[Harlequins_Back]

If you don't believe me, look at the words of another reviewer:

And with that, the chapter also points towards a problem which really rears its head in Creating a Shadowrunner- that is, the scattering of information throughout the game book. One section of the book covers the basics of each metavariant and what each attribute means, another section covers how to stat up a character, another section tells you what skills you can take, and so on. Now, I’ve read books that use the same layout, specifically the D&D Player’s Handbook. The thing is, in D&D, separate stat pools are used for attributes, skills, equipment, and magic, which means you can deal with all these sections in turn. Paying for equipment may be a bitch, but it can be done after everything else.

In Shadowrun, on the other hand, your character is created using a base pool of 400 Build Points. These points are used to buy everything, from metavariant to attributes to skills to qualities to spells to gear (attributes cost 10 BP per rank, active skills go at 4 BP, it’s 3 BP per spell, and you get 5000 nuyen- the game’s currency- per BP). Which means that once you’ve actually managed to spend all your points, you will most likely be going back and tweaking your character as much as you can before play begins. When creating my first character, it took me about four hours to get anywhere near straightening everything out. I’m sure that time will decrease with practice (it took me about one-and-a-half hours to recreate the character when I lost the sheet), but I couldn’t help but be reminded of the time my D&D group spent an entire night writing up 12th level characters for an one-shot.

So, the layout issues and the character creation issues have been noted by another RPG.net reviewer, who gave the game a more positive review. As for serious Shadowrun fans, according to a poll on Dumpshock, over 70% of them require 2+ hours to create a character, and almost half require more than 3 hours. Over 25% require more than a full day. Character generation is decidedly a problem if even the most dedicated fans require more than a full day to create a character.

What about the world? Let's look at the review this thread is for:

However, I’m not sure 4th Edition captures the essence of that cyber/fantasy chimera called “Shadowrun.” I don’t know why; it might be that the graphics seem comparatively bland compared to the pre-4th Edition books. Maybe it’s just lacking that sense of style that infused every one of the FASA books and even most of the recent stuff. There is no local culture like Seattle, no flamewar commentary in the margins, none of the attitude that set the stage for the game. Which may not seem like a big thing, but the original Shadowrun was probably the first major game to make snarkiness part of the in-game culture, not just the gamer culture. Maybe they just needed some more input from the original (or older) writers. Or maybe they could have gotten CJ Carella or someone else from EDEN Studios. Certainly the game needs a primer on style just as much as BUFFY.

Overall, if you never played Shadowrun before, 4th Edition is a pretty good rules set with a classic setting behind it. More than likely, though, you’ll be interested because you played the older game and want to see how this works. My impression is that it might be better than the original in general, but it’s different enough that veterans may be thrown off.

You might find it better, you might find it worse-- YMMV. But I'd be hesitant about declaring it to be decidedly superior to SR3, let alone many of the other wonderful games out there-- I would say it is about equal to many games on the market. Like he said, I think it's "pretty good"-- not great.