Recent reviews by terg

the experience of blasting through a level two times at mach speed and getting that s-rank is absolutely exhilarating holy moly

WARNING!
THERE BE SPOILERS AHEAD!
(It's only like one minor quasi-spoiler though.)

This is also loooooooooong, so skip to the end for a VERY brief summary.








Widely considered one of the greatest First Person Shooters of all time, System Shock 2 is one of the most influential sci-fi horror games to have ever come out. It's not hard to see why, as though the visual quality is still quite outdated, it still has an aesthetic that can't quite be replicated. What makes the game so absolutely spine-tingling, however, is its excellent sound design. You often hear your enemies way before you actually see them, which heightens the tension.

Of course, this isn't one of those horror games that just straight up tell you "no you may NOT attempt to defend yourself", you can actually fight back against the many mutants, psychic monkeys, hostile machina, and venomous giant spiders that have invaded the Van Braunn. (That's the spaceship this takes place on by the way.) Using cyber-modules as a sort of EXP system, you can upgrade certain aspects of your character. From your stats, your latent psychic abilites, your skill with technology, or your ability to use weaponry.

There is quite a lot of customization with how you wish to play through this game. Barring stat upgrades which you will most likely be getting, do you decide to upgrade your weapons skill and follow Mr. Doomguy's example? Or do you focus a bit more on being Mr. Hackerman, getting discounts on the Replicator vending machines and/or shutting down the security systems? Or do you decide that ranged weaponry is useless for a high-tier psionic such as yourself, flinging psychic fireballs at any annelids that may have a grievance with you, bashing anything else with your melee weapon?

The game also has a very high amount of worldbuilding to it. There are audio logs to find, visual setpieces to give you an idea of what's happened, and any inventory item can be examined to give you more details about it. As someone who's played the Metroid Prime trilogy (A great trilogy that anyone who liked this game should also check out) and loved the Scan Visor, this absolutely rubbed me the right way.

Of course, this game's not without its faults. Apparantly, a certain open-world Legend of Zelda game took inspiration from this one with the weapon degradation. Yes, your guns can and will degrade in quality and will eventually break if you don't maintain them. Like Breath of the Wild, the issue isn't that they can degrade and break, its how annoyingly quickly they do. The tech specialists don't get off easy either, as the minigame they have to do in order to do all the cool things like hacking, modifying, and repairing, is luck based. No skill involved, just click squares and hope they turn white. Literally all increasing the skills do is affect the things you can hack/repair/modify, and how much the odds are in your favor.

Lastly, though I say there's a lot of customization, the game does railroad you into branching out a bit outside of your playstyle. While this isn't inherently a bad thing, the way it goes about it is a bit...hamfisted? Now to the game's credit, it does tell you when you need a specific level of a specific skill, and will give you cyber-modules, hopefully enough to get to that skill and the level it needs to be at. It's just odd how an immersive sim like this would railroad you into playing a certain way.

Though a flawed, aged, somewhat crusty looking gem, this game is still a gem nonetheless. If you've played the Bioshock games, heck, even the 2017 Prey, I HIGHLY reccommend you check this game out. This is essentially where the "Shock" series "grew the beard" so to speak.







TL;DR
+game is good at horror
+you can play how you wanna play
+w o r l d b u i l d i n g
-weapon degradation
-tech skills are luck based
-game sometimes railroads you