Was pretty committed to beating this until I hit the executive level and I started thinking about other video games I'd rather be playing. My own personal SHODAN, Larry Davis, sometimes mentions to me how a game he doesn't like drops in half-star increments the more he plays, and I think that about sums up how I started to feel about System Shock (2023). The difference here is that I have enough games to play right now and I'd rather not push ahead with this just to be like "yo, did you hear Nightdive made a 2.5/5 System Shock??"

Citadel Station is the same arduous maze it always was and it's still obtuse to navigate. It's massive, oppressive, and actively hostile towards your existence. Every step of the way you're fighting SHODAN, you are literally within her plucking out her eyes and shooting at the cells she sends after you like a body would attack a virus. But familiar as it is, it doesn't really add anything. The Enhanced Edition already solves a lot of System Shock's cumbersome controls, it lets you break apart its UI and chuck its superfluous elements into the trash, or you can play it the way LookingGlass intended: via a system of pulleys and levers. However, while the Enhanced Edition gives you modernized controls as an option, the remake is built with them from the ground up. You could play it with a controller if you want, like a monster.

This results in a much smoother experience, one that's accompanied by some great art direction, an excellent soundtrack, and combat that has much more ommph thanks to nearly 30 years of technological leaps in animation and graphics. It also feels completely unnecessary, and hours into getting horrifically lost and accidentally firing a mining laser at Earth again, I started to feel like my second run through the station was dragging. At its worst, removing too much of System Shock's chunkiness becomes detrimental to its charm, but perhaps that's the purist in me pining for whatever the hell this is.

Some aspects, like VR, feel actively worse than before, and I encountered a staggering amount of collision issues that sent me falling through floors and elevators. Occasional errors with the game mis-flagging my location left me spawning in regeneration booths on totally different floors, and I encountered one crash that required running through a few excruciating combat encounters in the Grove for a second time. Your mileage and PC build may vary, but I found the remake to be pretty flimsy.

It's still System Shock, which is good, but I found the remake to be a bit too buggy and conceptually boring despite the shiny new coat Nightdive has given it. I feel like you'd get more out of this if you never played the original or the Enhanced Edition, and if you have then you may find Nightdive's take to be a bit watered down. It doesn't even have the cool Hackerman intro... or rather it does, just expanded upon and rendered more dull for it, and I think from the jump that's a good way of telling you exactly what you'll get from this particular version of System Shock. Shelving this thing because I'm starting to understand how people feel about the Demon's Souls Remake and this is not good for my soul.