Recent reviews by Roland The Thompson Gunner

Having never played any game in the System Shock series in my life or heard of it until rather recently, I came into it with an incredible level of skepticism. My fear was that everyone was looking through rose-tinted glasses and blinding themselves to design flaws or serious issues with the game, something I feel like a lot of old games suffer from unfortunately. While there are issues with this game, I'm going to start with the positives. The level design for each area is incredible, my playthrough was completely blind and I forgot entirely about the map, I never used it once, which is a good thing. Each area had distinct objects or looks, so I never really found myself wondering where I could possibly be or where anything was. Each time I entered a different room, I knew exactly where I was and where any room I had been to previously was in relation to it.

On top of that, each level is very large and still seamlessly connected. Any loading screens I found myself staring at were only there for a mere moment before I was on the other side and ready to go. On to the atmosphere, it deserves the praise it gets from all of its fans. The game works incredibly hard to build up a feeling of isolation while at the same time enemies in the form of rogue robots or horrific monstrosities are crawling out of every crack in the wall. While playing I had never felt so alone and yet so outnumbered and overwhelmed at the same time while being so desperate to meet up with even one friendly face. Even the enemies manage to be worthy of fear, their appearances combined with the amount of damage they do and the voice lines that they had lended multiple reasons to fear them. Failing that they usually had the element of surprise on top of everything else, which is extremely difficult to predict unless you're slowly walking along, listening for them and even that doesn't work sometimes.

The combat, oh the combat. I can't possibly say enough about it, there are so many ways to approach a fight in almost every situation. Especially if you manage to sneak up on them, run in guns blazing as some arms specialist. Cave in their skulls with blunt force trauma and brute strength as a melee specialist. Freeze, burn, drain, hypnotize or sneak around them, invisible, as a Psionic specialist. And that's if you even want to fight them, if you decide you want to save whatever ammo you can for a necessary fight so you devise some skiddish guerilla-warfare fighter that leans more on hacking and utility skills while using a light combination of combat abilities then go for it. Almost no fight in the game is absolutely necessary as you can outrun and hide from almost any foe in the game. Not to mention what you choose to be best in actually changes your playstyle in a significant fashion.

The hyper endurant marine might be able to stand there and keep shooting enemies while staying alive off of pure testosterone and gunpowder. But due to their physical focus they will definitely suffer when it comes to situations that call for hacking or researching, which can put them in some very bad spots. Whereas the Psionic specialist has all of the strength of a wet noodle and the endurance of tissue paper, but their intelligence will come in handy when hacking, or researching and at the same time present a completely different form of danger and combat prowess. Rather than just being the same old marine that just shoots guns and has a way to shoot guns in a slightly different way to shoot guns that could possibly be more effective. A problem that many mutiplayer games suffer from today.

The story was great, in my opinion. While there were certain points where I found myself questioning things just a little, it was never enough to put me off of it. The length was perfect, long enough to keep me invested to the end so I could see how it turns out, yet not so long that it felt drawn out and wore out its welcome. It was one of the few times in gaming that when I was coming up to the finale I felt a genuine sense of climax and when it finished I was satisfied with it, despite the ending being a teasing cliff hanger.

Right, now what was bad about it? For one, anyone who is new to the game will likely be met with the point where reality slaps them in the face hard and they discover that they've been specializing themselves wrong and now can't progress any further in the game. Forcing a restart. Which can be extremely frustrating to those who would like to simply play the game through rather than just get to the 70% mark over and over again. I had been warned about this so, despite knowing it had the potential to completely ruin the game for me, I entered a cheat that maximized my statistics permanently. Still wanting to have the best experience I possibly could, I cranked the difficulty to impossible for my run through. I will admit that having max stats from the starting gate did cheapen the game in some areas, but the difficulty made up for it.

While playing through the game and encountering as much as I did, I couldn't shake the feeling that the game had been partially designed with co-op in mind. Intended to have people of various skillsets so they would have to work as a team to cover those in areas where their particular skillset isn't helpful and letting those same ones take the lead when the situation changes. This would be a good thing, especially since the Steam version came with multiplayer modded into the game, were it not for the fact that co-op almost ruins a key part of the game. Atmosphere. Having a partner or partners around, living breathing reinforcements, denies any sense of isolation and can seriously dampen the psychological games the game tries to play with you. That said, I highly recommend the co-op play, it brings a very unique approach to team-based cooperation and is still very fun. Just play the game by yourself first, don't deny yourself the gem that is the atmosphere.

For all the good I gushed out about the combat there are flaws, not deal-breaking ones but flaws nonetheless. The AI at times can create issues that range from silly to annoying, either spotting you through a corner of a wall and shooting at you or setting off an alarm, which thank heavens is an extremely rare occurrence. At the same time, the AI can prove to be rather dumb. I think that it was amazing for it's time, but there are instances where you'll walk right up behind a cyborg assassin and rub up against him even and he will refuse to notice you unless you walk right around in front of him. This is slightly more common though not by much, but when it does happen it fortunately ellicits a smirk and a little giggle due to the small levity it usually creates.

On a final note, I think the melee enemies suffer greatly in this game, even without any real points in my agility it's almost insultingly easy to dodge an enemy melee attempt due to their usually extended and overlong attack animations. Even from the lategame melee enemies, if you have any agility at all it turns them into a joke, a game of how many times can you run up and juke back to watch them hit the empty air. This can happen anywhere and everywhere with any enemy melee attack in the game, which is a little sad. If it were up to me I would have someone shorten the animations or rework them entirely so enemies that try to knock your lights out present a legitimate threat to more than just the people who got stuck in the corner with them. This is my biggest issue with the game at present, but that said, it's still a rather minor problem and more of a gripe than anything. I still highly recommend this game to everyone who is interested in receiving a unique and very fun take on FPS horror.