Back in 1994, Looking Glass Technologies and Origin Systems changed action-adventure gaming by stranding gamers on a space station with rogue AI, mutants, robots, and cyborgs running amock in the horror cyberpunk game, System Shock. The game with its first-person perspective has not only spawned a sequel game and TV series but inspired other game series like Deus Ex and BioShock. In 2023, System Shock was given the remake treatment for modern audiences and players on PC and now has been released on consoles by Nightdive Studios, who were awesome enough to let me check out this remake, how was it? Let’s find out.
System Shock puts players in the shoes of a security hacker who, after being caught hacking into security files on the Citadel space station, is brought onto the space station to hack into and turn off the morality options for the station AI, SHODAN. The Hacker later wakes up to see that all hell has broken loose on the station pitting human survivors against SHODAN, mutants, robots, and cyborgs created by the station AI, all as a result of a corporate conspiracy.
Now, onto the game itself! When it comes to the controls for System Shock, it’s unnecessarily complicated along with the UI. Speaking of the UI, you have limited space in your inventory but are allowed to pick up pretty much anything to carry with you as you can recycle items for tokens to spend on health and powerups. At the time of writing this, I have yet to find a way to drop items as I right now have four of the same handgun and can’t seem to get rid of them.
Soundwise System Shock has decent ambient sound, voice acting, and creature sound effects, the latter is great for adding tension as you are working a puzzle and a mutant comes up behind you and attacks (that happened to me during my playthrough, so I suggest headphones).
The gameplay is fun, exploring the station, fighting, solving puzzles, and hacking into cyberspace (warning, it’s trippy!). but as I mentioned earlier, the UI is complicated for no reason and could have been done better. I noticed in my playthrough that there’s no auto-save, if there is I have not encountered it yet.
Overall System Shock is fun and unpredictable with mutants spawning randomly but I keep having to go back to the unnecessarily complicated controls and UI makes the game intimidating when I first started but I can’t shake the uneasy feeling that it does not need to be that way. Also, the text needs to be bigger! But on my scale of 1-10 I give System Shock an 8.
System Shock is out now on PC, PlayStation 4 and 5, and Xbox One and Series X/S
