Usually it’s important not to date yourself, especially when reviewing games, but some of us may have purchased the original System Shock on DOS way back in 1994. To be fair, it was the later enhanced port with full speech and fancier graphics but in 1994, System Shock was utterly mind-blowing. Nothing that complex had ever been packed into a first-person game before and the hard sci-fi and cyberpunk elements of the game were cutting edge at the time. This is a game that revolutionized game storytelling and design in a number of ways and ended up being a cornerstone of PC gaming in the 90s.
Fast forward a long time and we end up over 20 years later. System Shock was re-released on PC in its original format optimized for modern PCs as System Shock: Enhanced Edition in 2015. While it was amazing to play it again on a modern system and some changes had been made to fix areas of the game that had not withstood the test of time, the Enhanced Edition of the game was definitely not the be-all end-all remaster that long-time fans had been hoping for. It was a great game, no question, but not a full remaster. Fortunately Nightdive Studios finally rereleased their long-awaited remaster of System Shock. Noticeably absent from that release was a Switch version. With remasters, some ports are harder than others but it’s finally time to rectify that oversight with the release of System Shock for Switch and Switch 2 courtesy of publisher Atari!
While this game was intended to be a remaster, it’s more of a re-imagining of the franchise than a 1:1 remaster, which ended up with Nightdive dropping the ‘Remastered’ from the title. But what is System Shock? For those of you unfamiliar with the game, you play an unnamed hacker in a dystopian future. Captured by authorities, you work a deal to use your talents to fix some issues with an AI on a space station in exchange for your freedom. Seems like a pretty good deal compared to rotting in jail, at least until you make it to Citadel Station (Mass Effect anyone?), where an evil AI named SHODAN has taken things over and is setting up to use the station as a springboard to eliminate the human race on Earth. Naturally, as an altruistic hacker, your self-preservation instincts kick in and it’s time to go to bat solo for the entire human race. No one is helping you either. You’re the only live human left on Citadel and the entirety of the storyline in System Shock is told through voice records and emails left behind by the doomed staff of the station. System Shock was one of the earliest games to use this narrative style and it has been used in countless games since.
The game is presented entirely in first person and you’ll be exploring the entirety of Citadel Station with essentially no assistance. This is not a game that holds your hands by any means, so expect to figure out all but the most basic mechanics on your own. While System Shock may have been remastered, the basic structure and feel of the gameplay remains intact and the original design was from the mid-90s, when games let you do all the heavy lifting. There is additional challenge on the Switch as well, since the system struggles to handle the 3D of the game and ends up dropping frames left and right. Expect significant slowdown and issues with load times when you die in this version of System Shock that will add to the difficulty in learning the game, especially if this is your first experience with it.
Your exploration is mapped in a sub-menu and you have a modernized HUD that you can use to track your progress as well. At first, your weapons are limited but as you progress, there are more weapons than there are slots to place them in, so you’ll have to prioritize your weapon selections based on preference and available ammunition. The TB-05 Sparqbeam should definitely be one of your go-to weapons due to its recharge capabilities and multiple fire intensity settings, as should the Magnum 2100 since you tend to acquire a fair amount of ammo for it.
At first, there’s not much going on in System Shock. A few creepy mutants here, a log or two there, and a bunch of random, abandoned gear. This is an experience that takes a bit to really get rolling and the action ramps up very slowly as well. There are a variety of enemies to face and each is best foiled by different weaponry, forcing you to strategically attack and sneak around as you hear enemies from around corners and down hallways. The volume of enemies increases as you progress, just enough to keep you low on ammo and nervous in the dim, flickering lights of the station. The entire atmosphere of the game is one of intense solitude, leaving players feeling trapped and afraid as they slowly creep through the hallways of Citadel Station, hoping to survive their next encounter.
Not only are you alone, but robots and cyborgs are actively hunting you at the direction of SHODAN while she taunts you and plots your demise along with the rest of humanity. In the original game, targeting enemies was a bit challenging but in this new version of System Shock, normal difficulty is going to feel a bit casual to long-time FPS players with early enemies that only require a couple of direct hits or headshots to go down, even if you have to turn up your Sparqbeam now and again. Of course you can always up the difficulty….just try not to take the game’s warnings too much to heart.
Clearing floors on the ship and taking out all monitoring equipment will require time and patience and the further you get, the more aggressive SHODAN becomes in her pursuit of you. There are ten different areas in the game that you’ll have to survive in order to take down SHODAN, and getting through them is definitely a challenge. You’ll have to use every tool at your disposal and disposal is definitely the right word. This is a space station and you’ll have to unlock access to areas to acquire supplies. Some of those supplies are in vending machines, requiring you to spend money in the form of TriOptimum credits in order to obtain additional ammo, weapons upgrades, and even healing items.
To do this you’ll need to recycle all the junk you come across. While this is easy to do, the game doesn’t really explain how to do it effectively. Thankfully the Switch version of the game has massively streamlined what was previously a huge hassle that required you do go item by item to recycle. Now, all you do is pick up junk until your inventory is full, then hold R3 down until it’s all handily compacted into cubes for recycling which you can quickly take to a recycle station for credits. Unfortunately, spare working weapons cannot be recycled so don’t hoard them as yours don’t break. Just leave them there if you don’t need them.
Exploring the station is only one aspect of the game however. This is a quasi-cyberpunk game after all and you’ll be surfing cyberspace in addition to fighting in the real world. Fighting your way through computer systems is a far cry from playing a horror/sci-fi FPS however and the gameplay shifts accordingly in order to accommodate this very active type of ‘hacking’. If you’ve read much cyberpunk (the real stuff, not the modern watered-down stories), you’ll be aware of visual representations of computer systems and this one is more of a psychedelic 360 degree FPS interpretation. Shadowrun on the Sega Genesis had a similar sort of interface but it’s more RPG-based and Descent came out early in 1994 as well, but System Shock merges both concepts into a Descent-style FPS with multiple weapons. With the Switch version of System Shock however, the controls are a bit less responsive than the Xbox version, making the cyberspace portion of the game a bit more challenging. When undocked, the framerate absolutely plummets too, making it essentially impossible to play this portion of the game without docking your system.
Granted the original game was not nearly as advanced as Descent but this reimagining of the interface is fantastic and challenging, forcing you to take down system security programs, break enemy ICE (intrusion countermeasure electronics) and blast through system defenses in order to unlock doors and shut programs down. It’s a challenging portion of the game with a lot more frenetic combat than the main game. Fortunately death in cyberspace does not mean death in the rest of the game, leaving you able to dive right back in until you manage to unlock each area through the cyberspace access (though you do take damage). There’s no skipping these segments if you want to progress in the game either, so you’d best learn your way around the systems!
There’s even a puzzle element to the game with certain areas being shut down or locked by complex power relay systems which force you to readjust power output in order to proceed. These take the form of both complex switch puzzles and wiring puzzles where you have to maintain the right level of power to activate each circuit. After activation, the circuits lock down and the pathways open. As you progress further in the game, you’ll discover items that bypass some of these puzzles but they’re few and far between so you’re best off learning how to solve them quickly. Once again, there is a weird amount of lag in the Switch version of the game during puzzle sequences. This ends up frustrating because you click spots you had not intended to and makes the whole minigame that much more difficult.
Visually, this new System Shock is a unique fusion of modern aesthetic and vintage game design. While the overall designs look like modern polygonal artwork, closer inspection requires intentionally pixellated designs on everything, in-line with the style of the original game. This curious mixing of two distinct styles makes for a unique but subtle look that helps System Shock to stand out from other similar horror games and provides a sort of nostalgic flashback throughout the entire game. There are a lot of dark corners and hidden crannies in the game too and gruesome corpses are lovingly rendered with death screams still on their lips. The fusion of horror, death, and neon is a visual feast unmatched by other similar genre entries, but nothing is truly like System Shock and it (and its sequel) occupy a unique place in gaming).
Sadly, the Switch is not quite up to the task of these new visuals and compared to other versions of the game, the graphics end up heavily pixellated with major blurring if you run through screens. It’s hard to make out fine detail on occasion and while it feels more authentic to the original game experience, it’s more than a bit disappointing how badly the Switch chokes on System Shock. The system is just not powerful enough to truly handle the game and undocked, it is even worse. Massive frame stutters mean that enemies suddenly jump at you when the system is struggling and visual quality is inconsistent when the action heats up.
The remake of the game is fully voiced for all audio logs and SHODAN is voiced as well, run through a digital filter to create her robotic voice. The human emotions of the killer AI bleed through in the voice acting however and even though you’re not interacting with NPCs in the game, you feel more than a little like you’re slowly living their terrifying experiences as they relate the collapse of the station and their own deaths through their audio log entries. . Sound echoes throughout the metallic halls of the station and you can often hear mutants, cyborgs, robots, and other enemies before they appear. The metallic clangs, the quiet whispers, and the squishy biological sounds all blend together to make the game ten times as oppressive as it would be with a lesser soundscape. This is peak horror sound work and it really raises the bar for System Shock as a whole. The music is subtle as well, except when enemies swarm you and are actively hunting you, further enhancing the solitary dread that permeates the entire game. It’s rare that a title depends more on its sound effects than its music but here, less is more and the impact is substantial.
The Switch version of System Shock is more flawed than its other iterations. The inventory screen is just as awkward as other versions but that’s minor. Aiming is particularly terrible on the Switch and it is mandatory to turn sensitivity nearly all the way up. Even so, when you get further into the game, it’s difficult to target enemies fast enough. Even though you can adjust aiming speed in the menu, it really doesn’t help you zero in on distant enemies that hit you with surprising precision, making combat occasionally frustrating and tempting you to save spam in order to progress more rapidly. It’s often easier to use corners and distance to your advantage, forcing trailing enemies around bends where you can wait and target them. Citadel Station is complex and each level of the station is massive, allowing you to use the station itself as a weapon against enemies, some of whom cannot open doors or move through certain areas.
Save spamming won’t work either like it does with other versions of the game because the load times are surprisingly long in the Switch version of the game. Once the game does load up, it takes a minute for the framerate to catch up to the controller too, so if you save in the heat of combat, you’re in big trouble. Visuals are sub-par too and the system simply cannot match the graphics on more powerful consoles. That’s fine if this is your only way to play System Shock and even with these flaws it’s a great older game. Unfortunately undocked play is essentially impossible and the Switch is unable to handle gameplay while playing in portable mode. It is unlikely that these are issues with the Switch 2 version of the game as it is a much more powerful system but for the original Switch, it’s docked or forget it.
The default controller bindings and quick menu are frustrating as well. For example, the reload bind for the Sparqbeam is the same button used to open doors and pick up items, leading to repeated wasted battery pack reloads if you use it as your active weapon. There just aren’t enough buttons for some of the options so there’s a fair bit of doubling here and it was difficult to find a better layout than the default. Stimpatches and weapons also drop into the default quick menu whether you like it or not, so every time you organize your inventory, it repopulates your quick binds. This wouldn’t be a problem if you could actually use the patches outside the inventory menu but selecting them via the d-pad puts them in your hand but does not actually allow you to use them, a challenging issue in the heat of combat. Most of the major issues stem from the fact that System Shock is clearly designed to be played on PC with a mouse and not entirely controller optimized for console play, even though it runs great.
There’s no question that System Shock is a great game and this new version of the game only reinforces the classic status of the original, with design elements holding up exceedingly well after three decades. This is a title that was a milestone of game design and it’s still clear that that’s the case. At $40 it’s fairly reasonably priced too, especially considering that the design work is AAA tier and you’re looking at a solid 20+ hours of gameplay. Switch is definitely not the ideal console for System Shock but it’s perfectly serviceable when docked even if the load times are a bit slow and the fast vaporize function is fantastic. Setting those issues aside, you can enjoy one of the best sci-fi horror games ever made, now in HD with a modernized design interface and aesthetic, though it’s hard to recommend the Switch version unless you cannot play it any other way. System Shock is unquestionably a must-play experience for any fans of horror gaming and science fiction.
This review is based on a digital copy of System Shock provided by the publisher. It was played on an Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes and played significantly better in docked mode. System Shock is also available for PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on Steam and GOG. All screenshots are in-game captures from actual gameplay.
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.