System
Shock 2 (PC) By
Brian Kirkpatrick and James
Puckett 10/17/1999
You probably have already heard this before. System Shock 2 OWNS. It is
among the best 3D shooters ever. It is one of the best PC games ever. I
will go out on a limb and say that, after the patches, it is as good as
Half Life, if you only compare single player modes. This
is THE scariest game ever. If you were scared by Resident Evil, stay away,
the zombies of RE popping through a door or window now and then don’t
hold a candle to the monsters of System Shock 2 stalking you through the
dark corridors of abandoned spacecraft that falls apart all around you.
And the psychic power blasting monkeys are pretty damned nasty, too.
In SS2 you play a soldier from one of the three military factions:
OSA, Navy, or Marines. The OSA are powerful psionicists, the Navy guys are
the jacks-of-all-trades, and the marines are, well, grunts. On your fourth
year of training, you are assigned to the first faster-than-light
spaceship, the Von Braun, a joint effort between the UNN and Trioptimum.
Five months later, and 67 trillion miles from earth, you awake from
cryo-sleep to find a cybernetic interface implanted in you, most of your
memory gone, and almost everyone on the ship dead.
Fortunately, a Dr. Polito is alive on Deck 4, and can guide you
through your task of finding out what exactly has happened. System
Shock 2 combines action, role-playing, and puzzle-solving into a
beautifully horrific game. It's one of the few games where, even though you can save
anywhere you want, you are actually afraid to die. The
graphics are great. They're
not incredible, running on the somewhat weak Dark Engine last seen in
"Thief", but the level design and ambience more than makes up
for it. The lighting is also
exceptionally good, and it creates an atmosphere of technological chaos.
The graphics do have some nasty faults though. The enemies are trademark
Looking Glass models: Oddly shaped heads, knobby hands, and really, really
odd movement animations. You also get some crappy low-res cutscenes. Why
game manufacturers blow all that money for rendered cutscenes only to have
them more pixilated than old .mpeg’s makes no sense to us. Get with the
picture folks. The
sound for the game was well done, but unfortunately it uses the inferior
EAX API and not A3D, which makes it easy to distinguish sounds from the
sides, but not from anywhere else. The voice-overs are standard video game
fare: nice in places, bad in other, need work overall. The music is well
done, but at times the throbbing techno beats seems inappropriate. The
controls for the game, once customized, are incredible.
I wish all good RPGs were this easy to control.
Combat plays like a perfect blend of Quake and Metal Gear. Being
able to lean around corners is something that ALL first person shooters in
development need to implement now. I can’t say how many times I have
peeked around my monitor when I desperately needed to look around a
corner, which System Shock 2 makes incredibly easy. The
way the role-playing elements affect combat are something I wish to see
more of. Weapons break, security systems can be hacked, and those worms
you see swimming around in each other on the floor can actually be used as
ammo for some weapons. Using weapons, items, and objects requires skills,
which are learned while earning cyberunits to get upgrades during the
game. The skills work well, but it gets a little annoying when you can’t
use a gun just because you don’t have the skill. Any idiot can bust a
few caps out of a 9mm, he might just not hit anything. The guns also
degrade far too quickly, if real guns would fall apart that fast the world
would be a much better place. Fortunately this has been fixed via patches,
which makes the game much more enjoyable for the somewhat less hardcore
players. The
plot is complex and intriguing, the atmosphere is eerie and immersive, and
no sooner do you get used to nothing happening than something jumps out at
you and scares the... well, just don't play much before bed if you plan on
sleeping well at night. The
original was wonderful, and the sequel is even better.
It seems System Shock 2 has a place in the top ten games of all
time, and we can only hope to see more down the line. You are really
missing out if you don’t buy this game. On
a side note, when you're in training, and you begin your third year,
before you do anything else, walk up to the window to your left and just
watch for a minute. Trust
us on this one. (Note: This game also has a really nice co-op mode with the latest patch, but we haven't been able to play it enough to review it. It should have been in there out of the box anyway.)
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