While the heart of System Shock is undoubtedly exploration, there's still a lot of fighting to do along the way, with some enemies requiring a pure firefight to take down while others necessitate the exploitative stealth ambushes of a survival horror game instead. You can even tweak the interface color if phosphor green isn't your thing.Īs you might expect, you are going to have to bash, shoot, burn, and blow up some nasty monsters to escape Citadel. It all works together to remind you that you're still playing a game that's 30 years old, but that this version of it has been brought forward in time for you to more easily see what made it so special in the first place. The new music and sounds are a superb accompaniment, too. The revamped visuals and effects are great, and I loved the semi-pixelated textures and blocky objects at work, probably best exemplified in the power interface panels. An evil corporation-turned-government? But of course. Cool smart guns? We’ve got those as well. The awesome setting and style as you poke around is fuelled by one hundred per cent pure grade uncut spaceborne cyberpunk vibes. There isn’t really any main-quest hand holding, no log of what you're doing next (though there is now an optional difficulty setting to change that), so stopping SHODAN means you actually have to explore, listen to audio logs, and figure out what plans the now-dead crew had cooked up.

It's basic design that holds up thirty years and a hefty visual update later, giving you a space to delve out that's hard to navigate by its nature and providing a very satisfying challenge to learn your way around.

System Shock is old school in the oldest-school way, with levels that are deliberately-designed mazes of interconnecting corridors, rooms, and locked gates. Figuring out the extent of her plans and then foiling them is what you do.

If SHODAN's body is the giant Citadel space station, then you are a horrible little parasite killing her from the inside out.

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