Shadowrun

We played Shadowrun in a room of eight people, and the whole time we were playing nobody laughed. Nobody congratulated each other on a particularly skilful kill, nobody giggled at an embarrassing death and absolutely nobody slammed their mouse on the desk and screamed in anger at a kill they felt cheap or unfair. In short, as a PC deathmatch vehicle, Shadowrun is a failure. It’s a joyless grind, mediocre on 360 and simply pointless on PC.

It’s frustrating too since, alongside some isolated sparks of genius, there’s a good premise here. You begin each round as you would Counter-Strike - using money you’ve earned to buy bigger and better weapons and equipment. In a stunning twist though, you don’t simply buy (crap, ineffective) weapons, but also invest in different magical and technological abilities. These power-ups can then be stored in the buttons labeled 1, 2 and 3 on your keyboard and brought out to play whenever your magic-o-meter isn’t drained of tech-juice.

It’s a decent enough system that (alongside a choice of races to play as) lets you build your character into a semi-personalized Team Fortress-style class. It also means that the action cascades from basic shootouts into ever more crazed fragfests - dwarves swooping around on gliders firing mini-guns into the fray, katana-wielding elves with upgraded reflexes automatically swiping bullets away and life-giving trees sprouting at tactically significant bottlenecks.