Imagine, if you will, being stranded on a spaceship, light-years away from Earth, with no hope of rescue. Death lurks around every corner, and the feeling of an ever-present entity looms. You’re down to your last few rounds of handgun ammo. You have no med hypos, and you have no means of escape, other than to fight the enemy off until either party drops dead. That is how you could describe System Shock 2 to someone who has never played it before.
The original System Shock – released in 1994 for DOS and Mac – was often regarded as being a Doom clone, even though it was the wrong way to look at is. It wasn’t a simple action and gun-toting shooter, rather a first-person horror adventure.
That being said, though, for a game from 1994, System Shock was incredibly complex, featuring logs of the crew of Citadel Station, an expansive inventory allowing you to store anything from medical patches to human remains (eww!), and at the time, it pushed computers to their limits, with 3D environments and light-emitting objects.
And all of this was the child of renowned developer Warren Spector. His influence from System Shock is felt even in another one of his games – Deus Ex. Both games feature cyber-augmentation, and both games feature skill-based RPG elements. And what’s more, it’s also a brilliant game. It’s somewhat unfortunate that Spector didn’t make System Shock 2, though. However, this is where a man called Ken Levine walks in.
Ken Levine was the lead designer of System Shock 2, and went on to create System Shock’s spiritual successor. When you compare the two, you’ll see the reasons behind the comparisons. That said, we should hold back for the moment with comparisons for now.
Before Ken Levine’s insane rise in popularity with his work on BioShock, he worked at Looking Glass Studios, working on Thief: The Dark Project, which released in 1998. It was a game that encouraged stealth instead of full frontal assault, which, for a game at the time, was unheard of. Considering this game was released at roughly the same time as Quake II and Half-Life, a first-person game of Thief’s calibre was unbeknownst to the gaming world until its release.
Come nine months later, Irrational Games will have formed, and Ken Levine’s success would only be strengthened with his work on System Shock 2.
You play as a soldier who was recently recruited into the army and trained for work in space. You are enlisted as a soldier on the Von Braun – the world’s first spaceship capable of travelling at faster-than-light speeds. It isn’t travelling alone, however, as the U.N.N. Rickenbacker is also riding on top of it as a piggyback, providing the ship with security as she flies through space.
In a stellar example of the chaos theory, however, a research team on the ship intercepted a distress signal from Tau Ceti V. The team went to the site and picked up what was at the crash site. Biggest. Mistake. Ever.
The crash site has two rather terrible things:
1. Annelids that are designed with the intended purpose of taking over a person’s body by infecting them and turning them into a horrible thing; and
2. The creator of those annelids.
So you, the soldier, awaken from cryostasis when the annelids are running rampant, but because of a problem that arose from recovering from surgery, you are now an amnesiac. You don’t know why you’re on the ship, nor do you know what you’re supposed to do.
A friendly voice appears on your cyber implant’s communications system telling you to go to Deck 4 of the Von Braun, but you will have to go through hell and back trying to find what weapons you can to fend off the human/annelid hybrids, among other enemies.
Ultimately, the first half of the game ends as you finally reach Deck 4. On the flipside to that, this is where the real test of survival begins.
You are told that the person who was helping you over the comms is not who you think she is. Instead of being a doctor, it transpires that the entity that communicated with you was the creator of the annelids – the artificial intelligence SHODAN. She gives you the objectives of weakening the ship’s own AI XERXES, and killing the annelids she created so as to inhibit their growth and keep them under control.
Just a friendly word of warning – you are essentially helping your enemy. After all, you are indebted to her in some way. But one wrong move, and she will end you, and nobody would want that.
In essence, it is a case of “the enemy of my enemy is also my enemy”. Basically, you kill annelids, annelids target SHODAN, and SHODAN tasks you with killing more annelids.
Why are the annelids targeting their creator? To what extend will SHODAN go to destroy them?
This is only the story that directly affects the player’s character, as there’s more to it than ‘kill these things and kill this other thing’. Instead – much like the original System Shock - you can access audio logs of some of the crew before, during and after the annelid infestation. It gives the game a much more significant body for a story, and it delivers.
The dialogue is well written and is in character, and each character is relevant to something else, be it another member of the crew, the environment, or other plot points.
The only drawback I could really come up with in regards to the audio logs is that the voice acting in them can be a tad bit derivative; you will hear several crew members from a single voice talent, which can suck you out of it just a little bit, but not enough to actually be a severe detriment. However, considering this was from 1999 and games at the time weren’t highly cinematic (with Metal Gear Solid being a strong exception), it’s forgivable that the voice acting wouldn’t be the greatest ever.
As for the main story, the pacing is very well handled, and not once does it think of going too fast for its own good. The primary reason for this is because this is a narrative that needed to be handled carefully.
After all, its impact can be felt all the way in BioShock, what with its plot twists that will almost certainly prove to be a shock to the system…for lack of a better description. When all is said and done, however, it’ll keep you invested in the game and will make you want to know more about the universe this game exists in…which sucks, as this was the last System Shock game to ever be made, and is doubtful there will be another any time soon.
Gameplay is a big one for this game. Its genre is a mish-mash of already-existing ones, but to put it simply, it is a first-person sci-fi role-playing survival horror game. Basically, take Half-Life, Deus Ex and Resident Evil, and put them in a blender, and the resulting smoothie is System Shock 2. Except we’re not done with that. Not even close. And I shall go into some depth over how the game works.
Before we continue, however, the keyboard profiles for this game can be modified for your own personal needs. For the purposes of this review, we will be using the Standard FPS control scheme.
For the basic stuff, we’ll go into environmental interaction and movement. The WASD keys move your character in one of four directions, Q and E lean from left to right respectively, right clicking on the mouse allows you to pick up objects and check bodies and caches, and the Tab key opens up the inventory. Relatively standard stuff so far.
Now for combat. The left mouse button allows you to use your weapon, and the mouse wheel/number keys are used to select your weapon. Pretty simple stuff. However, there are multiple fire modes for each firearm and multiple ammunition types; for example, the handgun and assault rifle use standard rounds, anti-personnel rounds (does more damage to fleshy targets) and armour piercing rounds (does more damage to mechanicals). These can all be changed in the Tab Menu, but the button commands are the B key to cycle through ammo types and the O key to toggle weapon modes.
Similarly, there is an item known as a Psi Amplifier. Your character can have psionic abilities if you want, which – in another comparison to BioShock – allow you to use Psi Points (essentially, this game’s equivalent of Mana Points or Magic Points, or even EVE points…it works the same way) to attack enemies with cryokinesis or pyrokinesis (basically hit them with ice and fire, though preferably not at the same time), and to grab out-of-reach objects using kinetic redirection. Depending on the skill of the Psi power in use, you will expend more Psi Points. Speaking of which…
This is a game which utilises a classic health/magic points system in most RPGs before this. In the bottom left corner, your character’s health is signified by a blue bar on the top, and your Psi points are displayed as a red bar below it. Next to both bars are numerical values displaying exactly how many points for either you have left.
In the environments, you will find items such as medical hypos, Psi hypos, anti-radiation hypos, anti-toxin hypos, and several other curatives to help you along your way. There are also other things, such as medkits and surgical unit activation keys, but both of those are in comparatively low supply. Both the maximum counts of health points and Psi points vary depending on differing variables, such as the difficulty of the game, and your upgrade level for either Endurance or Psi.
Along the lines of upgrade levels, throughout the game you will collect cybernetic modules, which you can attain for completing objectives and finding them in caches or on bodies. These are used to upgrade your cybernetic rig. Upgrades via cyber modules can be applied to anything under Weapon, Tech, Stats, and Psi.
There are subcategories of upgrades for each branch of the upgrade tree; for instance, the Weapon upgrade branch includes points for Standard weaponry, Energy weaponry, Heavy weaponry and Exotic weaponry. Standard weaponry pertains to weapons such as the handgun, the shotgun, and the assault rifle.
Another upgrade system is the O/S Upgrade system, whereby there are four terminals scattered across the Von Braun, which each have only one use, and allow you to select a permanent upgrade of your choice, like a one-time bonus of 8 cyber modules, extra health points, and an overhead swing with melee weapons.
Depending on your progress on the Standard weaponry branch, you will be able to use certain weapons as opposed to others – at Level 3 for Standard, you can use the handgun and shotgun without any issues, but the assault rifle can’t be used until you upgraded the Standard branch further.
There are also differing paths for each side of the branches for weapons; for instance, Exotic weapons are best used side by side with the Research tech upgrade, as Exotic weapons cannot be used until they have been researched. Similarly, Heavy weapons require the Strength stat upgrade; this allows for you to actually be able to carry the weapons as well, as the Strength stat also increases inventory space.
The in-game inventory is where everything happens, and amazingly enough, a comparison cannot be made between this and BioShock, since BioShock doesn’t have an inventory as such. You can collect things, but it doesn’t require any sort of management. In System Shock 2, however, item management is essential, as you are most likely going to run out of inventory space somehow, what with all the other items you are going to need to carry around with you.
Any ammunition you pick up is pooled in its own ammo type group, and you can carry an unlimited number of rounds; just, good luck finding enough ammunition to consider yourself a one-man army, because in this game, ammunition is scarce, meaning you’ll have to resort to using ammunition both sparingly, and efficiently, like only using anti-personnel rounds on targets that are organic.
Whilst ammunition can be bought, as well as several other lots of supplies, it requires you to be careful with what you buy, as well as how you use your nanites – this game’s currency of sorts. Nanites are essentially credits that not only allow you to purchase goods from replicators, but they are also used in hacking, modifying and repairing machines, caches and weapons. They are the one thing that is in considerable supply, but be careful, as it’s easy to go overboard with such simple items.
This game is very complex for 1999, and because of this game’s complexity, it’s not recommended for those who aren’t familiar with first person shooters or RPGs, as this game will take a lot of getting used to. It’s also not ideal for those who are particularly new to games, as this game is actually fairly hard. However, if you’ve played the Thief games or Deus Ex, then you should be OK, thanks to their similar gameplay styles.
In regards to the difficulty, there are four settings – Easy, Normal, Hard and Impossible. For each difficulty setting, the game changes significantly, with upgrades and replicators costing more on higher difficulties, increased scarcity of items, weapons degrading faster, enemies becoming harder and stronger, and ultimately, every decision you make in this game counts; you make a mistake and you will suffer for it.
The best way to describe System Shock 2’s gameplay in a single word would be ‘complex’. There is a lot to do, and a lot of it is essential in a number of cases, and you will need to manage what resources you can find as efficiently as you can, as one screw-up can be the end of you. It’s very much a thinker’s game. Just don’t think for too long, though, because there’ll be an annelid Hybrid around the corner ready to bash your head in with a steel pipe.
As for the enemies, there are many many kinds of enemies in this game. There’s a reason why there are so many different types of ammo for everything.
There are organic enemies, such as the human/annelid Hybrids, the hulking Rumblers, and little monkeys. Because monkeys. Ideally, anti-personnel or incendiary attacks are ideal for enemies of this kind, and energy weapons are highly ill-advised, with the exception of the Laser Rapier.
There are also mechanical enemies, such as security mechs, service drones and automated turrets. These are enemies that will blow up in your face when you attack up close, so be careful with that. Anything that is anti-personnel is wasted against these enemies; armour-piercing and EMP weaponry is the way to go.
Then there are enemies that cross the line between machine and organism. These include the Assassins and Cyborg Midwives. These enemies may well take a beating from different weapons, but weaknesses can differ. However, both labelled enemies take more damage from armour-piercing ammo.
There’s a lot in regards to gameplay in this game. So much, in fact, that other elements of this game will pale in comparison, sadly. However, I will try to not make them seem entirely bad. If anything, the other elements kind of amplify the gameplay’s strengths.
First off, the music. This game’s soundtrack – and by extension, the whole game’s sound design – was composed by Eric Brosius, who also did the sound design and soundtrack for Thief: The Dark Project. It’s a very computerised soundtrack, with a lot of electronic sounds in the music, but unlike most electronic music pieces, it doesn’t like to be bombastic a lot.
This game is horror, after all. It would be silly if you were in space and you had dubstep playing out loud, right? Instead, in certain areas, there are a lot of ambient sounds in each of the songs, just to set you up for what’s to come in each area, but also to set the mood. Though, there could have been a little bit of work done to the names of the songs, as each song plays in a different area of the Von Braun, and the song names reflect that by being called ‘Ops 1’, ‘Ops 2’, ‘Engineering’…it’s largely bleak in terms of identity.
However, that does not detract from the fact that this game’s soundtrack is brilliant. There are a few tracks in this game I think set the mood perfectly. For instance, ‘Command 2’ plays at a moment when the tension breaks and you set out to do something incredibly hectic, and it fits that.
As for the fact that this is a horror game, you will find a few tracks in the soundtrack that convey this theme very well. One such example is ‘Ops 1’, where the quietness of the track is almost definitely going to send a few shivers down your spine. It’s not ideal music for a nice exploration, that’s a dead cert.
There was a CD of the soundtrack, but not only is it out of print, it is also incredibly difficult to find anywhere, and your best bet is to buy the soundtrack by way of buying the digital rereleases of the game on Good Old Games or Steam. In fact, upon looking on both Amazon and eBay, I found no results for a physical copy of the soundtrack. That’s saying something right there…
Sound design in horror games is an absolute must, as the sound can either make the game or break it. Games like Silent Hill uses the sound design in such a way that it makes you want to shut the game off in fear of being turned into another subject for the Pyramid Head to do…rather freaky things with…yeah.
In the case of System Shock 2, the sound design in this game is pretty subtle, but beautifully effective. Subtle horror is the best kind of horror, after all. Take for example Dead Space – a game where the horror is largely in your face and forces you into submission, with music and sounds that pierces through the atmosphere to deliver a shock to the player. But in System Shock 2, its subtlety is its strength, with a mostly quiet soundtrack, and sounds of enemies in mildly close proximity.
The only issue I have in terms of sound design is the voice acting, which can get very derivative when you start to connect different characters to a single voice actor, which is rather annoying.
However, that criticism is reverted for the most part upon hearing SHODAN speak to you. Being a considerably badly damaged supercomputer that crash-landed on an alien planet, it’s no surprise that it will sound distorted. And SHODAN’s distorted speech pattern – coupled with her dialogue – will resonate with you for a while.
For today’s audience, this is where the game would probably fall on its knees. However, this is where you have to put your Wayback Machine goggles on, because this game was released in 1999, when games were just starting to be completely 3D. The original System Shock has a 3D environment, but everything else consisted of sprites.
System Shock 2 offers an entirely polygonal 3D environment with every enemy – save for the Swarms – modelled to look as horrific as possible. However, by today’s standards…they look rather daft. At least if you look at them from screenshots, that is; they look rather stupid, and then you play the game to find yourself taken aback by how their designs actually add to the horror instead of taking away from it with laughably low resolution textures.
This game – on a technical standpoint – was ever so slightly behind another first person shooter that came out roughly a year before this. That FPS was called Half-Life, a game made by Valve, and it was seen as being one of the best games of all time, and is considered by a good number of PC gamers to be one of the best games of all time. Half-Life featured fully-3D environments and characters, and the animations, whilst jerky, toted some unique features for its time, such as mouth movement.
However, for System Shock 2, there is no mouth movement on any of the models; nothing on the Hybrids, Cyborg Midwives…even on you. You could argue that it didn’t them, as whilst they do say things, you’re not going to be paying any kind of attention to them whilst clobbering them to death with a wrench, but it would have added a little bit more realism to this game, in my opinion, as there are moments in the game where you will see characters talk to you…as few and far between as they may be.
The environments actually look pretty good, considering the game was released nearly 15 years ago. They fit in with the sci-fi nature of the game, providing largely dull shades of grey, but at the same time they don’t detract from the horror this game provides. What’s more, whilst each environment shares a similar structure in terms of environment design, the structure of the game’s level design helps in
As for the animations, they are smooth and feel like they have some weight to them. However, to some, they may seem like they look floppy and not very well done, which would be a fair argument, but there were very few games back then where the animations were smooth as butter, so props to Irrational and Looking Glass for that.
I would be remiss to mention that – if you are in need of a graphical boost for this game, there are modifications you can download and install to the game. I tried at one point and managed to get a few installed, and they are very good mods. However, for the purposes of this review, I played this game in its original state, with no modification to the game’s assets. Though, if you wanted to, you could mod the hell out of it, which is fine by me.
The enemy AI in this game is actually pretty competent and varied. Whilst you get the occasional “I will throw myself at you until you die” enemy, there are those who will retreat if they feel overly threatened.
This in turn creates a more atmospheric experience, and gives the enemies different personalities almost. Whilst there are some willing to attack you gung-ho, there are also those who attack from a distance. It certainly makes the enemies feel like they have intelligence, until you blop them over the head with your wrench.
The enemies in this game certainly have interesting designs, with the annelid/human Hybrid consisting of a mutated human to some degree, and the cyborg Midwife having mechanical legs but a human head and upper torso. The mechs also look like actual mechs, being either green or yellow, and are in areas where you would expect them to appear...usually. For some reason there are security/maintenance mechs in the Hydroponics sector. I don’t know; it seems weird that a machine would want to grow a plant.
A few games exist that are similar in several ways to this game, such as the much lauded Deus Ex, released shy of a year later for PC. The key similarities are that you play as a cyber-augmented protagonist in a sci-fi environment, with the reliance on alternative attack methods to despatch your foes. Each game also includes a character building system of sorts, and both the System Shock and Deus Ex franchises are both created by the same man – Warren Spector.
Both games also go into rather similar themes, such as computer sentience, as displayed by SHODAN’s god complex, and the Daedalus/Icarus/Helios artificial intelligence systems. Each of them are incredibly powerful AIs, all with similarities with AM from I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, and HAL-9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s intriguing, to say the least, how things from about 40 years ago are still relevant in today’s environments, and are still resonating in today’s world.
The main differences between the two, however, are that Deus Ex relies more on stealth, as opposed to hoping some random guy doesn’t bludgeon you to death. There is also Deus Ex’s primary emphasis on conspiracies, since you play as a detective more than a soldier. Also, odd tangent, but System Shock 2 was the last System Shock game to be made, until BioShock released as its spiritual successor, whereas Deus Ex released as the game that would start a currently four game strong series up to this point.
A more recent game to compare it to would be Dead Space. Admittedly, this is a rather loose connection, but both games feature a derelict spaceship where the game will take place for the most part, with monsters that take the form of a human host.
The key difference between the two is the kind of horror both games give off. System Shock 2 carries a lot of subtle horror, as opposed to Dead Space, whose idea of horror is to slap someone in the face with a slab of meat out of nowhere, which will cause you to jump, but in the short term, System Shock 2’s horror will be yet more chilling.
Ultimately, this is a game that is made for people who want to be scared, whilst being hunted down by one of SHODAN’s minions. Whilst this isn’t a particularly welcoming game to newcomers to role-playing first person shooters, it’s a game that is sure to have a lasting impact; an impact that can be felt all the way through to today.
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