System Shock® 2 (1999)

This game was a huge disappointment. I played the Thief games, and really enjoyed them, and I know that the director of Deus Ex worked for a short time at Looking Glass, and he was clearly inspired by this game when making Deus Ex, so I expected that this would be a different take on the same kind of gameplay. What I did not expect is that, unlike Deus Ex, this game is garbage. The things that all the five-star reviews tell you about are not untrue: there is limited ammunition, you do traverse cramped corridors and shoot sPOokY enemies. The thing is, I don't really care about the story or the setting as much as the core gameplay, and this is the part that the other reviews fail to mention: what you actually do. What is it, you ask? You run around corridors looking for things. Playing on Hard difficulty, I spent most of the game playing almost exclusively with melee, and never had any trouble with ammunition or health. I would say that this was a very easy game. And the stealth system from Thief does not seem to have been carried over at all; I had as much luck sneaking up behind enemies as I did simply sprinting up to them from behind. There are no alternate paths to take to go around enemies, and the enemies continuously respawn, so you can never "clear out" an area. With enemy encounters out of the way, all that's left is the "core" of the gameplay, which is simply running around looking for things. "Find four vials and four regulators to put them into," "Find three SIM cards and three computers to put them into," "Find four art terminals with codes and a transmitter use the code on." It never ends. And I'm all for exploration (King's Field is possibly my favourite game series), but this is some of the most boring gaming I've ever experienced. The "story" is just audio logs talking about how everything went bad, which you should not care about (see: the ending) Overall, play Deus Ex. This game attempts the same kind of gameplay and fails horribly, so skip it.

i bought this game but i don't know how to run it on my macbook. if someone can help me set this up i will buy them a game on here or steam. just message me or something. later hackers.

System Shock 2 CURED my CANCER! If you don't like SYSTEM SHOCK 2, you're probably the kind of person who KICKS KITTENS! DON'T BE A KITTEN-KICKER! BUY SYSTEM SHOCK 2! ...Yeah. So, there are plenty of people who are very, very enthusiastic about System Shock 2. And that's their right, and perhaps you'll be one of them. Just be aware: this is a game with some serious flaws. It has a broken economy. Infinitely respawning enemies who fire an unlimited number of very accurate shots at you from weapons that prove to be unloaded and broken when you look over their corpses. Weapons that degenerate into uselessness at a pace that has never been imitated elsewhere (and, sorry, fans: there's a very good reason for that!) A number of player-unfriendly choices, and at least one small plot development that no one really considered the ramifications of (your host can also *remove* cyber modules? Hmm...) Some people will rave about its difficulty being part and parcel of "*real* survival horror", but for my part, SS2's mechanics ceased being horrifying and started being irritating and wearying long before the final reel. The came consistently punishes you for exploring, for taking chances, for not being properly equipped to deal with threats you have no way of predicting- and that's not "horror"; that's just bad design. It's not a "great" game, nor is it a "bad" game, nor would it be entirely accurate to call it "good" or "mediocre", and certainly not "average".

Buy it, play it, enjoy it.

One of the much beautiful game ever made.