This review contains spoilers
I liked the Cybernetic Module upgrade system. Although I don't think it was properly balanced. Some examples, Repair is basically useless if you maintain your weapons with the Maintenance skill. Modify is probably useless too since you can find quite a few of those one time use upgrade items which will take care of most, if not all, of your weapons.
Some resources were also a pain the ass to find. I never really had enough bullets for the standard gun and assault rifle. Why was it even possible to upgrade the assault's rifle clip size if it's never even going to make a difference since you're lucky if you have more than 10 bullets of a type.
This lack of ammo issue especially became a problem if you weren't able to instantly know where to go and had to search around for a bit. Enemies barely drop any ammo and that is even more so for the respawns. At the beginning I had to rely on my wrench a lot and let me tell you that wasn't great since melee combat in this game sucks.
The game could also have done with a bit more weapon variety. You are probably not going to spec into every weapon type so you simply aren't able to use quite a few weapons.
I believe there's only three different weapons per type and some of them become obsolete by the time you get the level 6 weapons. Don't get me wrong, the weapons (that I tried) were great. The grenade launcher and the assault rifle were fun to use. I also enjoyed that you were able to select different modes for the weapons. Selecting Death mode on the Fusion Cannon was a blast.
I did not use the Psionic powers at all so I can't say anything about that.
The gameplay and interfacing have been much improved compared to System Shock 1 but the prequel had a better ambiance and a better villain.
Xerxes was ass, the Many was whatever and SHODAN was alright in this game but just not nearly as menacing as the System Shock 1 SHODAN. Moments like finding out that Polito was SHODAN and entering the Medical area from the first game were cool. The boss fights were pretty bad unfortunately. The SHODAN fight was one of the worst boss fight I have seen in a videogame. Having to hack when there is a damaging floor under you and mobs that spawn endlessly. I had a terrible time.
I also did not like the backtracking. Especially when you miss something then good luck trying to find it. Some examples that stick in my mind are finding the codes in the art, the egg hunt (since I missed one, I had to go all the way back to find it), going back to grab the necessary chemicals for a research etc.
The cameras were a dumb system too because it basically meant that if you were spotted that you would have to wait it out somewhere for a full 2 minutes before you could continue. I would have fought them off if it weren't for the serious lack of ammo problem.
And yes, you can hack them but for some reason, oftentimes you would encounter the camera before you even encountered the security systems where you can hack them. So that didn't really make sense.
On the topic of hacking, what a dumb RNG-based mini-"game" that was. And also why do hacking, repairing and modifying all have the exact same RNG get three in a row minigame. Even with a high level in these stats there was still a likely possibility that it would get screwed up. That and the cameras really incentivized save-scumming.
Some resources were also a pain the ass to find. I never really had enough bullets for the standard gun and assault rifle. Why was it even possible to upgrade the assault's rifle clip size if it's never even going to make a difference since you're lucky if you have more than 10 bullets of a type.
This lack of ammo issue especially became a problem if you weren't able to instantly know where to go and had to search around for a bit. Enemies barely drop any ammo and that is even more so for the respawns. At the beginning I had to rely on my wrench a lot and let me tell you that wasn't great since melee combat in this game sucks.
The game could also have done with a bit more weapon variety. You are probably not going to spec into every weapon type so you simply aren't able to use quite a few weapons.
I believe there's only three different weapons per type and some of them become obsolete by the time you get the level 6 weapons. Don't get me wrong, the weapons (that I tried) were great. The grenade launcher and the assault rifle were fun to use. I also enjoyed that you were able to select different modes for the weapons. Selecting Death mode on the Fusion Cannon was a blast.
I did not use the Psionic powers at all so I can't say anything about that.
The gameplay and interfacing have been much improved compared to System Shock 1 but the prequel had a better ambiance and a better villain.
Xerxes was ass, the Many was whatever and SHODAN was alright in this game but just not nearly as menacing as the System Shock 1 SHODAN. Moments like finding out that Polito was SHODAN and entering the Medical area from the first game were cool. The boss fights were pretty bad unfortunately. The SHODAN fight was one of the worst boss fight I have seen in a videogame. Having to hack when there is a damaging floor under you and mobs that spawn endlessly. I had a terrible time.
I also did not like the backtracking. Especially when you miss something then good luck trying to find it. Some examples that stick in my mind are finding the codes in the art, the egg hunt (since I missed one, I had to go all the way back to find it), going back to grab the necessary chemicals for a research etc.
The cameras were a dumb system too because it basically meant that if you were spotted that you would have to wait it out somewhere for a full 2 minutes before you could continue. I would have fought them off if it weren't for the serious lack of ammo problem.
And yes, you can hack them but for some reason, oftentimes you would encounter the camera before you even encountered the security systems where you can hack them. So that didn't really make sense.
On the topic of hacking, what a dumb RNG-based mini-"game" that was. And also why do hacking, repairing and modifying all have the exact same RNG get three in a row minigame. Even with a high level in these stats there was still a likely possibility that it would get screwed up. That and the cameras really incentivized save-scumming.