When System Shock is at its best, it's a great experience even today. It's a mean game, and that's on purpose. You're not some badass guy of doom running through a base giving demons what they deserve, you're a rat running through a maze desperately trying to get to safety. It's entirely different from the more straightforward shooters and in mostly a good way. This is a genuinely complex game, maybe not as complex as some that'd be found in its future, but still extremely demanding of skillful usage of the tools it gives you. There's even a difficulty that forces you to beat it in under 6 hours, just to emphasize that feeling of stress even more.
Shodan is the perfect villain for this game. If you're a rat in a maze, she's the maze, and she's quite upset with your scurrying. Despite all of your achievements you never succeed in denting her ego, and this feels deserved because she's genuinely threatening, every scheme you foil is replaced with an even more clever one, and her many traps only grow in deviousness as the game goes on.
Overall, there's a lot to praise about SS, the level design is intricate but fun and it genuinely makes you feel clever at points, especially when you learn to use some of its tools to pull off small skips. Unfortunately, that's only half of the experience. The game has plenty of flaws, and several big enough to dent the experience seriously. The levels are massive and hard to backtrack through, which becomes a serious issue with how often the game asks you to go back to previous ones (and wrestle with the respawning enemies) to do some chore, culminating in one of the endgame puzzles literally forcing you to go back through every single level to throw together a code, if you can even figure out that's what you're supposed to do.
Even trying to figure out what you have to do is a massive challenge with just how much ground you have to cover if you miss anything- this isn't a game I could ever have beaten without a guide, or at least I sure as hell wouldn't have had fun doing so. The music is usually good but sometimes devolves into ear-splitting noise, the wire minigames are completely incomprehensible and every once in a while you run into some truly heinous bullshit: for example in the endgame there's a maze full of infinitely and instantly respawning kamikaze enemies that can one-shot you through shields at point blank, and explode when killed with pretty significant range. Running through that maze was absolute agony for literally no reason, and I still had to do a shitty lil minigame and then run back through it afterwards. Without spoilers, the game ends on pretty lame confrontation too.
It's all fine, though. This was a groundbreaking game, missteps happen and they're all excusable when the product is this interesting, and interesting it definitely is. It's genuinely shocking just how much of this game's DNA has been inherited by so many other games - I knew it was influential, but even other much more famous games that can rightfully claim the term (Doom, Half-Life) don't quite compare- from not just the audio logs but the specific use of them, to the survival horror-esque mechanics, to the increased complexity and focus on exploration, to even random shit like being able to lean to check around corners or the AI villain with a god complex, so so much of System Shock is seminal to videogaming, and that itself is honestly worth a play on its own.
I'd recommend System Shock to anyone with an interest in it, as long as they're aware that they're going to be playing a pretty flawed product. The three stars are a reflection of my ultimate enjoyment of playing the game (though it was more of a series of ups and downs, with the ups being absolutely worthwhile), but I don't regret playing it in the slightest.
Shodan is the perfect villain for this game. If you're a rat in a maze, she's the maze, and she's quite upset with your scurrying. Despite all of your achievements you never succeed in denting her ego, and this feels deserved because she's genuinely threatening, every scheme you foil is replaced with an even more clever one, and her many traps only grow in deviousness as the game goes on.
Overall, there's a lot to praise about SS, the level design is intricate but fun and it genuinely makes you feel clever at points, especially when you learn to use some of its tools to pull off small skips. Unfortunately, that's only half of the experience. The game has plenty of flaws, and several big enough to dent the experience seriously. The levels are massive and hard to backtrack through, which becomes a serious issue with how often the game asks you to go back to previous ones (and wrestle with the respawning enemies) to do some chore, culminating in one of the endgame puzzles literally forcing you to go back through every single level to throw together a code, if you can even figure out that's what you're supposed to do.
Even trying to figure out what you have to do is a massive challenge with just how much ground you have to cover if you miss anything- this isn't a game I could ever have beaten without a guide, or at least I sure as hell wouldn't have had fun doing so. The music is usually good but sometimes devolves into ear-splitting noise, the wire minigames are completely incomprehensible and every once in a while you run into some truly heinous bullshit: for example in the endgame there's a maze full of infinitely and instantly respawning kamikaze enemies that can one-shot you through shields at point blank, and explode when killed with pretty significant range. Running through that maze was absolute agony for literally no reason, and I still had to do a shitty lil minigame and then run back through it afterwards. Without spoilers, the game ends on pretty lame confrontation too.
It's all fine, though. This was a groundbreaking game, missteps happen and they're all excusable when the product is this interesting, and interesting it definitely is. It's genuinely shocking just how much of this game's DNA has been inherited by so many other games - I knew it was influential, but even other much more famous games that can rightfully claim the term (Doom, Half-Life) don't quite compare- from not just the audio logs but the specific use of them, to the survival horror-esque mechanics, to the increased complexity and focus on exploration, to even random shit like being able to lean to check around corners or the AI villain with a god complex, so so much of System Shock is seminal to videogaming, and that itself is honestly worth a play on its own.
I'd recommend System Shock to anyone with an interest in it, as long as they're aware that they're going to be playing a pretty flawed product. The three stars are a reflection of my ultimate enjoyment of playing the game (though it was more of a series of ups and downs, with the ups being absolutely worthwhile), but I don't regret playing it in the slightest.