System Shock Review (Kaia)
This is very faithful remake of the original.
Make sure you look at some footage before buying to see if you can deal with the semi-pixely art style this game went with.
The gun play is good without being anything extraordinary either, but the story, atmosphere and experience of fighting against an omnipresent ever watchful AI entity is real good. It's a marked shift from present day horror with enemies that are unsettling but sufficiently over the top or quirky to have this ummistakeable 90s PC gaming vibe to them.
The difficulty is mild on 2 (normal difficulty), once you get used to the control scheme, the level of challenge for an experience fps user is very middle of the road. I would advise veteran fps players to bump that up from the start.
The one single aspect of this game that is irredeemably bad are all the sections that take place in "cyberspace". This was terrible at the time, it has been improved, but it's still just a whole lot of suck. It's a very jarring genre-shifting experience that will completely break the pacing of your current game, to have a Descent-like game of pew-pew in cyberspaaaaaace. I would recommend players to put that on the minimum difficulty, so as to expedite that, because the rest of the game is truely worth it.
Technically ran flawlessly for me, with not a single crash, slowdown or visual bug. Some ragdoll mechanics are still all sorts of borked, with gibbed body parts infinitely twitching on the ground or enemy corpses just moving slightly.
Otherwise a very safe buy, at least on sale, which this is now getting serious discounts. Took me about 26h to complete (including some serious backtracking), which these days is kind of good for a first person shooter type of game. Granted i got lost a lot in the maze-like levels of citadel station.
Some PSA that will potentially save you hours of frustration:
- Note down every single digit the game shows you. It expects you to notice and will have you backtrack for if you don't the first go around.
- Clicking and holding while viewing your inventory will mass vaporize every item in your inventory.
- Clicking while viewing your inventory will reorder your inventory.
- Make sure you immediately reduce the UI transparency to 0, it is by default very high and makes things not readable at all.
- The game lets you put markers down on your map and edit them with text. If you're as untalented as me at orienteering, make use of those.