This had an interesting idea and the story was good. However, the controls are awkward at the best of times, and much of what needs to be done is never explained. Combined with a checkpoint system that can save once and still leave you with things you must accomplish before being allowed to progress, this can be an incredible frustrating and maddening game. Difficulty spikes at the end of the game are more vertical difficulty cliff walls. Not worth it, overall.
I remember playing System Shock back in college, with one session over a holiday weekend standing out in my mind. The game was so well done at the time that even playing as I normally do, for the story and not the combat, I was still jumped out of my skin when the phone rang. Now all these years later, with my skin nicely reattached, I have played the remake. The remake is excellently done and very faithful to the original, despite the many changes made to the game, which were made even more obvious by a side-by-side playthrough with the original's Enhanced Edition. I stated earlier that I play for the story and not the fights. This means I was playing on the lowest combat and cyberspace difficulties. I had the puzzles on hard and the story setting on normal, as the ticking timer would have added nothing but frustration to the game. In the original, my settings guaranteed that there were no fights to speak of. Enemies fell with one hit from any weapon, and they never attacked first, cyberspace was a 3D maze without obvious walls, and the puzzles were nice and challenging without being annoying. In the remake, I died early and often, got kicked out of cyberspace dozen of times on EVERY level, but found the puzzles quite enjoyable, when I lived long enough to actually work on them. The redesign of the levels was at once familiar and confusing. The addition of a second cyberjack to the Medical level at left me wondering how I was going to complete the game. The big fight on Level 5 nearly saw my playthrough end prematurely, as did the nightmare of Beta Grove which left me desperately looking for a map so I could see if it was even possible to finish. The incredibly sharp increase in difficulty was far more of a shock than the rest of the remake. The audio, which helped make the original game, one of my all-time favorites, was once again top notch. The new audio logs were very well done, and SHODAN continued to be a menacing adversary.....
As I write this, I have yet to finish this game, and I am so annoyed with it that I am debating, for the second time, whether I ever will. The story is well done, well crafted, and entertaining with interesting characters. The problem lies in the designs of the various locations. Many of the locations in the latter half of the game are giant mazes in which you are required to run back and forth 3-4 times, just to unlock a single door, and many of these mazes also feature shifting walls which serve only to lengthen then amount of time you have to spend running around the maze. This, in and of itself, I find to be bad enough, but when the maps are hard to read, it makes it even worse. I also find the system for moving these characters to be needlessly involved, forcing you to click on a new location every 3-4 steps, in order to keep them moving, but you also have to find just the right spots in some of these area or the characters won't even move, which can make getting them through a door a near impossible task. This game is a perfect example of bad level design dragging down an otherwise compelling story. I want to see how the story ends, but I get tired of running back and forth for several hours, just so I can open a single door.
