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. Luckily, Nightdive Studios was both aware of that fact and are clearly fans of the original game and finally managed to deliver one to PC gamers in fall of last year, just under 30 years after the original release of System Shock.
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. Now the studio has managed one more welcome feat, porting the PC release of System Shock to consoles for a wider audience through publisher Prime Matter and ensuring a whole new generation will enjoy it! It’s been a long time coming but this is one franchise that everyone should get a chance to experience!
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. 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. Every time you come across something labeled ‘Junk’ and pick it up, you can access it in the Inventory menu. Simply go to the menu screen, highlight the item, and hit the Y button on the XBox to provide a drop down menu. From there, select ‘Vaporize’ and that inventory-clogging item will be reduced to component metal that you can easily feed into a recycling machine to generate credits. Chances are without that handy tip, there’d be a lot for you to go back to. 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.
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. 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.
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).
The audio is of course spectacular as well. 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 mass 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.
While the game is fantastic, looks great, and sound great, System Shock isn’t entirely perfect either. One issue is the awkward inventory screen which requires players to manually move items from inventory to external containers such as recycling one by one. Vaporizing them makes this faster, but it’s still not well-optimized for controller play. Another is aiming, which is a bit slow and precise. As the game starts to ramp up in difficulty, you’ll find that targeting is a bit slow and enemies react faster and do more damage. There’s no skill tree powering you up here either, so those hits kill you fast.
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.
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 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. There are a few hiccups around porting the game from PC to console in regards to controller mapping, but a bit of patience will let you set those issues aside and enjoy one of the best sci-fi horror games ever made, now in HD with a modernized design interface and aesthetic. 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 Xbox Series X system using a Sony 55” 1080p TV. System Shock is also available for PS4, PS5 and PC on Steam and GOG.
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.