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If you weren’t already aware of how System Shock was a good game, then you were pretty much trained to see it as another ‘ugly, frustrating, and extremely stupid fps.’ Quake solved the ‘too ugly to be distinguishable’ problem.
Sep 23, 2024 · 30 years on, despite being overshadowed by 'Doom', 'System Shock' remains a pivotal title in the history of first-person shooters and horror.
It’s a narrative technique closely associated with BioShock, but System Shock pioneered it so successfully back in 1994 that the remake has barely had to alter them. They provide a voice to the...
- Matt Purslow
System Shock is a 1994 first-person action-adventure video game developed by LookingGlass Technologies and published by Origin Systems. It was directed by Doug Church with Warren Spector serving as producer. The game is set aboard a space station in a cyberpunk vision of the year 2072.
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By Jon Bolding
Updated: Jun 2, 2023 1:52 am
Posted: Jun 2, 2023 1:51 am
Trapped in a hell he helped make, a lone hacker aboard a space station far from home sneaks and fights his way through horrible mutants and killer robots in order to take down the monstrous artificial intelligence behind it all: SHODAN, one of the all-time great gaming villains. System Shock pioneered so many first-person shooter concepts back in 1994 that now feel fundamental, simultaneously paving the way for the entire immersive sim genre. Nightdive Studios has done masterful work with this 2023 remake, taking a fantastic game that the years have made hard to play and updating it with modern conveniences that will let it be enjoyed for decades to come.
If SHODAN's body is the giant Citadel space station, then you are a horrible little parasite killing her from the inside out. Figuring out the extent of her plans and then foiling them is what you do. System Shock is old school in the oldest-school way, with levels that are deliberately-designed mazes of interconnecting corridors, rooms, and locked gates. 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. 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.
The awesome setting and style as you poke around is fuelled by one hundred per cent pure grade uncut spaceborne cyberpunk vibes. Cyberware? We’ve got that. Cool smart guns? We’ve got those as well. An evil corporation-turned-government? But of course. 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. The new music and sounds are a superb accompaniment, too. 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. You can even tweak the interface color if phosphor green isn't your thing.
Combat is probably where this remake has changed most.
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As you might expect, you are going to have to bash, shoot, burn, and blow up some nasty monsters to escape Citadel. 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. Brute force won’t always work, so you’ll often have to cleverly sneak around corners and through maintenance shafts to take down enemies that are far tougher and more dangerous than you are.
Combat is probably the place where this new System Shock changes most from the original game. Enemies were previously fairly slow and unintelligent, and the whole concept of what a first-person shooter even was hadn’t been nailed down in the way it is today. That meant many of the coolest weapons on paper were hard to use in practice, and enemies weren't very good at fighting back. Most experienced players would just run at everything and rip it to pieces with the Laser Rapier, a kind of electro-charged lightsaber, but that’s no longer as much of a viable option.
Allied Mastercomputer (I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream)
HAL 9000 (2001: A Space Odyssey)
SHODAN (System Shock)
Skynet (Terminator)
Ultron (Marvel)
Other (Leave a comment below!)
The finest in splashing yourself down in another world for a while.
It's a nice bit of older design that aged well, which is good because how you move around the station hasn’t. Your hacker's movements can at times feel clunky and slow, unable to perform some actions that have become staples of modern games like sliding down ladders. That one I can forgive, but I'm not sure we needed to be forced to crouch-jump in order to get on top of objects anymore – that's a bit of old game wisdom best left in the past.
Speaking of the very few things I didn't like: Cyberspace. At certain points in System Shock you find terminals that let you enter the station's cyberspace mainframe, where reality is instead a kind of “six degrees of freedom” shooter with mediocre wireframe graphics. Questionably, but perhaps to its credit, the remake is very faithful to these sections by leaving them intact, but that still doesn't change the fact that they could often bore me to tears.
Extremely to its credit, however, the remake lets you adjust individual difficulty settings for four separate areas of gameplay: combat, puzzles, cyberspace, and the main story missions. If you dislike exploring blindly and scouring audio logs, the lowest mission difficulty will give you clearer directions to follow. If you, like me, hate cyberspace, just turn the difficulty down and quickly blaze through those bits. If you want a more hardcore survival experience, you can crank up the combat and get absolutely dunked on by Cortex Reavers. I did this and it ruled.
Where many modern games invite you to sit back and enjoy the ride, System Shock wants you to sit up and experience the SHODAN. Tweaking the technical workings of Citadel station to come out on top and foil SHODAN's machinations is just as compelling as it ever was, making the original System Shock one of gaming's classics for a very good reason. Ni...
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System Shock deftly returns a classic immersive shooter to its place on top of the heap, updated for nearly anyone to enjoy.
- Jon Bolding
May 29, 2023 · The 2023 remake of Looking Glass’ 1994 PC touchstone emphasizes just how important System Shock is to modern video games. It will be released on PC on May 30.
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Jan 1, 2018 · Featuring interviews with infamous music executives, artists, and techies, System Shock chronicles how the MP3 crushed the music industry and gave rise to the billion-dollar sharing economy. Germany 1995, a PhD student makes a technological breakthrough when he discovers how to compress audio without losing sound quality.
