The Good
Beautiful art. Very moody. Not just screenshots from the movies, but original art that very much captures the noir style and grainy feeling. Some detailed technical pictures of equipment such as the Esper machine. They know that many of their customers will never play the game, and only buy the book as a collector's item.
Cool world, with all the info you need to run it. There is a timeline of the world history, and the LA megacity is detailed well. Several of the districts of the megacity are described. Equipment is listed, with retro line art diagrams of the firearms and tech. The default setting is sometime between the two movies, but details are provided for you to play in either time period. Only Los Angeles is detailed. No info is given for a game in another location or off-world.
Simple skill system. There are 12 skills, each linked to a stat. They are rated the same way as stats, from A to D, which means a different size dice is rolled. I found it simple and elegant. Honestly, that is all I am looking for from a skill system. It is practically a classless game. There are archetypes that you choose (e.g. Analyst, Enforcer, Doxie, etc.) but these have only minimal impact on the skills you choose at character creation, and then are never used again.
Replicants are cool. Mechanically they are different to humans, usually with superior physical stats and inferior empathy stats. Rules are provided for both the Voight-Kampff test (2019 setting) and the Baseline test (2049 setting). My replicant was a naive newborn, trying to do things by the book and learned quickly that things don't work that way.
Push system. Like other Free League games, when you fail a skill check you can choose to Push and reroll. You risk damage to yourself if you roll any 1's. It is always a fun little decision for players to make, and for my replicant the risk was real because my Empathy was horribly low and I risked an outburst that could force me to take another Baseline test at the end of the shift.
Shifts, phases of the day. You are encouraged to track what your characters do during 4 phases of the day. The time tracker is a sheet the players can use to record what clues they found during the phases of the day, and you have to spend 1 shift of the day doing downtime activity. This is wonderful. It provides a structured way to see what the characters do in their private time. A chance to break away from the case and explore being a person in the dystopian world looks like. Our campaign didn't do this much, and we were focused on solving the case. There is a weakness to the downtime phase, if you read below.
Case Files. Free League publishes Case Files as adventures or modules to run. Our GM ran an original homebrew case for us, so we didn't use any of the official cases. They sound pretty cool, because they include detailed handouts with clues on them. They also include Countdown Events which are predetermined situations that develop during the investigation and may escalate the problems faced by the players. I like this idea.
An Improvement on the Year Zero engine. I have played a lot of Forbidden Lands, and have noticed that the probabilities of dice rolls often result in zero successes. It seems like it happens more frequently than feels good - a punishing difficulty. In Blade Runner, they have tweaked how the system works. Instead of rolling a pool of d6s (trying to get a 6), you roll just 2 dice - one dice for your stat (d6, d8, d10, or d12) and one dice for your skill (also d6, d8, d10, or d12). You need to roll 6 or higher for it to count as a success. The probabilities feel much better. My luck with dice rolls was still not great, however!
Advantage and Disadvantage. This mechanic makes dice rolling much faster. Forbidden Lands uses modifiers to your dice pool, to add or subtract dice for favourable or difficult circumstances. But simply rolling 1 extra or 1 fewer dice is elegant and quick. In a gunfight, fictional modifiers like shooting at a target who is behind cover are easy, or using full auto, because such things just give Disadvantage or Advantage.
The Connections Skill. One of the skills on your character sheet is used to represent how many contacts you know in the megacity. We used this skill quite a bit in our game, and it was a great shortcut for getting ourselves into scenes in the underbelly and calling in favours to work the case. I'm glad they included this skill.
