Audio
New music enhances System Shock's oppressive atmosphere, while sound effects and voice-overs (there are loads of audio logs to collect) are in keeping with the original game.
Visuals
After thirty years, System Shock looks rather crude. Nightdive's sensitive remake brings it up to date, introducing the game to a new audience, while enabling anyone who enjoyed the original to rediscover it anew.
Playability
Modern refinements make System Shock far more palatable when playing with a controller, although there are still remnants of its PC past in its interface. Still, being able to immerse yourself in Citadel Station on a console is a dream come true.
Delivery
Flexible difficulty settings and controller configuration options allow you to tailor your experience, while the campaign is generously proportioned and brimming with scope for exploration. System Shock is held up as one of the greats for a reason.
Achievements
A pretty good list that covers almost all of the requisite bases, meaning you'll need to dig in and see everything that System Shock has to offer. There are one or two tricky tasks here, but nothing too demanding.
May 20, 2024
Playing developer Nightdive Studios' remake of System Shock, you can easily forget just how enormously influential it was upon its original release, in 1994. Its DNA runs through the modern immersive sims of Arkane (Dishonored, Prey etc.), and in games such as BioShock, Deus Ex, and the like. Numerous things we now take for granted, like being able to crouch, lean out from cover, and mechanics governed by simulated physics were all present and correct in System Shock thirty years ago. In many ways, developer Looking Glass was way ahead of its time, and experiencing the game now is an interesting exercise, albeit an incredibly challenging one.
In System Shock, you're a hacker trapped within the confines of a space station – a deadly rat's maze where a malevolent AI known as SHODAN makes the rules, and everything (and we do mean everything) is out to kill you. Grotesque, goggle-eyed mutants give way to electric-death spewing turrets and floating drones, little RC car type things that whizz towards you and explode on contact, big clanking robots bristling with firepower, and myriad other cyborgs and such, all under SHODAN's command. If you like your first-person shooters with a healthy dollop of all-pervading panic and the constant, looming threat of imminent death, then System Shock will prove to be a delight.
Scarce ammunition and other resources (particularly health packs) make survival all the more difficult, while a smattering of tricky puzzles (rerouting circuit boxes, for the most part) gently squeeze your grey matter. System Shock being the forefather of the immersive sim also means that you'll find plenty of clutter rattling around Citadel Station, all of which can be gathered up (inventory space allowing) and chucked into a recycling station in exchange for currency. Useful items can be purchased from vending machines with sufficient credits, and before long you'll be fiddling around with your inventory trying to accommodate a shotgun, amid your always-useful TB-05 Sparq Beam sidearm (which uses your rechargeable energy reserves rather than ammo), and countless articles of detritus.
Undoubtedly, System Shock is a complex game, and Nightdive presents it here in full warts-and-all glory, no mechanic or gameplay system altered to the point that it's unrecognisable. If you played the original, back in 1994, then you'll immediately feel at home and truly appreciate what a remarkable job the studio has done in breathing new life into a thirty-year-old game, punching up the visuals to a high standard, while retaining the game's spirit. Indeed, there's no escaping System Shock's PC origins – you'll be using the right thumbstick to move a cursor around to manipulate puzzles and manage your inventory, while weapons and items are committed to hotkey slots. What's a quick shortcut on a keyboard, however, is a relatively inconvenient d-pad scroll away when using a controller.
It might not be to the tastes of some modern gamers, and it does require a lot of patience, but System Shock is still a fantastic game, one that's deserving of its classic status. There's no hand-holding, no quest log, no waypoints telling you where to go. You've a map and that's about it. Enemies often respawn, too, so you're always on edge, wondering what horrible thing you'll bump into next around one of Citadel's many dark corners and claustrophobic corridors – turns out SHODAN is a properly sadistic sod, making Portal's GLaDOS almost seem benign. She really doesn't want you making it off the station alive, and there are countless ways to meet a sticky end.
As a nameless hacker (male or female, the latter added for this remake), you'll take intermittent dives into Cyberspace, floating around shooting hostile bug thingies through glowing tracts of virtual reality. In the original, these were rendered as crude wireframes but here are a nightmarish network of cubes and aggressive crystalline enemies. It's one of many welcome alterations Nightdive has brought to System Shock, alongside a new opening sequence, incidental animations when picking up important items that lend more of a connection to the game's world, and revamped puzzles. All of this adds up to a remake that, while unremittingly true to the original, has had some of its rough edges very subtly and sympathetically sanded off. There are some issues, mind you, like grenades pinging off in unpredictable directions when you throw them, or enemies sometimes miraculously hitting you through cover.
An uncompromising remake, System Shock might seem a bit unwelcoming by today's standards, but its credentials as a trailblazing game remain. It still holds up, especially if you're up to the challenge – saving your game a lot certainly helps, and you can activate Vita-Chamber-style Cyborg Conversion chambers to respawn without being penalised. Thanks to Nightdive's clear reverence for Looking Glass Studios' original ambitions, its remake of System Shock emerges on consoles (almost a year on from its PC release) as a clear-eyed, smartly conceived update of something that was already well ahead of its time, and the definitive version of a classic.