System Shock

if you want to know if this game is good or not then just skip the first paragraph you weenie im sure greasy old guys with nostalgia glasses that find modern games 'too fast' or young men who just discovered contrarianism and find modern games 'too easy'will swear up and down that this style of gaming, stripped of most modern amenities, is the best or whatever and that people who don't like this game are zoomy newgens who are addicted to modern-day gamerism handholding, but i myself dont really need to sit on my hands and tape my mouth shut to restrain myself from spitting up and clapping like a newborn baby over what i can describe as the most veritably thankless, digitally amish, unrewarding and aged-like-milk gameplay on this side of the planet. if you are a person who is either offended by what i just said or feels accurately described, then don't bother reading the rest of this review as ill spend it rather thoroughly ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ on this lazarus game. its not like i hate you for loving this game but im sure there will be some veritable prototype demi-humans in my comments or reaction rewards here grilling me with the barely controlled savagery of a fat kid deciding which fast food joint to doordash food from i bought this game because it looked cool and what not and it came out pretty recently in gaming years so i figured id give it a try. i dont really feel like i wasted my money, only my time. the main loop and gunplay is to either peek around corners or rush across rooms and shoot the drooling ai enemies or to run at them with a laser sword (honestly quite cool) and slash them until they become wrongly-assembled heaps of mr potato-head parts. the variety and escalation of enemy types also dries up pretty hard towards the last half of the game and are actually /a bit too easy to overcome/ and tactically unstimulating even on the hardest difficulty. still, that is about all there is to the combat of the game, which is a little sad, but to be expected of a game that spends most of its time figuring out inventive ways of making you feel as if you were given a prefrontal lobotomy or kicked in the balls the environmental hazards arent all as bad as people say they are (especially if you ever played half life) but they do make the character get a priapism and moan continuously for upwards of 6 hours at a time (which is about when you would want to see a doctor or a psychologist) the level design is atmospherically cool, but seems to be designed to give you the worst possible walkback-of-doom backtracking experience ever. you will walk around with squinted eyes looking for some dumbass button that you missed with monotonous regularity. you will go back and forth between maze-like levels looking for some obscure switch or gadget or gizmo. sometimes i felt like im walking through a greek maze, minus the minotaur, and minus the treasure, and with 5 times as much tedious incensement. even with the special doodad that highlights items for you (which im sure the would-be avgn gentlemen who adore this game think is silly) items that are rather important are very easy to miss. unrelated but closing the map makes a sound like a cheap smoke detector running out of battery which im not sure is more or less immersive. for cyberspace i have one word: BLOWS i cannot stress this enough but the backtracking in this game will make the worst evening of your adolescence (watching the crow in a vain attempt to get laid) seem like a formative experience by comparison. you can run through the game and knock out these cpu nodes and a number apparently appears on each screen that you are supposed to remember for like 4 or 5 levels ahead when you get to this reactor core that requires all of those numbers in order (which are randomly generated and unique to each playthrough). believe me when i found this out i immediately went out for a long drive and visited my local dive bar and solicited five homeless guys to beat me for 45 minutes just to feel something other than a sense of doom a kernel of good here - i really enjoyed the inventory management. don't know why. i liked picking up everything in the game and trying to turn it into wall-e cubes that i could then exchange for chuck-e-cheese tokens and then spend those tokens on ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. i made a preposterous amount of money doing this and that was actually the most fun i had on the game. i also liked the music and most of the sound design (minus the guy moaning and groaning in my ear over his biological contamination) - but that being said, the music itself wasnt the most technically impressive thing either. it was good, did its job, i enjoyed it. no real need for dream theater levels of complicated chord progressions and what not. its fine. i didnt bother to finish this so i cant really speak to the alleged shodan bossfight but i heard it sucks so there you go. the atmosphere and story and what not didnt really reach me and felt either basic or obfuscated by the marsh of biological contamination that is everything else. shodan has a big laser and the newest version of leprosy and wants to release it. no, this isn't spooky atmosphere wise, no, this isn't dead space or alien isolation or whatever: shodan is about as scary as a phone bill. to be fair though, is anyone really playing these kinds of games for their story or atmosphere alone anyways? i figured the main selling point was the whole 'eternal damnation' simulator and dated ('classic') gameplay mechanics. the core takeaway here is that this game and games like it are older than your mother, and if you dont like old games (or milfs for that matter) it'll fundamentally suck for you. that's really all there is to it. my only real gripe here is that it would have been nice for some kind of placard or note somewhere in the description saying "THIS PLAYS JUST LIKE THE 1994 GAME" because that may have sufficiently repulsed me from trying it in the first place. again im sorry if my less than glamorous review of your favorite immersive psychic perdition simulator was less than glowing but i just really didnt give much of a ♥♥♥♥ for this game and i dont really think most people should either. be well now

First off, I've played a chunk of the original, but never got far. Just a few hours here and there on loop over the past ~30 years. This game is a monumental achievement as a sim game for all of its moving parts, and I loved the story. Also gives you the experience of being just above a nobody going up against a massive force of mutants, cyborgs, and robots. Which is to say you better get familiar with the quicksave and quickload buttons (former of which doesn't work if an enemy is too close, be sure to look for confirmation) as you’ll be using them a lot or doing lots of runbacks from the respawners. The gameplay is mostly getting up to a new floor to clear most of the enemies and cameras, then to a previous floor to clear a new area of enemies and cameras, then to a new floor to clear out enemies and cameras, and back to a previous floor to clear out—almost ad inifnitum. The mission difficulty setting ranges from telling you roughly where to go to letting you bash your head against walls with an optional 10hour timer. It just drags on forever when it feels like it should take half the time it actually does. Gaze upon it as it did give us System Shock 2, Bioshock, and Prey. But don’t play this remake or the original. It’s just not worth the time in any form with all of the zigzagging and dying. I’d even recommend just watching an LP that includes the audio logs over playing it yourself.

Nunca jugué al original, pero conocía dicho juego por lo famoso que es y lo que supuso en su día. Creo que esta versión remasterizada es la mejor manera para jugar este pedacito de historia.

I Loved the original system shock when it came out. I love this game. But the devs obviously ran out of money and couldn't pay playtesters for their Descent levels. Even Descent, I was hardcore into that online and was really good at, but their version of Descent is just so poorly designed (no map, OP bots and no way to change the difficulty settings for say a steam deck player) that it literally made me rage quit something that I really wanted to finish. I wish they would simply follow ITIL practices, listen to feedback, improve what you have. But this is the curse of not having enough money I guess.

A very good game. It's certainly not for everyone but I really enjoyed it.

Well, this is how remakes should be done. I was waiting for this game 32 years. And somehow it still hit harder than I expected. This is not a "modernized classic" in the lazy sense. It keeps the soul of the original intact: the loneliness, the maze-like station, the feeling that SHODAN is not just a villain but the whole place around you. It does not hold your hand, it does not flatten the level design, and it trusts you to learn its systems the hard way. Because of that, every bit of progress feels earned. Yes, it is brutal. At times frustratingly so. The final stretch hit me like a truck. But that is also why finishing it felt so damn satisfying. This remake reminded me why System Shock stayed in my head for decades. Nightdive did not just polish an old game. They brought it back to life. If you want a real remake, not a hollow tribute, this is it.

Shooter clásico que me recuerda mucho a doom 3. La jugabilidad es bastante arcade, con mapas pasilleros y de corta distancia, entornos industriales laberinticos y objetos útiles repartidos por el mapa, que está lleno de habitaciones ocultas y de pequeños secretos. Algún que otro mapa puede ser bastante obtuso de navegar e incluso frustrante (te miro a ti, almacén) y hay que prestar bastante atención a las grabaciones de audio que irás encontrando a lo largo del juego para enterarte que tienes que hacer, ya que no hay un sistema de misiones o marcadores para guiarte, lo que lleva a situaciones en la que estás media hora dando vueltas por el mapa para encontrar una maldita llave en el bolsillo de un cadáver (eso si está en el mismo nivel, una broma muy buena que me ha pasado un par de veces jaja). También hay elementos de survival bastante presentes, la munición y los objetos de curación son bastante escasos hasta ya muy avanzado el juego, y el espacio de inventario es muy limitado, tienes que pensar bien que te llevas y que no. En cuanto a dificultad diré que es "dificilillo", no me ha parecido verdaderamente difícil en general (me he pasado el juego en la dificultad normal), pero hay unas cuantas situaciones que se me han complicado. No me quiero ni imaginar cómo serán las partes del ciberespacio en dificultad difícil porque en normal son un dolor de culo tremendo xD Lo recomiendo si tienes paciencia y cierta tolerancia a la frustración, no es que yo sea la persona más paciente del mundo, pero mientras no seas un zoomer con la dopamina quemada por tiktok estarás bien xd