System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster Review – Shock Treatment

If you want to get into the blood-soaked debates of what constitute absolutely seminal video games, titles which radically redefined not just their genre but the entire industry, System Shock 2 is undoubtedly going to pop up. And it’s hard to argue otherwise. The entire BioShock series could not have come about without the sort of advances System Shock 2 made. As one critic put it so many years ago, it was one half of the “twin barrels” which made up the revolutionary changes to FPS games around the Millennium (the other being the equally venerable Deus Ex). But, like so many games of the past, finding and playing it has been something of a challenge. Enter System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster, a game which does precisely what it says on the box, and still delivers the goods after all this time.

It’s perhaps a quibble that this particular remaster comes out almost a year past its 25th anniversary launch date, but a quibble is all that it is. This is effectively the System Shock 2 which launched towards the end of summer 1999, rebuilt and ported into Nightdive Studios’ KEX engine to work with modern systems. You play a nameless soldier, sailor, or spy assigned at the tail end of your four year hitch with the UNN to the Von Braun, an experimental vessel equipped with humanity’s first FTL drive and heading for Tau Ceti. Riding shotgun (and attached as a parasite craft) is the UNN vessel Rickenbacker, there to provide the Von Braun with the means to fight back in case “first contact” goes badly. But something has clearly gone very wrong, since you wake up in a cryo-tube with no memory of how you got there. And the ship seems to be falling apart. You must make your way through the decks of the Von Braun, dealing with the mutated remnants of the crew, fixing various systems, and facing down the infamous SHODAN from the first game in a fight for survival.

Being a remaster instead of a remake, System Shock 2‘s visuals are definitely of its time. They’re still quite evocative and still distinctive. But you’re looking at the state of the art from a quarter century in the past, where organic curves more complicated than a sphere or cylinder had a lot of sharp corners and textures didn’t have the same degree of detail because shaders hadn’t been developed. It’s a testament both to the original teams at Irrational Games and Looking Glass Studios, as well as the team at Nightdive who were able to rebuild everything inside their KEX engine, that System Shock 2 looks good. There’s almost a sense of art restoration involved. Humanoid enemies are recognizable as having been human at one time. Mechs have an almost prescient design aesthetic, as though companies like Boston Dynamics or Honda lent their expertise instead of possibly being influenced by a video game. As for the aliens, well, they’re weird and gross, to be sure. Of course, how truly “alien” they are is a matter of perspective. Long time fans will know the truth, newcomers will be surprised. As for elements like lighting and visual effects, again, well done for the time but still old-school. The UI is clean and easy to read, but its usability stumbles a little bit in the translation to console.

If ever there was a game where you really needed the sound to be on, System Shock 2 is that game. And with that necessity in mind, the sound design is top notch. You can get an idea about enemy proximity (for the most part) just by listening as they move through the corridors of the Von Braun. Security cameras chirping as you accidentally step into their field-of-view and turrets which pop up when you cross their sensor threshold definitely give one pause. That said, the sound quality is perhaps a little off. In this, the art restoration efforts run into a different sort of limitation. Compared to more recent titles, certain weapon sounds seem a little flat and constrained. Environmental sounds have a similar feeling to them. What would have sounded impressive on a Sound Blaster 16 audio card seems a bit wimpy now. By the same token, the voice acting is occasionally uneven. While the audio quality is good, and appropriately distorted in spots when you’re clearly hearing a log from a crewmember degenerating into something other than human, the emoting sometimes doesn’t quite sound right. A lot of the cast obviously got into their roles with relish, a couple didn’t, and those who didn’t stand out like sore thumbs. As for the music, it shifts at some of the oddest times. It’s like it wants to be getting you pumped up for impending combat, but there’s often no enemy present when the shifts occur. And being fair, there’s not a lot of what you’d call distinctive themes or pieces in the soundtrack. Evocative, but not iconic, there to set a mood instead of being remembered.

When it comes to the gameplay elements of System Shock 2, there’s a sense of familiarity hindered by unexpected friction. At its core, you’ve got basic run-and-gun FPS, though there’s a strong aspect of stealth as well. On top of that, you have the RPG mechanics which dictate your starting skills and (by extension) your options for approaching problems in the environment. A limited inventory system holds various curatives, weapons, and ammo. As you progress through the story, you’ll gain the capacity to improve your stats from basic attributes to various skills and even psionic abilities. Raw violence solves a lot of problems, but good technical skills and well developed psi abilities can help out as well. You’ll even be able to research bits and pieces of fallen enemies (if they drop for you) and take some time to play mini-games on a handheld Game Boy knockoff (if those drop for you).

The big caveat here is that the gameplay model owes more to earlier games like Heretic and Hexen than Half-Life. It’s never just a straight line from point A to point B. You’re going to be doing a lot of backtracking, revisiting earlier areas because you know that certain vending machines have certain items you need or your research projects need chemicals located in a particular storage compartment. In theory, this lets you advance the story and occasionally replenish your ammo when a random enemy respawns. In practice, it sometimes feels like a bit of a slog. Having a minimap helps, as does a good notes system which tracks access codes and chemical storage contents. But once you’ve cleared a deck the first time, it’s often a case of long stretches of dead quiet punctuated by moments of shock and surprise. And sometimes, the surprise is downright lethal. Mechanically, there’s at least one small pain point related to the mapping of the “lean” function, which on a DualShock controller puts it on the L3 button. It’s occasionally frustrating when you’re running for your life and suddenly finding yourself locked in place and only able to tilt yourself a little to one side or the other because you clicked the thumbstick as a reaction to being ambushed (or just by habit). If your circle strafe skills are rusty, you’re gonna get good fast or dead fast. Probably both. Also, the ancient wisdom of “save early and often” which applies to games like Skyrim absolutely applies to System Shock 2. There’s an autosave mechanism when transitioning from one section or deck of the ship to another through bulkhead doors or the main elevator. Beyond that, you’re responsible for keeping your saves managed. God help you if you bop along the corridors and find yourself dead because you weren’t paying attention.

The narrative aspects of System Shock 2 are almost a perfect snapshot of a moment in game development and design history. Other games had used elements like random documents as storytelling components. Other games had used semi-narrative exercises to help players develop their particular expression of their avatar. But everything just felt like it came together perfectly in System Shock 2. The fact you still can be surprised with the twists and turns of the plot after all this time marks the writing as a textbook example of how to do it right (and why good writing is so damned important in games). To hear the desperation, the pettiness, the arrogance, and even the terrifying acceptance in the voices of the doomed crewmembers as all the events we as a character missed happening around us is astounding. You know SHODAN is absolutely bonkers, and not to be trusted any farther than you could throw the Von Braun at the bottom of a 5G gravity well, but the character is just so well written that you can’t help but connect to her. Few villains in the history of gaming have been as personable or memorable.

System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster stands as the pre-eminent example of how to restore a classic title for contemporary audiences. It doesn’t try to go beyond the remit of getting a specific title to function on modern systems, and that’s exactly what it needed to do. Within those confines, Nightdive Studios has preserved the artistic integrity of a seminal game. What once was old is all new again. It may not be a perfect game, but it is the perfect remaster.

Axel reviewed System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster on PlayStation 5 with a provided review copy.