The System Shock series is certainly one of the most venerable in the sci-fi horror sphere; perhaps not as widely known as Dead Space, but likely more influential. The spiritual successor BioShock is overall much more mainstream, while System Shock has remained the more niche predecessor. Nightdive Studios have been the custodian for most things System Shock these days, releasing not only digital versions of the 1994 original and 1999 sequel, but also a full remake of the original game in 2023. That game ended up being my personal Game of the Year; an atmospheric and challenging, but engaging experience which brought up the very clunky gameplay of the original to more modern standards.
Compared to 2023’s System Shock, which remade both the gameplay and visuals of the first game from the ground up, the 25th Anniversary Remaster of System Shock 2 from Nightdive is an almost purely visual update; the gameplay is essentially exactly the same as the 1999 original. Instead, this remaster concentrates on improving and modernizing the graphics and appearance while keeping everything in the underlying game the same; the same layouts, same UI, same environments. The original cutscenes have been remastered and upscaled too, and all look excellent, on par with similar work done for the Command & Conquer Remastered Collection in 2020. Likewise character models and animations have been smoothed over, while all textures have been redone to remove pixelation.
The outcome is the best and smoothest System Shock 2 has ever looked and played, but still retaining all the quirks of a game which is now more than 25 years old. New players will never be forgiven into thinking this is a brand new game; it feels decidedly of the era and the visual changes only somewhat ameliorate that. For those who have never played the game, it is set a number of years after the original installment, based on humanity’s first faster-than-light starship, the Von Braun (named after Nazi/NASA scientist, Wernher von Braun). You play as a soldier who awakes from cryosleep to find the ship in complete disarray, the crew taken over by a collective consciousness called The Many and deformed into shambling monsters, with the ship’s artificial intelligence, Xerxes, also under its control.
Your only ally is Dr. Janice Polito, the Von Braun’s chief scientist, who talks to you over the radio, explains what happened and grants you regular cyber modules after completing objectives. Those who have played BioShock may realize fairly quickly that Polito is not all she seems. At the beginning of the game, you feel really very vulnerable, armed with nothing but your trusty wrench and a very limited supply of pistol ammunition. The problem is, weapons can and will wear down and break. You have two separate skills for looking after them; one for maintenance, which allows you to keep your weapons in working order, and one for repair, allowing you to fix broken weapons.
Upgrading your character is essential if you’re to make any headway, with skills like hacking being particularly important, allowing you to open locked chests and disable the security system for short periods. Similarly you can invest in Psionics, which will give your character various mental special powers from a damaging ball of energy to telekinesis. The game is very much designed for you to min-max certain skills and not go for a jack-of-all-trades approach, otherwise you will miss out on various upgrades and abilities.
Each floor of the Von Braun is a large sprawling level, some with bulkheads between load zones. They’re nowhere near as labyrinthine as the decks of Citadel Station in the original game, but you’ll still be regularly consulting the map to find where you need to go next. The music for both System Shock and System Shock 2 wasn’t the most iconic, being rather too heavy and fast, something you might find in a 1990s nightclub rather than a moody and atmospheric sci-fi shooter. Thankfully there are some slower, tense and more appropriate tracks but I predominantly enjoyed exploring when the music was absent. Despite the somewhat low-detail environments the game still manages to maintain its singular sense of lurking horror, particularly thanks to the effective sound effects.
If you’re a new player coming to System Shock for the first time, you should go and play 2023’s remake first, but then should be fresh to roll straight into the 25th Anniversary Remaster of System Shock 2. It’s very interesting to view it as a bridging gap before BioShock, as there are various elements which BioShock inherited, particularly the format of the “twist” in the plot. If you’ve played the game before, this remaster offers nothing new except for some neater and sharper visuals. I would honestly be interested to see a full remake, but given how long it took Nightdive to make the remake of System Shock original, we might be waiting quite a while.
