Shadowrun Returns

Shadowrun Returns is a 2013 tactical role-playing game from Harebrained Schemes, the studio of Jordan Weisman, co-creator of the Shadowrun tabletop game. It was funded on Kickstarter. In a future where magic has returned to a world run by corporations, you play a shadowrunner, a criminal for hire, investigating a friend's murder in Seattle.

Missions are explored in real time and fought in turns, with action points and cover in the style of the XCOM reboot. You hire a team of runners for each job: street samurai, mages, deckers who hack into the network, shamans who summon spirits.

Its writing and setting are strong, and its turn-based fights are clear and varied thanks to the mix of guns, magic and hacking. It was followed by Dragonfall in 2014, often called the best of the three, and Hong Kong in 2015.

The first game is linear and its team is hired by the job rather than kept. Dragonfall and Hong Kong improved both.

Shadowrun Returns shares Fallout Tactics' squad of specialists in turns, in a world where civilisation has gone badly wrong. Its role-playing layer and its writing put it closer to the Fallout role-playing games than to the tactics game, but its fights are squad tactics.