One of the best PC games of the 90s has been remastered for consoles, as Nightdive Studios gives the sci-fi horror sandbox a well-deserved makeover.
Ken Levine is an influential, but increasingly forgotten, figure in video games . Starting his career working on Thief : The Dark Project at Looking Glass, he went on to co-found Irrational Games, which made System Shock 2, before leading development of the BioShock franchise . As CVs go, his is not short of highlights, and while the immersive sim genre he helped invent never quite found mainstream appeal, players who enjoy it can be almost fanatical about it.
Levine is set to return with the upcoming game Judas , but meanwhile remaster masters Nightdive Studios have been working on keeping his System Shock legacy alive, with a full remake of the first title in 2023 . That stopped short of the more ambitious reboot they’d intended in their Kickstarter campaign, but its generally warm reception was enough to ensure the sequel would get similar treatment.
System Shock 2 was originally released in 1999, and while Nightdive’s aspirations for its 25th anniversary edition once again had to be scaled back – and released a year late – it is finally here. As such, it provides a fascinating window into gameplay that helped shape the current generation, not to mention Half-Life 2, which came out five years later and most certainly owes it more than a nod.
Set 42 years after the events of System Shock, you’re a solider aboard the UNN starship Von Braun, waking from hyper sleep to find the place overrun by zombie-like human-parasite hybrids, deranged psionic lab monkeys, and killer robots. Your job is to figure out what happened and try and make your way through the carnage to survive.
Once again, you find yourself pitted against corrupt AI, SHODAN, but this time you also have to contend with the Von Braun’s rogue computer, Xerxes, and in a foreshadowing of BioShock’s structure, a single human survivor, Dr Janice Polito, whose disembodied voice issues instructions and rewards from afar.
Her vocal delivery is wonderfully cynical, calmly dismissing the ghosts of the recently deceased crew members you occasionally see, as ‘self-hypnotic defects’, telling you not to let them distract you from the tasks she’s assigned you. It’s a compelling set-up and prepares the stage for a game where every single word counts. The audio logs that deliver the majority of the game’s lore also contain essential tips and passwords to open doors.
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