Ok, don't hate, but I prefer not to pre-order games, for various reasons, but this I just might. This is a classic. One of the best games. And now in its new revision, the atmosphere, is like wow, they managed to get the pixel graphics in but with modern tech like Unreal Engine, its a beautiful looking game even by modern standards, just goes to show you can make things pretty and yet amazing in look and feel without taxing the GPU or the CPU (honestly, when I saw "Unreal Engine" I thought it would hog up all the system resources, but wow what a surprise, barely taxes the GPU or the CPU). This is an old game, but the attention to detail, just incredible, the place is corpse city in space, and the dead bodies stay put, you can even put your inventory on them and use them as storage boxes. This is very handy if you need to plan out some pattern of attack but honestly I have yet try the higher difficulty levels. The puzzles are good, already run into one I could not figure out. There's no hand holding, so objectives are from people leaving behind messages and its bringing back some memories of running around trying to figure out what is what. Having played System Shock 2 in the day, I never got to experience the first game, and this is quite the treat! Music, atmosphere are top notch. The enemies, well it does get a little hard when you're in a tight space, but the AI is basically seek and destroy, so you just need to move around the enemies and strafe your way through, especially if you need to conserve ammo... and boy will you need to conserve your items. Anyways, looking forward to the whole game and spending hours running around corridors and stepping over dead bodies!
While the art itself is nice, and the story has some promise (but its not really well flushed out), the game itself falls flat into totally mediocre territory. There are no animated scenes of any kind, just static CGs, of very SO SO quality, and there are extremely lame with only 4 event scenes with zero variety. Its basically the same CG and just text reading for minutes at a time. And even to unlock these 4 lousy event scenes you have to read a guide because the game has to be saved at a certain point to get the different scenes so unless you care to read the guide, you can play over and over again and none of the choices will really matter until a certain point in the game, and you won't know what that is unless you read the guide. Location variety is also lacking and they reuse the same lame backdrops over and over again. Giving one point for the character design of the knight, as she's pretty cool (but completely wasted as there's barely two good CGs of her). One point for the game not crashing at least and having a save option at any point in the game. Probably not going to be buying anything from this developer ever again unless it has stellar reviews. Use my mistake for your gain, save your money.
Simple thing, developer needs to add disclaimer to the game that it requires additional effort to get it to run, something no one should be doing in 2023. If you game doesn't work out of the box, patch it and fix it run on Windows 11 without additional "fixes", this is isn't 1999 bros.
