Finished this thing...
It's not the worst game ever, but people are considerably more forgiving about its shortcomings than they ought to be.
Stuff I liked compared to the original:
- Seamless level transitions
- Good performance
- Items don't randomly despawn
- I liked the addition of a shrine to SHODAN in the reactor level
Stuff I disliked:
- The intro. They axed the old intro cutscene and replaced it with a new "interactive" intro (read: 5 minutes of "gameplay" where you get to walk around a tiny apartment that is entirely designed around cramming as many silly easter eggs per square pixel into it as possible), without realising that an intro is used for, well, INTRODUCING you to things - in this case our main antagonist SHODAN, who also served as a narrator during the original intro, where she left us with the delightfully foreboding "The hacker's work is finished, but mine is only just beginning.", perfectly setting the stage for the ensuing carnage. The iconic opening narration is gone now and we lose a whole lot of flavor right of the bat.
- I didn't care for the visuals. The pixellated textures didn't even bother me all that much, I genuinely found the contrast between the dark levels while having these bright lights flashing right into your eyes with bloom and lens flares and camera dirt quite straining. Add to that the usual bullshit where you can't simply disable particularly nausea inducing effects (like putting chromatic abberation on your fucking in-game font)
- Barebones at best AI. I posted this gif from the demo a couple of pages back:
Guess how they circumvented the problem of their AI being incapable of being able to climb up a ramp? They simply got rid of the ramp. It's fairly noticeable that their AI has serious pathfinding issues.
- As a direct result of the AI, combat in this game is pure popamole.
- Enemies still don't react to you making noise with a wrench (they do react to gunshots, though)
- Barebones audio design. Doesn't hold a candle to Shock 2.
- Some of the new AI barks are rather silly. I appreciate they tried to give the enemies some personality, but they're certainly not scary or intimidating as they were in Shock 2.
- Lackluster soundtrack. There are moments where you can discern some melody from the original game, but all that does is remind you how much better the original's music was.
- Overabundance of pointless, badly written audio logs, to the point where they drown out the important stuff.
- The overacting in the audio logs is insufferable, they end up being more cheesy than the original (which at least happened to be cheesy in the charming oldskool 'who do we have in the office to read those lines today?' sort of way)
- Motherfucking first person animations. They caused a bit of controversy back during the first demo where players considered them a bit overlong. So NDS decided it would be great to add overlong animations to every other item, just to shove it down your throat how AWESOME they think these animations are. To add insult to injury, stuff that is ESSENTIAL during combat gets painfully overlong animations while insignificant stuff doesn't. When you drink a bottle of wine, there's no first person animation for that. Just a quick glug sound to let you know that you consumed the beverage, just like in the good old days. Wouldn't it be nice if medkits also worked the same way? But nooo, gotta admite those stupid looking make up compacts first! This game would easily earn an extra troll if they made these animations toggle-able in the menu.
- No more minigames.
- Anyone saying that the remake's cyberspace is an improvment should lay off the industiral grade Ajax. True, the original's cyberspace wasn't all that great either. But while clunky and seriously undercooked, at least it got points for novelty, had very cool Tron-inspired visuals and had awesome music and if none of that was to your liking, you could just speed past enemies to get these sections over as quickly as possible. For the remake, they turned cyberspace into
a fucking wave shooter by way of poor man's Descent with Audiosurf visuals. Playing the demo, I found the cyberspace sections to be incredibly tedious, so I just wanted to get that shit over with quickly. No such luck, because even on difficulty 1 you're forced to gun down endless waves of bullet-spongy enemies for the next exit to open up. At least the enemy AI is pretty terrible here too, so they usually get stuck in the architecture or don't even notice you, so you get to snipe these things from all the way across the room.
- Difficulty settings nowhere near as robust as the original. In the original, you could outright DISABLE things you disliked.
- A very annoying gameplay bug, where your enviro suit deactivates after loading a savegame - even if you happen to be standing right in the middle of Chernobyl, which will fuck your health up in seconds during the beta grove.
- Taking drugs nowhere near as trippy. The Shock 1 mutant hallucinations are a nice touch.
- No mantling
Feels very constrictive after being treated to mantling in Dark Engine games. Even Shock 1 had mantling of sorts, with some surfaces being climbable. Wouldn't surprise me if they axed mantling because they couldn't be arsed to do tedious first person animations for it.
- There's something weird going on with the melee combat. When running right into an enemy to hit it over the head with a wrench, my mouse clicks randomly wouldn't register. Probably has something to do with that 'player holding his weapon closely to his chest before bumpint into walls' thing they implemented to make the clipping issues a bit less noticeable.
- I played on Combat 2 and there were barely any respawns. In the original, you'd go back to Medical and it'd be CRAWLING with mutants. In the remake there are a few respawns, at the beginning, but then they never happen again. I made frequent trips back to Medical all the way up until the end of the game and it never repopulated.
- The remake carries on a proud Shock 2 tradition, where the the more high-level your guns get, the less usable they are. Of the higher-tier guns, only the railgun does reasonable damage, but takes roughly a million years to reload.
- Why do the drones shoot toxic goo at you? Is there some audio log I missed that gives a painfully overlong explanation for that?
- Minor nitpick: Can't fault NDS for this one, as they stick fairly close to the original design, but the Exec-Bots look like Daft Punk
Now, despite these misgivings, I was going to rate it
because at it's core, it's still (mostly) System Shock. Then the bloody ending came around...
- The part where you enable the self destruct sequence is easily my favorite part of the original System Shock and I can't think of many (if any) games that match the frantic "Oh shit!" feeling I get when running for the bridge. And all of that is achieved simply by having an alarm blaring and having the screen shake violently every once in a while. In the remake, this part is pretty damn boring. With all the technological progress 3D engines have made, there'd be SOOO MANY WAYS to signal to the player to better hurry up because this thing is about to blow! The remake can't even muster the earthquake effect. There's red alarm lights everywhere, but since the game is already riddled with obnoxious lighting effects, the alarm lighting barely registers.
- Once you get to the security level, the doors close behind you and, unlike the original game, you can't go back. If you still have some stuff stashed on another deck and haven't kept a savegame from just before you entered deck 8, you're fucked. IIRC there was no advance warning of this.
- Le epic boss battle against Diego (you can cheese him and he doesn't even shoot back)
- Gone are the awesome HR Giger visuals on the bridge. What they have instead is... ok, I guess? But it's nowhere near as cool as in the original.
- They turned SHODAN's "throne room" into yet another tiresome, overlong wave shooter. What's worse is that this fight is bugged as well, only this time it's the player getting screwed (those enemy respawn pods coming out of the floor can push the cyborg elite guards through the ceiling, where they can shoot you but you can't shoot them. Had to replay the bridge section three times because of this shit.
- The ending boss fight is atrociously bad. They pulled off a true miracle here, by making the finale somehow much worse than what was in the original. It's also much worse than the cyberspace sections in the game proper (which I already didn't care for). Footage of this crap ended up on the internet some time ago and I just assumed it was just some placeholder and the actual mechanics hadn't been implemented yet. Turns out, it was a fairly accurate representation of the final product... It gives you the slowest, shittiest gun in video game history, you get to randomly shoot the giant cyber carrot while having to fend off all those bullet-sponges you found annoying in the cyberspace sections, but this time with a slow-ass gun that's not fun to use. This garbage will make you curse the day the Japanese came up with their cover art for System Shock.
- I like Hardware as much as the next guy, but that ending song is grating and not really fitting (other than someone at NDS going "I know! System Shock is cyberpunk! Hardware is cyberpunk! So let's use that song from the ending credits of Hardware in our ending credits! Brilliant!"). The ending cutscene fucking sucks and as a reward for your efforts you're forced to watch 10 unskippable minutes of all the retards that donated to Kickscammer.
only if you compare it to absolute trash like the Bioshit series. You should have higher standards than that.
PS: Behead all who insult System Shock 2!
