Unless you played System Shock at least 20 years ago, the chances are you’ll find even the Enhanced Edition of the original game to be a bit awkward to play. The original System Shock was released in 1994, long before FPS shooter controls or even 3D navigation had become standardized across the industry. If you’ve tried to pick up the game since then, you probably hit a brick wall. But System Shock is considered a classic – not a cult classic, but an actual classic – and heavily inspired the legendary BioShock series. If you want to see what kind of game could hold that kind of acclaim but you’re younger than 38, then you will need to play the System Shock remake.
It’s simple, really. What we need is System Shock, with all the puzzles, items, enemy placements, and everything else that made the game iconic, but with modern controls and menus so someone younger than 30 can play it without having to learn to drive a stick-shift. But System Shock goes a little bit further than that, and even evokes the look of an early 90s game. Nightdive Studios isn’t trying to hide that System Shock is an older game with a complete overhaul, it’s just trying to make that experience palatable to modern tastes while looking and feeling as authentically old-school as possible.
For example, textures and models are rarely too detailed. An early sequence has you sitting behind your desk, logging into a funky laptop, and the items on your desk are angular, and even the donuts are pixellated. The game is almost always dancing the line between detailed and low-poly. From a distance, hallways look immaculate, with each protruding lump on the wall being a fully modeled mesh of polygons, not simple bump-mapped textures.
The dark atmosphere makes light sources pop as they illuminate the environment, and each model in the scene gives off accurate shadows, making this world feel believable. The mood and visuals of this modern System Shock remake are unlike anything else we’ve played in recent memory. It’s closest to something like Alien: Isolation, thanks to the use of light and space station setting, but the tightly honed visual style and RPG mechanics make it unlike quite anything else, even the original.
As you navigate the space station you’ll be battling servo robots and mutated creatures, all while being spoken to by Shodan, the AI overlord that has full “control” of the space station gone awry. You’ll be destroying security cameras and monsters alike while hacking control panels and slowly making your way through the labyrinthine ship.
While the controls are more familiar to shooter fans than they ever have been before, ultimately this is not a shooter. System Shock is a hardcore RPG, and while you might get to play with pistols and shotguns over the course of your adventure, you won’t be playing this game like Doom. Instead, you’ll be carefully making your way through perilous hallways, scarcely actually using the arsenal of weaponry you’ll be building up. But all of that strength will come in handy when you finally go up against Shodan in the end.
System Shock really is a classic, or at least that’s what I’ve been told. With this new remake, I’m excited to finally experience the game for myself, without needing driving lessons. If this game is this atmospheric and engaging until the end, then it might be essential.
Written by Dave Aubrey on behalf of GLHF.
