StarCrawlers is insanely addictive. Beginning as a lone Crawler (an adventurer in space clearing out shifty runs for megacorporations), you hire a team of excentric classes such as a Cyberninja or Void Psyker. Each class has brings its unique style to the gameplay, and more importantly, its own personality in dialogues and dialogue options. The setting is full of puns and tongue-in-cheek, but the writing is unexpectantly good. The story of the Stellar Marin - a seemingly abandoned giant spaceship where everyone just disappeared - provides the red threat through the game, and quickly becomes the center point of three very different political factions vying for information, control and your team. The political agenda is excellent. Dozens of megacorps vye for your favour and vice versa, and any of them make excellent allies and even more dangerous foes. You can't make everyone happy, just make sure you choose carefully who to annoy, and how much. For me, the best things about the game are the clever writing, the great options and being a key political player in a world that makes a lot more sense than initially expected. But the gameplay is solid as well. The combat system is astoundingly complex, and timing of skills and order of enemies keep most battles fresh and fun until the very end. Starcrawlers is my unexpected highlight of this quarter.
The premise of the game is fantastic - you take control of a group of survivor's actions to coordinate their ongoing survival or rescue. The graphics and menu are incredibly stylish, even though the actual order menu is slightly fiddly and not entirely intuitive. It took me half an hour to find out how to actually order my survivors to actually enter and loot a new location instead of just scouting it. The whole art-style is wonderful. The map with the randomized tokens symbolizing your people is something you'd probably find in a real-life zombie apocalypse situation. Stunning art design. The writing however leaves a lot to be desired - and since reading the written entries are the crux of the game, I can only award 3 stars in total. The writing is very formulaic which breaks immersion. For example, my house has been attacked three times in a row - and every single time the detailed combat descriptions was exactly the same. The fighting took place in the same room within the house. The same amount of zombies. Exactly the same banter in the group (one headed to the basement, the others scattered). Mostly same results. This is a shame. If the writing would be less formulaic, more fluid and build more suspension, the game would be an instant classic.
System Shock 2 is a game that aged surprisingly well, despite the low-polygon enemies, the textures you can count the amount of pixels in and the shooting mechanics that felt slightly outdated by the time the game first came out. But none of these detract from the pure joy and thrill of exploring the Von Braun, simply the best and most amazingly designed starship in any game. Every single room feels like it makes sense to be exactly where it is, every deck is unique and well-placed. If it wasn't overrun by strange creatures, it's a place I definitely would have wanted to live with. The voice-acting remains excellent quality, the writing and the story gripping. You will find yourself caring for the individuals you mostly only interact with via their audio logs. Their strong, believable personalities are for me the prime reasons the entire game feels so very immersive. And that is a beautiful thing in a game 14 years old. The level-design, the different solutions to every single obstacle and the strong, eerie story make this a game well worth replaying even today, and certainly playing for the first time. Spend the first half an hour on the Von Braun, and you will not notice the aged graphics and aged shooting mechanics anymore, because you will BE on the Von Braun in person by then.
