System Shock 2

I’m essentially writing this review for two types of people:

1) Those who have heard great things about System Shock from people like me, and are curious about how the sequel fares.

2) Newcomers who have just finished “spiritual sequel” BioShock and are curious about how its parent fares.

If you don’t fit either of these categories, don’t fret. I feel we can work something out.

I was a huge fan of SS2 when it was released. It had that sci-fi horror vibe that I’m a sucker for if it works correctly, it had good ol’ SHODAN, and it was a fairly creative go at handling the kind of survival horror similar to the then-ridiculously-popular Resident Evil series. But it’s been a while since I’ve played, and as I recently powered through BioShock (look for my critical review in 2014), I started to get frustrated by some of its design elements. The more I thought about them, the more I recognized them from System Shock 2, and the more I wanted to play SS2 for the third and last time to see if maybe the game wasn’t quite as rosy I remembered it. So I loved the game in 1999. Can I justify that today, or do I still even feel the same way? Let’s find out.

The sequel begins some thirty years after the events on Citadel Station. TriOptimum has just finished getting their winky whacked by the government for almost allowing their rogue artificial intelligence to glass Earth. TriOp’s triumphant return as a major corporate player comes with the maiden voyage of their science ship Von Braun – the first faster-than-light spacecraft. There’s still some clear mistrust between the government and TriOp though, so the trip is only allowed to happen with a Navy escort from the UNN Rickenbacker, commanded by decorated sailor William Diego.

Now let’s stop a minute and guess how well this is going to turn out. First, the issue of FTL flight in science fiction. It either happens all the time, everyone’s cool with it, and nothing ever goes wrong (Star Wars), or it’s the first time it’s ever been attempted, and it results in pants-shitting disaster (Event Horizon). On top of that, you’ve got a ship full of armed Marines with the son of the corrupt traitor from the first game in charge. What could possibly go wrong?

You play as a member of the Von Braun’s crew, waking from stasis with an illegal cybernetic implant and months of amnesia. But before you even get that far, you have to establish your career in a pretty clever three-year prologue. The game begins with you stepping off the subway of a futuristic city, and heading to the local Navy recruitment center to set about breakin’ hearts and swabbin’ decks. The look of the city subtly establishes the technology of the period, and optional holographic booths teach you the interface and key game mechanics. It’s an interesting, “living” approach to the ubiquitous training level, and before you even start the game proper, you’ll have had hands-on training with weapons, hacking, and the various machines that will keep you alive on the VB. After your holo-training (disappointingly, the only time you’ll ever really see cyberspace in this game), you’ll decide on a career in one of three branches of the military: Marines (weapons), Navy (hacking\repair), or the OSS (magic, technologically explained and called “psionics”). From there, you’ll spend the next three years picking tours that boost your stats in specific areas.

You don’t actually play the year out, and having you do so, even in a brief minigame, would be excessive anyway. Instead, you just get a notice of what stat will get boosted by that mission, decide which of the three different boosts you want, pick the door and go. It’s still a neat way of handling the old “decide your character’s past and experience” RPG standard, and better in context than a simple menu would have been. Your fourth year will always take you to the Von Braun’s launch, and the beginning of the real game.

At the cost of throwing out my usual, flowing, modular review style, let’s pause here for a second so I can bitch. I really like this RPG career system, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not as cool as you are initially led to believe. The existence of three branches with vastly different specialties implies that you can play three different times and have three different games. I’ve done this, and it doesn’t happen. First, your characters start so limited in their respective fields that you’re really not specializing in anything at all. As an example, the Marine leaves his three-year post with only 2 points to standard weapons (giving you only a pistol). You need 3 for a shotgun. So while you’ve got one good foot down the weapons path, every branch of service can start with basic pistol knowledge. The only true benefit you get from this field is early access to a breaking-down grenade launcher or laser pistol. You’re certainly not the weapons powerhouse that “Marine” would imply, and have no more potential to be than the other classes. Similar results come from the other branches – you only get basic hacking skills and weak psi attacks that any character can pick up at any time. There are no special powers that only one class can get access to. It’s cheaper to follow your path rather than radically changing your focus (say, from weapons to psi) in the middle of the game, but that’s about it.

I wish that the class you picked gave reduced upgrade costs for skills in its field, or gave you a stronger start, but I understand the need to keep you underpowered and afraid through everything but the final levels. I also like that you’re not so sold down a path at the beginning that you can’t change direction later, but the end result is that every character will be a diluted hodgepodge of the branches’ most important skills. Every character will eventually need hacking, research, weapons, and maintenance abilities, and there was really no difference between my Navy character and my Marine by the end of the game. Psionics gave the most unique game, as you don’t need those skills to live. Psionics can basically replace your weapons and most of your technical skills, and a decked-out psi agent has new approaches to the same problems and new considerations to deal with. But you don’t need to join the OSS to get this; you can easily dabble along the way if you’re interested.

Second, you have to make character decisions before you really understand what they mean. You’ll get full text descriptions at upgrade stations within the game, but not when you’re picking out tours in the prologue. So what’s the difference between repair and maintenance? Which is most important? What is cyber-affinity, and why can’t I hack once I have it? Is endurance going to be more important, or is agility? Again, because you don’t learn enough in these three years to make any critical, game-ruining errors, this isn’t much of an issue. But since it costs more to train a new skill than to upgrade it through the first few tiers, it’s almost worth restarting the game if you realize right away you’ve picked a skill you’re not going to immediately use.

Even with the text descriptions, you’ll make some rookie mistakes as you go along. Unlike BioShock’s hot-swapping abilities and skills, you’ll find a set number of “modules” to buy permanent upgrades to your character. You’ll find them in groups of 2-3 inside the world, or 10-14 for completing key objectives, so it’s fair to say that they are scarce. They’re spent on all possible upgrades, from physical ones like strength and health, to technical knowledge like hacking or repair, to weapons or psionic skills. You’ll always be left wanting more abilities than you can afford, so making every module count is critical. The trouble comes when you’re trying to guess what kind of path you want to carve. Weapons are broken into categories, so it’s not enough to simply say “I want the best guns so I’ll keep putting points into this tree.” You’ll have to consider if you want energy guns later, or heavy guns for enemies you haven’t yet seen and can’t concieve of. Furthermore, you won’t see the skill requirements for weapons or hacking objects until you encounter them in the world, making it impossible to know what you earn further down a skill path. Also, you can’t use guns and psi abilities at all until you buy their skills, and won’t know they suck until you’ve wasted the modules (a surprising amount of top-tier weapons are basically worthless).

Back to the story, you’ll take whatever character you’ve created (or ended up with) and move your way through a linear path spanning the Von Braun’s six decks. As in the original, mutants and robots have overrun the ship, leaving only a scant handful of survivors still alive. You’ll piece together the events leading to the current situation through audio logs scattered around, and attempt to fight back by following emailed instructions from a barricaded senior scientist guide. These simple objectives will become overly convoluted. Murphy’s law is certainly in full effect throughout the ship, and if equipment can be broken or access cards can be misplaced, you better believe that they will be.

These objectives and branching sub-objectives manage to route you around to see every major area of the ship, and seem to be their real purpose for existing – I wouldn’t set a single step inside the cargo bays if I didn’t have to search around for the key in there. If you’re ready to explore the ship and follow an unraveling plot, you won’t mind. You may even come across objectives in the course of your natural roaming, making any “go look over there” requirements invisible. If you’re expecting a run-and-gun shooter without backtracking and endless sidesteps, you’re gonna have some problems.

Aside from exploring and plot-unravelling, the only other major thrill is in upgrading your character. It’s fun to save up for and finally unlock a new ability, then rush gleefully out to try it; if you enjoy a good RPG or MMO, you’ll know what I’m talking about. That feeling does carry over here. However, its implementation is not without flaws, most of which I’ve already documented above. But the fundamental disappointment comes with the enormous costs and hidden costs associated with upgrading a skill. Best example: if you want to be proficient with the strongest weapons, you have to max out multiple trees to do so. With all your other considerations, you’ll only be able to afford two complete weapons trees – the costs are simply too high and upgrade modules too scarce. The “other considerations” I speak of are not only upgrading your physical skills to stay alive, but the fact that weapons need supplementary skills to keep them operating: maintenance to keep them from breaking, and repair to fix them when they do.

Oh yes, your weapons will break, and they will break a lot. Like most RPGs, weapons degrade with use, tracked by a declining 10-point system. The problem here is that the process is vastly accelerated, and you cannot buy new guns or take old ones to a “blacksmith” for repair. You have to do it all with maintenance skills, and are further limited by only being able to ply those skills with disposable tools found in the world.

Now, guns operate with the same effectiveness regardless of their quality, and only stop operating when they break, so you may be inclined to simply get the repair skill instead, especially since you can repair guns without tools. So you could use a gun until it breaks, fix it for “free,” and repeat the cycle. Ahh, but a successful repair is only able to bring guns back to a 1 or 2 level quality, giving you only a handful of shots before they break again. So that’s TWO trees you’ll need to work on if you’re serious about guns, with an optional third to modify their effectiveness. Of course, you could just use a gun until it breaks, toss it, and get a new one from the many discarded around the ship. But almost all the guns you’ll find are at a quality of 3 or less, and the majority of those are already broken. Did I mention ammo is limited too, to the point that I found myself taking busted guns off enemies, unloading the one good shell inside, and tossing the gun?

It feels like traditional RPG elements clashing with the need to keep a horror vibe going, but to be fair, I think they accomplish what they were going for. You’re out there scavenging for ammo, picking your shots, klonking weak enemies with the wrench to save your precious bullets and gun quality. And you’re really not as undersupplied as all this makes it sound, especially by the end, and if you work on hacking to unlock secure crates and drop prices at vending machines. But there’s still a lot to consider compared to your average FPS, and anyone caught off-guard and expecting a less-complicated game will likely be pissed.

You’ll notice I haven’t really talked about SHODAN, which is certainly odd for a System Shock game. And it’s another problem I have with SS2. You’ll run through quite a stretch of the game before she even appears, and she never takes on the relentless villain role she did so well in the original. I appreciate that this game is not a rehash or retelling of SS1, but the gameplay and major storyline seem so divorced from the original that it’s like the System Shock elements got grafted in later. Maybe it was an original concept someone decided fit Shock just enough to be reworked into a sequel. But ultimately, it feels like a different game that SHODAN limply shows up in. It actually feels more like the game BioShock would become.

The game runs on a modified version of the engine for Thief: The Dark Project, with most of the characteristic flaws. Humanoid enemies are low-poly embarrassments with low-res textured faces and clothes. The dead crewmen you wade through look pretty freakish to begin with due to this gaunt, angular look, but when you run across the deformed mutants or the hideous cyborg nurses, the unnatural, uncomfortable models of these “humans” actually start to work in the game’s favor. Animations are fairly awkward and melee combat is particularly gangly – you’ll swing your wrench the same way Garrett swings his sword in Thief. It’s pretty slow and tough to get the feel of the timing at first, which worked for Thief when you were supposed to avoid fighting, but not in a game where limited supplies make melee combat so crucial.

Fortunately, the locations shine. Eerie colored lighting, especially the chilling purples, help keep the game techno-creepy. The different decks, and even most rooms, manage to look distinct, and enough decoration exists to make the areas seem lived-in and appropriately ransacked as you descend further into chaos. There’s some overuse of tiled textures, giving a hefty sameness to all the walls and floors of the ship, but the careful and atmospheric lighting and shadows make up for this. A lot of areas are genuinely haunting, sold all the more with some excellent sound design. Possessed crew members mumble to themselves, then charge you on sight while begging you to run. Granted, the “last bit of humanity reaching out in their voice” deal loses its effect after the twentieth time, but it’s pretty unsettling for your initial encounters. After all, how many FPS enemies plead for you to end their suffering while simultaneously trying to cave your head in? Crisp, directional sound effects do an excellent job of rolling through the lonely steel hallways, alerting you to enemies up ahead, or setting up a “too quiet” ambience of humming ship machinery. And the logs of the dead crew are universally well-acted, believable, and add to the mood of the situation at least as much as they convey narrative information.

In an attempt to be relevant and break though the clutter of opinions on this game, here’s my little post-BioShock blurb. I thought BioShock was a great game until it fell deep into routine. Enemies got tougher as you did, always forcing you into lengthy fights, always causing you to use the same ratio of ammo despite the fact that you were finding more of it. I basically got to the point where I was so sick of dodging security cameras and trading countless blows with mutants while looking for some piece of some goddamn objective or other that I was absolutely ready for the game to be over. Since so many of BioShock’s mechanics (RPG stats, security systems, hacking, logs, radio instructions, branching objectives) come from System Shock 2, I was expecting the same thing to occur when I played SS2 again.

Surprisingly, it doesn’t. With enough upgrades you can kill mutants in one or two shots. Exploration or hacking security crates can give you enough supplies to be quite prepared for what’s ahead. Side-trips become less annoying when you’re not fighting for your life at every turn, and the game isn’t afraid to let you get good at it. If you can make it through the first few levels, you will come out a badass. Eventually reaching the point where you can drop enemies effortlessly, and you don’t have to scavenge for every available bullet, makes you feel like you’ve accomplished something. By comparison, scaling enemies that require third-generations of the same fucking plasmids just to keep up meant that BioShock was pretty much the same game at the end that it was at the beginning. For me, being able to make character progress in SS2 made me much more willing to play through to the end, backtracking and all, even though I already knew the ending. So yes, upon playing both back-to-back, I do find myself liking SS2 better.

I don’t think it requires a certain kind of person to enjoy System Shock 2, you just have to be willing to accept its style and challenges. And I don’t think that people didn’t “get it” when it was released, like “OMG! Y R MY GUNZ BrEaKiNg d00d?!?” I think that many people just weren’t interested in creeping around, building a character, and using weaker attacks to hoard supplies for later. That’s okay, and why I’ve gone to such trouble to make what you’re getting into clear. If any of these descriptions sound intriguing, you’re going to have a swell time in a kind of experimental game that doesn’t usually get made. As a can’t-miss sequel to System Shock though, that’s harder to swallow, and why it seems that BioShock was really the game Irrational was out to make all along. Put it this way – I’d be surprised if much of the events here get referenced in a System Shock 3. There’s really not enough of an official continuance (especially that God-awful ending) for System Shock fans to play this or die, but it’s still a fun game for all interested, and an original sci-fi/horror adventure.

 

The Good

Great, moody setting. Generally successful RPG system. Competent survival horror/FPS/RPG genre blending that remains fairly unique even today.

The Bad

Changing objectives force a lot of wandering and exploration. Virtually required skills may push you away from others you’re more interested in. Tenuous connection to the original System Shock.