System Shock 2

"Almost Been a Decade and It's Still One of the Best"

"Look at you Hacker, a pathetic creature of meat and bone, panting and sweating as you run through my corridor. How can you challenge a perfect, immortal machine?"

As you hear that, the opening movie continues and you brace yourself to enter one of the greatest game experiences to have ever been put to code.

System Shock 2 ultimately failed commercially much like its predecessor. Shock 1 was complex, unnerving, and unrelentingly creepy and hard. Unfortunately, it met its doom to the much more mainstream and much more accessible Doom. In a repetition of history, System Shock 2, despite its amazing gameplay system, unrelenting series of chills and scares, an immersive game story, and unilaterally amazing reviews, met its death at the hands of the much more mainstream and much more accessible Half-Life.

Yet System Shock 2 has persisted, even though one of its parent companies has folded (Irrational Games continues on). The fan base has not waned. And System Shock 2 has been forever etched into the minds of many forever, as evidenced by SHODAN's continual placement on "Top Villains of All Time" lists. We are approaching a decade since its release, but like a fine vintage of wine, it just keeps getting better.

Story (10/10): System Shock 2 features one of the most immersive game experiences ever to unfold. Your character starts off with amnesia onboard a faster-than-light spaceship. Swell. Not a very original plot device. But the way you piece together the story is nothing short of amazing. Instead of a narrative, you find PDA logs that playback various recordings people have made at some point during their stay on the spaceship. You see ghosts playing out their last moments. The enigma of piecing things together as you hear and read about other characters musing about their circumstances, the eerieness when you hear the foreshadowing of someone's demise, the dawning horror as an innocuous log turns into a recording of a person's last, painful moments... simply outstanding. And these characters you read and hear about, they become like real characters in a novel or a book. You follow them and their conclusions, you become emotionally tied to their well-being, and you mourn softly when you hear about one of their demise, and you cheer about their small successes.

The impact cannot be underestimated. When games now have multimillion dollar cinematic budgets, the simple audio recordings of System Shock 2 are terribly simple, but amazingly effective. When a log is nothing but screams of pain and denial, your imagination is left to picture the absolute horror befalling the person, and no CGI can emulate your imagination. And the ghosts... oh, the ghosts. In lesser hands, they could be cheesy. But no, not even after many years of playing the game, I never cease to get chills in some especially harrowing last scenes played out before my eyes.

The active plot for you as the player is relatively simple: go here, do that. But the atmosphere you're drenched in makes up for so much. Discovering what SHODAN's ultimate plans are is truly a significant moment in gaming storytelling. System Shock 2 is an example of a game that got its narrative done right.

Sound (10/10): The sound is one of System Shock 2's strongest points. The music is well-composed and properly heart-thumping and atmospheric. Some of the creepiest music ever compressed are the simple reverberating bass lines that play in the Engineering Cargo Bays.

But most amazingly, sound is a vital part of the System Shock 2 game. This is not a shooter. You can not run around and blast everything. No. This is your wits against the wits of an insane AI and a murderous, all-consuming alien biomass. You will hear the whirring of a security camera around the corner. The radio chatter of security robots hunting you down, and all, aside from being amazingly atmospheric, are vital to your survival. And on occasion, the source of much immense fear.

In one example, there are several doors in Engineering that make very distinct, slow whines as they open. And you will forever remember that sound, because you will turn around in fear as you hear the doors open to reveal an enemy that you are unprepared to deal with. In another, you will hear the telltale creepy and unnerving speech of a Cyborg Midwife hunting you down, except you will have NO idea where she is, and you will spend breathless minutes in anticipation, waving your gun at any possible entrance, ready to let off a barrage of bullets. Don't get me wrong. This game is damn scary. I've beaten it more times than I can count, I've beaten it on the most impossibly hard difficulty with a hard character build, and this game never ceases to scare the living daylights out of me. Doom 3? Child's play. Half-life 2's Ravenholm? Nuh-uh. System Shock 2 surpasses them all. It doesn't rely on "boo!" moments like a cheap horror flicks, but instead lets your own psychology go mad with the terrifying grumble of a cyborg assassin you can't find.

Replayability (10/10): One of the most replayable games ever. Four difficulties, each with significant variation. (Impossible difficulty is actually really, really hard, and not just somewhat hard, as you'd expect from other games.) Plus, you have many, many different ways to build a character (yes, this isn't your normal first person game), all with completely different playstyles and ways to go about beating the game. And if you somehow get bored with that, there's multiplayer.

As a testament to its replayability, a dedicated fan base still exists and still grows as there is always something new to try out, a new challenge to test yourself against. And more importantly, the game never gets old. The atmosphere never ceases to be creepy. The enemes never cease to be horrifying. The story never ceases to be engrossing.

Gameplay (10/10): System Shock 2 has one of the most well-designed game systems created in recent memory. Your character is built together by spending Cyber Modules on various skills, stats, and abilities. You spend some time determining your character's initial starting stats and abilities, and then throughout the course of the game, you are awarded Cyber Modules for tasks, or you find them stashed away somewhere on the spaceship. You spend them, you buy new abilities, et cetera.

This leads to an unbelievable amount of customization. There are four distinct weapon categories, five different statistics, four technical skills (including Hack, one of the greatest skills ever introduced into a game), and five tiers of Psionics, each with 9 PSI abilities. You can also get four different OS upgrades, which significantly alter aspects of your character. In addition, there are many different types of items and Implants, implants being items that you "equip" to give yourself temporary boosts to a trait.

It's not the most well-balanced system. Standard Weapons, for example, are amazingly powerful. Hack and Maintenance are both dramatically more useful technical skills than Repair and Modify. But it's amazingly customizable and gives you great satisfaction when you have a build that works beautifully. And moreover, higher difficulties make upgrades more expensive, making your cyber modules worth less, limiting your choices and making the game a blast for those who want to truly test their character concepts against the designers' sadistic tendencies.

But simply, it's fun. It's simple, it's transparent, and it works very well. Which cannot be said for 90% of game systems out there.

As for actual gameplay? Amazing. If you've ever played Metal Gear Solid or Thief, you have an idea of the type of game this is. You aren't going to go into a room with both barrels blasting (unless you've really decked your character out to do that). You'll have to pay attention to the whirring scan arcs of security cameras, to the sounds of patrolling aliens, and to the fact that you're almost out of ammo, you have no more Nanites with which to buy more, your gun's durability is shot and almost broken, and yet you hear a Rumbler running down the hallway to claim your blood... Everything about this game oozes tension and adrenaline.

One of the game's most well-known quotes said to you by the biomass puts it best: "Your weapons fail. Your ammunition runs low. And you've yet to see our most beautiful creation. All you have is your hatred... and your individuality."

Final Assessment (10/10): I really try hard not to give out perfect 10's. But I really can't do otherwise for this game. So much good stuff went into this game. By now, it's old, the graphics are dated, and you need patches to get it to run smoothly on a Windows XP machine. But it never ceases to amaze, to terrify, and to just be a good experience. If you don't own it, do yourself a favor and spend the ten bucks on a budget copy. It'll be the best ten bucks you'll ever spend.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 03/10/06