System Shock® 2 (1999)

Seriously, stop reading this review and give them your money already.

The title says it all.

I just creamed myself

Enough said, the long awaited day has come, without much fanfare. The best survivor-horror-fps-cyberpunk et al. game of all time. The only game I still regret giving it's cd to a not-so-tidy friend and never get back. Take me to 1999, to Good Old Days.

This is not a good game, though it is technically well made. I stopped playing after 5 hours game time, having finally repaired the elevator to the other decks of the space ship. Imagine spending 5 hours game time for such a trivial task, using only two of the many available capabilities (psi, hacking). What it all boils down to is running through a maze of corridors with respawning monsters (hybrids) collecting key cards and key codes to get access to a sequence switches you have to enable. And in the mean time you can pickup and read/hear audio fragments that give a chaotic image of what happended at the space ship. It is supposed to be a good story, but after 5 hours of playing I still wondered when the story was going to begin. For me all this was not interesting, rather boring, more a repetitive chore, with much reloading when encountering turrets, maintenance robots and things the like. Also you have no idea where to go to find the next key card or key code. You get unclear directions through emails, and you go of wandering off through the endless boring coridors killing more hybrids until you find it. In my experience games like Deus Ex and Thief 2 are orders of magnitude better than this one.