System Shock Remake (PS5)
Completed 10th June
System Shock 2 is a game I have always heard about as being highly regarded and I have always been interested in playing the game. I have also wanted to play the first game before venturing into the second game, but it has not always been easy to play on modern PCs.
A remake of the first game was released (I believe it started as a Kickstarter campaign) as it is said to be quite faithful to the original game in terms of level design.
Having played Prey (2017) earlier this year I can see that it was highly influenced by System Shock as there are a number of similarities, the grid based inventory, collecting resources that can be recycled and many other factors.
In System Shock you play as a hacker in the future that has been abducted and abandoned on a space station that has been overtaken by an A.I that has gone rouge and she has turned the crew into cyborg type creatures - it really feels like battling the Borg.
Without spoiling too much of the game, I enjoyed the my time considerably with System Shock and would rank it among one of my favourite games.
The game very much does not give you direction compared to many games of today - it is up to you to figure out your next objectives by exploring and listening very carefully to the audio logs that you find throughout the game. I would not want every game to be designed this way, but it was a nice change of pace and I had fun trying to figure out what to do next.
A couple of designs in the game did frustrate me a little. The boss fights felt quite unfair in how much damage they inflicted - you could lose with 2 or even 1 hit and I was not the biggest fan of the cyberspace sections, although they did not cause me too much trouble after a few attempts.
I did enjoy playing it like a survival horror - this involved stacking up my resources and being very careful not too use them up quickly. Saving any where I wanted also helped, but I could not save during boss fights or cyberspace sections. Also, I was not a fan of the final boss - it just was not as fun as the rest of the game.
Whilst playing the game for the most part it felt like a 9/10 experience, but because of my issues with the boss fights and cyberspace interrupting the flow of the game I disappointingly have decided to bump the score by one point.