One of the best games I've ever played, if not the best. Irrational Games knows how to create a great immersive experience by taking the immersive sim concept Looking Glass was demonstrating with their games, and merging it with a complex FPS-RPG system where you can almost create a completely unique character everytime you play. Also, the storytelling is superb, with some thoughtful commentary from people in the game (with the help of audiologs you find while exploring the spaceship where you're trapped), and SHODAN. The opressive atmosphere is amazing too, the soundtrack fits very well with the places you visit in the game.

Nothing more to say, this game is a must.

Whew. This is gonna be a rougher one.
I know this game is beloved and I don't wanna piss on anybody's all time favs, but please count me out.

I played this game til about the halfway point and it just frustrated the living hell out of me with its confusing, unfair and flawed game design.

Okeee, now with that said, let's get started.

The degradation of the ranged weapons always pissed me off, the psy-abilities were unintuitive to me and I was shying away from investing any valuable skill points in these abilties when it was unclear to me if they would be useful to me in the long run. So I just kept sticking to close combat and hoarded all the other skill points I would've spend on combat abilities.
I get what people like about this game, it is very deep and while I think its story is confusing and convoluted, it's themes reign powerful even today.
But I was not having a good experience with System Shock 2 at all. I was constantly frustrated, battling the controls and the game mechanics, berating myself for sucking, being paranoid about the skill points and most of all I found that progressing further in the game had me feeling increasingly worried (and not in a way a horror game should), instead of rewarded.

On Top of that, I was constantly struggling with all the many stats, menus, shortcuts to items, weapons etc., the inventory and the constant managing of all of it. Even after figuring out a control setting that worked for me, I was constantly confused and took way too long for anything to get done.
Because of that, every suprise encounter felt like I was caught with my pants down.
Regarding the balance issues: To me there were far too many varied abilities you
were able to sink your skill points into and even trivial things needed very specific abilities to the point that the progression felt entirely unrewarding to me.
As for the approach to gameplay, I felt that close combat with a weapon (especially an energy weapon), was far superior to any other approach to encounters.

And I also feel like this game wastes my time.
If I sit down to play a classic, I don't wanna read a 50 page game manual to find
out what I am supposed to be doing (The Reason I could not get into the first XCom).
And with system shock 2, the first thing I needed to do was take 30 minutes to re-configurate the control schemes because the default was totally useless.

Just... no. Like I said in the beginning: Please count me out. I tried this, did not like it at all and will never play it again.

re-reviewing 6/10/23, old review: "it's a cool game that's physically painful to play"

system shock 2 isnt a horror game, it's a game about running around shooting monkeys to blasting techno and it's fucking sick

i gave this game another shot finally, really really enjoyed it and felt like i was unfair my first run. it does have problems and can be really tedious (recreation deck in particular drags on for waaay too long) but the game's systems are so tightly wound together that it's hard not to enjoy it.

one thing i love about older pc games is how they create worlds that feel lived in and believable, and system shock 2 is that for me. getting to explore the ship and see the experiences of its inhabitants is what created the horror for me. while i didnt find the game itself that scary, my empathy for the residents of the von braun, even those who were turned by the many, carried my appreciation for the game and its story.

ironically, i feel like shodan is the weakest part of the game. her reveal is spoiled pretty early on (if you dont know already), and i dont think it's as effective. what the game does great with her though, is making her your only companion when all else fails. the von braun is cripplingly lonely, you find no other sane humans and the many are both trying to kill you and call out to you in agony. this sense of isolation is crushing, but shodan, despite your fear of her, provides some sense of company and keeps you going. i felt bad killing her even, because she just feels similar to the many where she's just grown beyond her own control and right to. while i think what the game wants her to be - a sinister overboding figure who manipulates all of these events - doesnt work for me, her position as an unreliable and scary companion works very well.

in spite of the clunk, this games systems are so sick. i love the different stats and weapons, i love the stress of managing your inventory and resources. this game feels like some of the best inventory juggling besides resident evil, and its level design is reminiscient of metroidvania (which makes sense, since this is one of the first games to be considered an 'immersive sim', where player freedom and game keys are important elements). the shooting could be better, but it's good enough. the level design and resource management makes it work. only thing id say felt unfair were the cyborg assassins because holy shit they are so fast for how slow you fire

good game. really enjoyed revisiting it and it will definitely set some expectations for me for the genre as a whole.

I really liked it until I finished Von Braun and had to go "searching for X amount of things" in confusing no-map place, where things got tedious and kinda annoying. There were some great parts after that but it just didn't feel the same anymore.
I should preface that because I didn't fully understand how the early choices work I ended up a Psi/Melee char. Yet melee hitboxes quite often didn't work properly and some of psi skills were kinda...useless, making the experience less and less enjoyable as more enemies were introduced into the respawn system.
I heard there will be Remake of 1 and Remaster/Enchanced version of this so I might give these a try.

I am astonished. This is one of the best games I have ever played for PC. It is like BioShock, but even better! I love the combat, the level design, the exploration, the many options, and the plot! And let's not forget that incredible soundtrack, my favourite tunes being "Engineering", "Hydro 1" and "Ops 2". This game blew my mind, and it's easily the best game from 1998! I haven't been this hooked to a game since I played MGS2, and that is saying something considering that that is my all time favourite game. If you want a game where you can customize your character in a lot of different ways, that is difficult, but gets easy to the point of being satisfying as hell when you get good at it, and that has a kickass soundtrack and some of the best villains in video game history, then you need to play this game!

I liked System Shock 1 enough to jump directly into the sequel, which is something I rarely do. It didn't exactly disappoint, but my appreciation was stunted by knowing what it was able to build off. While the setting and villain formed a brilliant combination in the first game, this one falls victim to a comparatively disconnected story and gameplay. About 80% of your time is fixing random things that get in your way, sticking you in a narrative holding pattern until the big moments of development. The gameplay itself has been strengthened enough to hold up the weakened overall structure, but it’s disappointing that this compromise was made at all when the same pieces that made the original great are still here. However, the key word to that criticism is “compromise”, and the two games form a balance of priorities where one isn’t necessarily lesser than the other. With accessibility being one of System Shock 2’s advantages, this game is a much easier recommendation than the first one, even if it has the sting of missed potential. The story can be easily understood even if you skip the first game, but I would still recommend going in order if you can. It may not be required, but with how each game compliments the other, it would certainly give you the richest System Shock experience.

System Shock 2 is a game that, when I first played it, I took a huge break from before coming back. When I did eventually come back, I remember feeling tense, the sight of a psi-monkey walking down the corridor filling me with fear. It is probably one of the more immersive games I have played in my life, and I really mean it. The soundtrack, however, does detract a bit from it. Not that there's anything wrong with badass techno bangers, but it doesn't quite fit the general aesthetic of the game.

Gameplay wise it's definitely not the most polished, running on Thief's engine. While movement options are actually quite good, it suffers from Thief's terrible melee combat which, if you're a psi user, you might find yourself using a lot. Still, there are additional mechanics layered on top to make up for the clunkiness of combat.

The story is particularly good, focusing on giving you snippets of what has happened, without revealing the full scale of it all until later. Not to mention SHODAN being one of the best antagonists ever made.

Level-design wise it does suffer from issues such as areas looking similar, or being incredibly maze-like, but this adds to the feeling of being a rat trapped in a cage. With a fully functioning map it's quite possible to navigate the world without too much hassle (unlike Thief Gold.)

I'd recommend anyone to pick up this game and to listen carefully to what you're told to do. It is possible to soft-lock yourself if you're stupid.

System Shock 2 is a great example of a game which combines some surprisingly inventive and intuitive gameplay - combining RPG mechanics with an FPS game into something where it immerses you heavily within the world. Really, there's so much to do here - with how it combines elements of puzzle games, shooters and particularly with the psi abilities which are a bit unwieldy to handle but rewarding in its own right.

Although, I think the best thing about this game comes from just how much attention is placed on the story and atmosphere - so much of it takes place in these sterile hallways of a spaceship, and there's so much that you can infer just from the environment along. That, and the story is told through a string of audio logs by people that you rarely if ever see in the actual game - very much maintaining this central sense of isolation, but then there's so much done towards otherwise tiny and minute details such as how every item you pick up has its own little backstory about how it was created and its purpose and so on.

But it's details like that, along with how the story is seemingly straightforward - but all revolves around this central theme of human autonomy, of people either being possessed and corrupted by alien mutagens or with people who become cybernetically enhanced - and there's very much a central suspicion casted in this game that you could be manipulated in some way by nefarious entities. The murkiness of the plot definitely adds towards this experience, where you're just driven forward by what seems necessary in order to survive - only it seems that every step of the way its being manipulated in ways that seem out of your control.