As someone who owned the CD version and beat it probably 20 or so years ago now; I say without reservation that it's a great remake. The things it changed, and the things it kept are almost all positive. The only issue I have is the "game over" screen. This is only an issue in a handful of places, depending on the difficulty, but it having to watch it every time you fall to a grenade spewing boss really slows down the pace. That is the only complaint I have, though. The texures look pixelated, but I guess that's an aesthetic choice, so I'll give it a pass. Overall, an excellent update of an excellent game.
In the end, I have a feeling this remake will be fairly divisive to those who like it and those who don't. It's very old school and things we take for granted like a quest list to keep track of our goals or auto-notes for important details being kept by the game simply do not exist. The game will not stop you from doing things that will screw you over and get you stuck for hours (like toss key items into dark corners and forget about them without knowing they are key items yet). It will demand your attention like few games made today will. And yet these are traits I can see some gamers who are tired of modern games holding their hand every step of the way seeing as a breath of fresh air and drinking in that freedom.
But the moment to moment gameplay is absolutely fantastic with snappy controls, enemies to learn and gunplay that just makes sense and is a lot of fun. Add to that some logic puzzles and some dips into cyberspace for floating combat like we haven't seen in ages and this is the real deal. If only the game gave you more inventory space it would have been even better. If it had not made you watch the same 15-20 second death sequence every time you died to a boss (which are rather challenging) before you loaded up to figure out what you did wrong and try again, I would have rated it even higher. This is simply put so close to a masterpiece it's painful.
The short one:
If you expect a total mayhem like it was in DOOM - you'll be disappointed
If you want to experience survival horror like it was in Dead Space - you'll be disappointed.
If you're not that easily discouraged by tedious wandering through a futuristic maze of tight corridors, looking for that one right button to push or a piece of equipment without which you can't progress to the next level, and you enjoyed Prey (2017) - I personally think you'll love this one.
And now the long one (because this game deserves it):
You must be warned before you play... there is a lot of backtracking here.
Generally I like backtracking and it is very typical for a game from 90-s but the level design makes it frustrating as hell. In some review below this one, a player has given up on Executive level, and I'm not surprised because it was designed in a really bad way (although environment in that level is more appealing). You'll be forced to crawl through the same ventilation shaft over and over again to CPU, a lever... going back to another lever... and than returning to each level again in order to find a piece of information on how to disable a piece of equipment... and then returning through the same shaft just because no one gave you that information before.
I can't blame Nightdive for this because that was the original design but I still think it could have been improved. Somewhere at the end of Executive I thought about letting this go too, and yet something kept me going.
It's because overall this game is really good and absorbing. I loved the pixel-art aesthetics of textures. Even though they wanted to make it feel more retro (in which they succeeded) this game still looks gorgeaous and has a lot of nice little details, a wide variety of weapons and enemies. There was a lot of heart put into this and you can see it.
One more thing:
If your performance suffers from stuttering, look for System Shock Shader Compilation on forums and on youtube. This can be fixed.
