henke on 29/5/2023 at 13:42
Alrighty, reviews for this have started popping up and they are... quite good. (
https://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/system-shock) 76% Metacritic average.
Polygon and Rock Paper Shotgun's scores don't count towards the Metacritic average since they don't use numbered scores, but Polygon gave it their "Polygon Recommends" badge, and RPS gave it their "Bestest Best", saying:
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This is the product of a team which, to its credit, believed in the 1994 proposition of System Shock and trusted it would still stand up today, in spite of a 30-year shift towards smoothing the player's path. The result has proved them right. It transpires that our creepy, manipulative robot mother knows best.
Sounds pretty good! I didn't back it on KS or pre-order, but I might just be picking up a copy tomorrow. :)
Jason Moyer on 29/5/2023 at 18:30
Sounds like it's great.
[video=youtube;eGQ4bs_1MRE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGQ4bs_1MRE[/video]
Starker on 29/5/2023 at 18:44
Most of the criticisms seem to converge on a few points besides finding the combat unsatisfying:
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murderous level of difficulty, tons of backtracking, and minimal handholding
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Showing its age more evidently is the frustrating exploration into the unknown on each level of the station. Hallway upon hallway, the hacker is slowed down by all manner of locked doors, unclear objectives, and gratuitous backtracking.
[..]
These hallways are labyrinths akin to an old-school dungeon crawler and every cardinal direction is blocked off by some manner of malfunctioning door or zigzagging layout. By the time you reach the objective's floor sometime later, you will be pushed into tangents due to dying and respawning on the previous level, a series of locked doors, or simply needing to interact with every inch of the floors' walls before finding some hidden panel that opens the path forward. Frustrating stuff. Don't be scared to use a walkthrough, I had to. Multiple times.
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This remake of an early 90s sci-fi shooter has a heap of great ideas for its time. But its time has long passed and has little to offer new audiences except for pain, frustration, and a prettied-up history lesson of a game.
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System Shock makes a good first impression, only for frustration to become its default mode once more and more of the station opens up to you. The maze-like level design requires the sort of backtracking that's reminiscent of the Metroid games—that is, if Metroid was particularly stingy about opening up shortcuts and did a poor job of signposting where to go next.
The lack of player direction in System Shock will test even the most vocal detractors of modern games' handholding. All of your objectives are left unmarked and largely uncommented on aside from what you can glean from certain audio logs, which can only be referenced by picking through a list of the many, many other logs that are meant just for flavor.
The map screen is no better, with tiny icons and minimal labeling that only further complicate the process of remembering where you've been. As a whole, this System Shock lacks for useful navigation tools that could have allowed it to better thread the needle between aimless wandering and over-explanation. Even when you know where you need to go, you're left to fumble around in blind hope of eventually running into an objective or a medical bay.
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With no guidance, no indicator of what my objective is, all enemies on the level dead, and a labyrinthine map of cut-paste corridors, this experience truly takes me back to an earlier, less refined epoch of gaming.
There are little glimmers of ways in which this experience could be cool, and novel, and showing us how we've been softened over the years by games that are too eager to hold our hands when we get waylaid, but most of the time, the theory behind this uncompromisingly old-school design manifests as tedium when I find myself lost for the umpteenth time, backtracking through the map and looking for that one audio log, that one security camera, that one code randomly written on a screen in a completely different part of the level to help me progress.
heywood on 29/5/2023 at 22:18
Surprisingly positive considering most professional reviewers aren't old enough to be 1990s PC gaming vets. Seems like the press wants this to succeed.
I see mostly the expected criticisms e.g. fair points about the old level design that hasn't aged well, and the combat which could have been better considering it's a remake, but it seems like a lot of people are just whinging because they didn't expect to have to solve a puzzle.
voodoo47 on 29/5/2023 at 23:16
seems like no SS2 style notes/quest log? puzzling that with all the unimportant additions, they somehow omitted one that would actually make a lot of sense (and I can imagine keeping track of your goals by writing them on a piece of real paper using a real pen is not really the kind of retro experience most people are looking for).
anyway, I'll just repeat what I have been saying for the last year or so - no worries, it will not bomb. will it be mind blowing? no, definitely not. but it could have been really close to that, with just a few small changes.
ZylonBane on 29/5/2023 at 23:37
Quote Posted by heywood
Surprisingly positive considering most professional reviewers aren't old enough to be 1990s PC gaming vets.
That's probably exactly why it's reviewing so well. They're seeing it as yet another pixelated retro shooter like Dusk, Selaco, Ion Fury, etc. By that low standard, it goes above and beyond.
That or they're afraid of losing cred by criticizing a remake of one of the most renowned PC games ever.
heywood on 30/5/2023 at 12:36
Quote Posted by ZylonBane
That's probably exactly why it's reviewing so well. They're seeing it as yet another pixelated retro shooter like Dusk, Selaco, Ion Fury, etc. By that low standard, it goes above and beyond.
That or they're afraid of losing cred by criticizing a remake of one of the most renowned PC games ever.
There's definitely a fear of falling on the wrong side of the consensus and not wanting to look soft. But I also suspect a lot of people are pulling for Night Dive and the franchise, both of which could be dead if this bombs.
D'Arcy on 30/5/2023 at 14:11
I'm surprised with how much exposure this is having. I wasn't expecting this remake to have this much publicity. Currently the game is 5th on the Steam top sellers list (and of the four above it, two are free to play games and another one is the Steam deck).