System Shock

If you are interested in the series but don't want to deal with the learning curve of the 1994 version of this game, than this is for you.

One of the best "remakes" I've seen in years with distinct improvements to quality of life aspects while maintaining a lot of the original systems. The visual style is distinct and reflective of an aesthetic not found in most "photo-realism" focused modern titles. The campaign experience is about 20 hours on regular difficulty (all settings on 2) without external walkthroughs which is pretty packed with content and overall very enjoyable. The combat is smooth with modern touches to keep the experience rather streamlined although character control can sometime feel clunky and unintuitive. The weapons animations and sound effects are very well made. The biggest complaint I have is the balance of weapons and inventory management. It is a shame that only a handful of weapons can fit in the inventory at once without sacrificing the ability to hold mission items or junk for recycling. All the weapons are unique both in mechanisms and animations but I can't use most of them since only like 4 are actually worth carrying with you. The energy guns also consumes so much energy even with efficiency upgrades to be worthwhile that it would just be better to use bullet weapons instead. I had to use a community mod that shrinks all weapon grids just so I can give some weaker (but unique) guns some reasons to exist beyond the first 20 minutes of the game. Some minor frictions include vaporizing items, enemy ragdolls and the hot bar. I wish there is a button for vaporizing trashes in an opened container so I can take the scrap without needing to find space for the item first. Not being able to vaporize or recycle duplicate weapons is also very annoying personally since I hate leaving items on the ground, especially later in the game when all my weapons are upgraded and I don't need the ones found on corpses. Throughout the playthrough I have had multiple instances where enemy ragdolls interfere with essential items or interactions. They constantly block the item I want to grab or block a gate I need to open. Without ragdoll culling or body movements I can only waste a bunch of ammo shooting the dead body for it to move, which is annoying to say the least and game breaking in case I can't afford the ammo waste. Lastly, not able to dynamically assign the hot bar slots is a pain in the butt to say the least. I don't use throwables at all, especially not once the grenade launcher is available. Why am I stuck with only 4 gun slots and cannot repurpose the grenade slots which I don't use at all?