The System Shock remake is at once a real nice modernization of the original game but also ends up being a bit too faithful to the original game’s bad design decisions. I played the remaster of the original years ago and practically immediately bounced off of the archaic control scheme. The interesting thing to me though was that it felt surprisingly similar to a modern immersive sim control-wise aside from how you interact with stuff in the world, which was clunky as shit. The remake obviously completely revamps the controls to a modern immersive sim shooter and it does so well. System Shock 1 was a genre trailblazer ahead of its time, but it definitely feels rather dated in how its later successors such as Prey 2017, Deus Ex, and Bioshock 1 have surpassed it. There isn’t much in the way of build variety for example, you just choose between ballistic weapons, lasers, and explosives. Hacking is also rather basic too. This isn’t at all bad mind you, but you just need to know going in that despite all the polish and love Night Dive gave it this is still a 1994 DOS game at its core. As mentioned some of its design decisions are just archaically obtuse and short-sighted. For the most part the game strikes a good balance on the normal mission difficulty of not holding the player’s hand but still hinting at what you need to do. This degrades as the game reaches its climax and becomes genuinely obtuse and the endgame just draaaags for several hours because of the obtuse and extensive backtracking and also how the Engineering, Security, and Bridge levels are big areas crawling with enemies. These levels aren’t bad, there’s no sudden difficulty spikes, but it’s still a gauntlet. Just as an FYI to save you the trouble, screenshot the numbers on each terminal in the security node rooms after you blow them up. Also screw whoever added that chess puzzle, it’s optional, but it still gives you more inventory room and it just absolutely sucks as an in-game puzzle. Keep whoever designed that away from designing video game puzzles forever.
Still there’s a whole bunch of good about this game. This game is the OG immersive sim and it still holds up quite well with all the sprucing up Nightdive did. The level design is mainly quite good with enough to reward exploration. Visually it looks nice too, with a strong 80’s sci-fi aesthetic of blinking lights and circuitry. The combat, while simple, is still fun. The guns feel good and I liked using the lasers. Though you’ll be using those lean buttons a good deal to nail enemies around corners because combat out in the open usually ain’t the best idea. The narrative is also rather basic, there’s not much in the way in characterization and practically everyone has been murdered or turned into killer cyborgs by the time the game actually starts but SHODAN is a great antagonist who goes on some fun supervillain rants and Edward Diego works nicely as her loathsome sycophantic corpo toady and recurring boss fight. I really do like the enemy designs too, the robots all have that ED-209 brutal killbot look to them and the cyborgs do look nicely horrifying.
Overall it’s a worthy dive into the gaming past despite some of its design flaws, now I’m just waiting for the SS2 remaster to come out.
Still there’s a whole bunch of good about this game. This game is the OG immersive sim and it still holds up quite well with all the sprucing up Nightdive did. The level design is mainly quite good with enough to reward exploration. Visually it looks nice too, with a strong 80’s sci-fi aesthetic of blinking lights and circuitry. The combat, while simple, is still fun. The guns feel good and I liked using the lasers. Though you’ll be using those lean buttons a good deal to nail enemies around corners because combat out in the open usually ain’t the best idea. The narrative is also rather basic, there’s not much in the way in characterization and practically everyone has been murdered or turned into killer cyborgs by the time the game actually starts but SHODAN is a great antagonist who goes on some fun supervillain rants and Edward Diego works nicely as her loathsome sycophantic corpo toady and recurring boss fight. I really do like the enemy designs too, the robots all have that ED-209 brutal killbot look to them and the cyborgs do look nicely horrifying.
Overall it’s a worthy dive into the gaming past despite some of its design flaws, now I’m just waiting for the SS2 remaster to come out.