System Shock Remake

This remaster was absolutely amazing and Nightdive Studios need to be given the original Deus Ex immediately.

Honestly, it's a miracle what they have done. And obviously very rarely seen.

A remaster that was needed for a legendary game that is otherwise nigh impossible to enjoy nowadays.
And they did it masterfuly. They managed the perfect balance between modernizing and keeping it as it was.

Its an easy recommend, there aren't really any flaws in this game besides the backtracking (which is to be expected).

However be warned, this is NOT a 2024 game. Your won't be guided. Your hand won't be held. There won't be any waypoints, quests and whatnot. You actually have to pay attention, read and listen to w/e scrap of information you can scavenge and then maybe, maybe you may beat Shodan.

This is a phenomenal remake of an old classic which was sorely in need of an update. I really enjoy the original 1994 release but oh boy, it has not aged well.
I strongly recommend the System Shock Remake to anyone with even a passing interest in Immersive Sims.
9/10, it's very good all round except for some of the level design. The remake is extremely faithful to the original game which means some of the levels are a maze of seemingly random corridors.

Welcome back to Citadel Station, insect.
I've always heard that the "System Shock" series is a cult classic, which was so revolutionary at the time of its release and so ahead of its time, that all modern projects draw inspiration and rely on it as a reference. Well, after playing the game, I've convinced myself of this firsthand. I can barely imagine how this game blew people's minds in 1994. Because there was no such revolutionary project on the market at the time. This is a project that combines several genres at once, from shooter to metroidvania, from immersive sim to horror. Unfortunately, the horror component and the full-fledged immersive sim didn't quite work out, but overall it's very cool. Of course, the game suffers from an old game design. On the one side, it's nice that in those days the developers respected the player's intelligence, and you had to solve problems yourself, no one held your hand. On the other side, some things here are so non-obvious that you can get a serious mental block from not understanding what you need to do. In this regard, I think the remake should have at least slightly modernized the gameplay. The same goes for the graphics, I would have liked to see better graphics. But we have what we have. Overall, the remake turned out to be good, it is completely faithful to the original. An intriguing setting, science fiction and cyberpunk, excellent music, a magnificent antagonist (now I understand why the geek community has such a hard-on for Shodan), in general, I'm in complete awe!

I recommend this game VERY cautiously. It does NOT hold your hand. I thought I knew what I was getting into and I didn't, not one bit. System Shock shirks modern game design sensibilities even when it would be in its best interest to keep them. It's an extremely faithful remake with only a modern control scheme, UI, and audio/visual. There is a lot of design here that feels like it is only there to pad game length and waste time, such as enemy respawns, the very limited inventory, and the amount of backtracking you have to do to find that one key item you didn't think was a key item and dropped off somewhere, leaving it to be forgotten. Cyberspace has no continues and no saves, so if you die at the end of it, even in a sometimes cheap manner, then tough luck... you'll have to start over. It is ruthless, but it still plays by its own rules and respects your freedom to screw yourself over.

The longer I played, the more frustrated I got, and it felt like the game was dragging on. I was always interested in System Shock but the original was prohibitively obtuse. I was pretty excited for this one because of that, since the modern control scheme alone was going to really help things along. My main interest with System Shock was exploring the space station and experiencing the story with SHODAN and how things went down. The things I didn't like about the game started to stack up, and I went from using mods to just straight up gifting myself god-mode in the last act because I wanted to finish the game already and a lot of what I was doing just felt like tedium. Why save scum around when I could just not worry about health/ammo, you know? Why drop items just to pick up other items to turn into scrap and then pick up the items I dropped... over and over and over again... when I could just lower the sizes of all the items to one square and not have to worry about it? The enemy respawning was getting in the way of exploration and just felt a little cheap, especially with how much ammo I was wasting on them (and if you go for melee, you WILL get hit, so if you don't want to have even MORE tedium of going all the way back to a restore bay you're going to be wasting medpatches as well).

That being said, I still love the atmosphere. The story is awesome. You can tell that the game was very lovingly crafted as a perfect homage to the original, right down to the unique, pixelated textures. The weapons all felt pretty satisfying to use, although enemies didn't react to them very much until their ragdoll upon death. The music is great, although the elevator track does get pretty grating after a while. I'd still recommend this game, but you REALLY have to know what you're getting into. You have to be extremely patient and make sure you note down everything you do. Make sure you have strategies for what you're going to do with your items, even the ones you might think are pointless. I've seen a lot of people now say it's good to drop them next to elevators since they won't disappear. I wish I hadn't gone into the game completely blind because it definitely hampered my experience and I had to use not only a walkthrough, but mods and even cheats to help me finish the game if I didn't want to spend double the time on it. I've got other things to do, other things to play, and I did feel like the game didn't respect my time all that much. Still, it's a well-developed game and it has a lot of good things going. It might just lean on those old design fundamentals a little too hard at times.

I will recommend this game, but with some serious disclaimers for those not familiar with the System Shock games.
This game from a design perspective is as old-school as it gets. Each level is a massive labyrinth full of windy passages that you will constantly get turned around in. There is zero objective markers or hand-holding to speak of, and you will get confused and lost for hours trying to figure out where to go and what to do. Also, be prepared to backtrack. A lot. I'm not going to lie, I doubt most people will have the patience for this type of game nowadays.
If you're still reading, then maybe you aren't most people. Well, if you are willing to put up with the constant confusion and hours of aimlessly wandering, there is a fantastic game here. An amazing art style, atmosphere, combat, story, and villain are here for you to experience. It is a phenomenal remaster to a cult classic that influenced many games that came after.

Really enjoyed this game. I never played the original, but this one stands on it's own and was a lot of fun. The inventory space is a little frustrating for the number of enemies you have to kill. But it's a minor complaint. Would happily recommend this to anyone that enjoys a thoughtful FPS. It's not on rails, and makes you strategize and plot to a degree. If you play, learn to add map markers early to things. Find a neat gun but not ready to pick it up? Map marker. Find a door that requires lower security? Map marker. Elevator? Mark it with the levels it goes to. Computer Node room? Map Marker. etc. etc. It's a big help. when you have to back track or want to quickly find something.