System Shock Demo

Just a short review of this: Unity engine = awful performance, leading to sub par player experience. Kinda clunky, possibly not as much as the original but the problem stands. Also, graphics are really plasticy or rubbery. Overall, a poor attempt.

The pre-alpha felt like it was on the right track to me, this new way forward they've decided on is painful, not allowing to save in this much larger demo meant that I had a bug where I was unable to use any item but the lead pipe. I'm in the minority here who liked the direction they were going early on in the kickstarter (Hence why I backed). Oh well, I'll still end up having to play it but I felt no tension, no fear, just blasting my way past enemies that make me giggle by their appearance.

all in all, I think the remake has potential, and I actually enjoyed the demo. and obviously, most of the things that i disliked are problems, taht are related to the early stage of the game, so I am sure, that, by the time the full game comes around, most of my complaints will have been fixed. As someone who has never played the original System Shock, i went in this Demo, not knowing what to expect. I liked the immediacy of gameplay at the beginning, but i could have used a environmental tutorial. The combat feels weird, and the hit detection is terrible. Stealth also plays NO role whatsoever, as enemies will spot you INSTANTLY, if you are within their view, even if you have only your head poking out of a corner. Also, one particular piece of leveldesign had me scratch my head, as it was completely counter intuitively set up. The charge station, it has a high voltage warning sign, so obviously it is hazardous to me, right? Well, wrong and so i kept walking around for a wile without energy. I also ran into a bug, where i would be stuck on a ladder, unable to leave it in all directions, because one of these spidery repair bots has decided to setup camp right underneath the ladder. Lastly: the textureresolution is, like, really bad. Now to the things I liked: The Music: i thought the music was very good, I liked it, dramatic and majestic, creepy and kind of disturbing. Atmosphere: The first time I played the demo, I was really enthralled by the atmosphere of this spacestation. Also: the view on what I guess is Saturn, is really cool. Artdirection: Really nice. I liked the colourscheme, and especially the lighting. The animations looked good as well, and even though I did not found the enemies to be particularly scary, (actually I think they look rather funny) I liked their deceiving looks ( also the repairbots remind me of the tachikomas from Ghost in the shell, so cute^^)

I have added money to the kick start campaign since I was so impressed with this demo. Night Dive also worked on the Turok re-release so these guys know how to be faithful and that's exactly what this is. While most remakes and remasters focus on just the graphics; often what made the first game special is lost. This doesn't seem to be the case for this game though. This isn't Bio Shock THIS IS SYSTEM SHOCK. A hard care no hand holding figure it out FPS/RPG hybrid. This game will be much closer to the FPS of yore. You can't afford to miss this one.

I love how the game looks and as far as I can tell it's faithful to the original (I'm familiar with it but have only played SS2). A lot of effort has been put into the voicework and visual design. In particular I am fond of the colour scheme and architectural design of the setting. However at this point it seems like that setting and the IP are carrying the day. The game has a poor framerate with the following hardware specs: Intel i7-4770 32GB RAM Nvidia GTX 770 And this is with the pixelated graphical style, which I do like, and I understand is toggleable, but is not reflected in the promotional material btw (I didn't know it would look like that). So why the performance issues? If I'm missing something please downvote me to oblivion but this seems unoptimized. The game also has no controller support. Technically it does, technically. Realistically? You can't navigate the menus or inventory using the dpad. The right joystick does work, but moves extremely slow, and is more or less too clunky to be a viable option. There's no slider to increase the speed either, only for camera sensitivity (which uses the same stick outside the menus). You can't toggle the menu tabs using the shoulder buttons, which is standard for this genre (see Deus Ex). And you can't play audio logs or notes from the menu without resorting to the mouse, because 'double-clicking' using the X button doesn't work. On one hand maybe I shouldn't expect a remake of a classic computer game to work with a controller. On the other hand, Deus Ex and Prey managed just fine. I'm putting the review at 3/5 to be fair since I didn't experience the entire demo, but these are major issues that will need to be addressed before the final release.