through different classes to get a feel for them. I think you’re probably always going to want to end up as a Fighter/Something, but we’ll see.