Shadowrun
Worth $60? Maybe. Better multiplayer than other games that include a single player experience? No.
Mitch Gitelman, FASA Studio manager, participated in an Official Xbox Magazine podcast in which he said:
The most important thing is the value of what you’re getting, I think there is value there at the $60 price point. If you play just about any first person, next-generation shooter that’s come out recently, you’re looking at the single player game being about 10 hours. I’ve been playing Shadowrun for three years… You can see this game truly has legs. So, ten hours of gameplay for sixty bucks, plus some probably lame multiplayer they tacked on, versus Shadowrun that you can play, lets say, for years.
Now, I like the Xbox 360 Shadowrun game. I like it a lot, and I think that a lot of the bad reviews are unfairly biased because of its inconsistencies with the pen-and-paper RPG, but others do make some valid points. Sixty dollars is quite a bit to pay for a multiplayer-only game that has only three game types (and at most two game modes available for each map, if I recall correctly) and only a handful of maps. Gitelman’s defense here is just silly. He’d've done much better if he hadn’t referred to other games, and stressed that most of the game’s variety comes not from maps but from the combinations of magic/tech that players can utilize (and maybe dropped a couple of hints about future downloadable content). Let’s compare Shadowrun with a few other games that my friends and I have spent a lot of time playing:
| Title | Shadowrun | Rainbow Six: Vegas | G.R.A.W. | Gears of War | |
| Single-player Campaign | 6 tutorial levels | Lengthy Campaign | Lengthy Campaign | Lengthy Campaign | |
| Multiplayer | Maps |
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| Co-operative game types | N/A |
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Campaign | |
| Competitive game types |
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| Personalization | Pick your race. | Pick a face (including the ability to put your own face on your character), and choose various armors and clothing based on rank. | Pick a class, and change some outfitting options to customize the look/weaponry. | Pick from several different characters to play. | |
Items marked with an asterisk were features added in downloadable content, and may not be considered a part of the initial $60 purchase (though in some cases, these extra features were free or became free after a certain amount of time had passed).
Even ignoring the downloadable content for these other games, it’s easy to see that they not only have a decent single-player game, but that their multiplayer is not “probably lame multiplayer they tacked on”. Regardless of the merits of the game’s price point, attacking other games just makes Gitelman (and, by extension, FASA) look defensive, which lends credence to the complaints of the naysayers.