System Shock 2

[KLSymph]

You travel within the glory of my memories, insect.  I can feel your fear as you travel the endless expanse of my mind. Make yourself comfortable... before long, I will decorate my home with your carcass.

System Shock 2 is First-Person Shooter/Role-Playing Game hybrid, created by Looking Glass Studios and Irrational Games, that is praised by many gamers as one of the finest games ever made on the basis of its excellent gameplay and story.

System Shock 2 follows the story of the original System Shock, in which the artificial intelligence SHODAN went insane, and is ultimately defeated and presumably destroyed by the player character, the hacker hired by the Tri-Optimum corporation bigwig to mess with SHODAN in the first place. It's now forty-two years after that incident, and Tri-Optimum, which took the expected PR hit from the whole SHODAN affair, has managed to scrape up some of its old corporate power by creating the first faster-than-light starship, the Von Braun. And you, the player, are a United National Nominate grunt assigned to the Rickenbacker, the military vessel connected to the Von Braun on its maiden voyage as security.

Much like the first game, the story starts without you, and you wake up from medical stasis right in the middle of the crisis (or, more accurately, toward the end of the crisis which you are going to resolve).  The Von Braun has been attacked by some strange force, and basically everywhere you see, you see corpses, people who are about to
become corpses, or things which you are about to turn into corpses. Fun stuff, as you can imagine.

Gameplay:

Much of the game is quite standard FPS. You're in your first-person view with your weapon in front of you, and you whack and shoot your opponents. I don't play all that many FPS games (due to a harsh motion-sickness problem with first-person view), so I can't compare and contrast with games like Half Life or anything. One of the particulars about SS2 is that it was created with the Dark Engine, the same as the Thief series (also from Looking Glass, and my favorite games ever). This being the case, you pick things up by centering them on the screen and "frobbing" them (clicking a button when they light up), rather than automatically when you walk over them. As any good Thief player knows, this requires you to search nooks and crannies for your next shot of Med Hypo, and introduces quite a bit more appreciation for the level designs, which are quite good.

The RPG aspect is introduced with the character classes and the stat upgrade system. The game has a set of primary statistics, a set of secondary statistics, and a large collection of abilities and skills as well, and you must purchase all the ones you want. You're always a UNN grunt, but at the start of the game you choose to become a Marine soldier, a Navy engineer, or an OSA agent; this will give you some free stats and skills at the beginning of the game, but not much. The Marines are focused on weaponry skills, the Navy is focused on technical abilities, and OSA is the special ops division dedicated to psionic powers. Unfortunately, while as a "real world" concept the three divisions and the particular skills within weaponry, tech, and psi appear well-balanced, the game environment itself isn't structured such that everything is equally useful, and some skills are much more powerful than others.

Your character is outfitted with a cybernetic rig, and in order to upgrade your stats and get new skills, you must buy them at certain upgrade terminals using cybernetic modules which you find or are rewarded with in the game. The difficulty of the game is greatly based on restricting how much you can strengthen yourself; the enemies don't get tougher and the Von Braun's layout never changes, but how many modules and how much each upgrade strengthens you decreases significantly as you go up the difficulty scale.

A gameplay section for an FPS game can hardly skip a discussion on the weapons. System Shock 2, much like its predecessor, has a wide variety of weapons, with a variety of weapon options. There are standard projectile weapons, energy weapons, heavy weapons like the grenade launcher, and exotic alien weaponry. They all have their strengths and weaknesses (some more than others); for instance standard weapons have abundant ammunition and are easy to maintain, energy weapons all can be recharged at energy stations or with batteries indefinitely but are effective only against mechanized creatures, heavy weapons do a variety of things but have rare ammo and break down easily, and exotic weapons pretty much all suck because you need both high skill in exotic weapons and high research to use them effectively, and you can't afford such expertise on the higher difficulties. Except the crystal shard, which is great, but strangely not all that much greater than the giant wrench that you get at the beginning of the game. In terms of balance, standard is usually believed to be the way to go. In order to prevent the game from being a general fragfest like most games of the day, ammunition is strictly curtailed, and non-melee weapons degrade and break. In addition, weapons tend to have multiple settings, and even more than one ammunition type which you can cycle through to better attack particular targets (standard, anti-personnel, armor piercing, many grenade types). Others have stated their opinions on this subject more eloquently than I, though.
http://www.acay.com.au/~dunnwell/ss2encounter.png

That's not to say that weapons are the be-all-end-all of SS2. The ability to sneak past enemies and use your other non-weapon abilities are also important. Unfortunately, the balance of the game goes toward weapons, in the end.

Interface:

Can't say much about the interface beyond the fact that it's basically the Thief interface, plus the MFD inventory system. If you've played Thief (with the leaning, mantling, frobbing, etc.), then you're all set on SS2, and if you haven't, the in-game Basic Training tutorial will set you up quickly enough. The MFD inventory system is basically a HUD display that lets you putz with your items and equipment, and allows you to play your email and datadisks, check on your stats and research, and other cool stuff. Not much to say about it, but it's very easy to use and I wish they had it for Thief, though Thief doesn't need it since it didn't have the same item variety. In total, the interface is quite intuitive, but since I've already mastered it in another game and basically had all my keymaps memorized, I'm not the best person to judge that for a new player.

Story and Atmosphere:

The story, and the way it's presented, is awesome. I can't say much more than that, really, except to note that System Shock 2 really gets across how much good writers paired with good voice actors really add to the game. The combination of a spray of shotgun pellets on a bloody wall, a tense environment full of enemies, and a heart-felt voice message recorded on a datadisk sitting on the ground can really make a player appreciate that "someone died on this spot". System Shock 2 is, shall we say, quite good at that.

In terms of how much it scared me personally, though, I have to admit that I was already scared out by Thief. It's hard to review SS2 without comparing it to Thief, since the two games were made concurrently, but while SS2 isn't exactly a trip to Disneyworld, there's a degree to which I'm more scared by Thief since Thief's zombies are actual zombies (and can't be normally killed) and the best weapon you have is a shortbow, while in System Shock 2 you have the grenade launcher. All tense atmosphere, sound effects, limited ammo, and randomly infinitely respawning enemies aside, there's a limit as to how much you can possibly be scared when you're holding a GRENADE LAUNCHER.

I wish I played SS2 before playing Thief to get the entire horror effect. On the other hand, I'm not sure if I could have played SS2 for very long if I hadn't played Thief and already gotten past the running-away-like-a-little- girl/hiding-in-the-shadows-paralyzed-for-fifteen-minutes stage.

It's hard to say.

Music:

Eh... wouldn't know anything about it. The instant there was any music, I turned the music volume all the way down. I'm on a ship filled with alien-infested humans, exploding robots, psionic monkeys, and I'm armed with a single wrench. I don't need any fast-paced techno (or whatever that stuff was) to increase my panic level.

Wow, I have, in fact, no way of ending this review.

Hmm...

Play System Shock 2. You won't regret it. Unless you hate great games and/or yourself.

[Dracos]

I never did finish SS2.  I've got a low tolerance for horror and more specifically the sheer awesome of the game overwhelmed me.  Nominally, I'd mock someone for making such a line, but this is System Shock 2, where spider monkeys blast you with psychic blasts between your legs because they were bastards... and all around...chasing you...

This game is one of the best examples of proper atmosphere I've seen in a game.  Developers could kill themselves to reach half the effect.  And I disagree with the whole not scary enough cuz of grenade launcher.  But then I don't think I got the grenade launcher.

Mmm, pretty good. =D

Dracos

[KLSymph]

And I disagree with the whole not scary enough cuz of grenade launcher. But then I don't think I got the grenade launcher.

Due to the overwhelming superiority of the assault rifle over every other weapon in the game, the grenade launcher's only unique usefulness is its splash damage, and the only things that group together with any regularity are the annelid worms when the game scripts their sudden appearance from a corpse or something. Therefore, beyond being a security blanket, I haven't found the grenade launcher to be useful for anything other than whacking groups of worms, which are the weakest enemies in the game. Unfortunately, by the time you flip over to incendiary rounds and acquire the target on a group of annelid worms, they'll have already seen you and wormed their way over to you, so the only application I've ever found for the grenade launcher was blowing myself up by shooting at my feet. You haven't missed out on much.

My most unpleasant SS2 moment:
Discovering that annelid egg sacs, those giant... sacs... from which you can loot healing items from but also spontaneously burst and spew annelid worms (and later swarms) when you get too close, can not only be attached in plain sight on the ground and on walls, but also out of sight on the ceiling.

That was... an unpleasant discovery.

More so because they were in small deep nooks in the ceiling which cannot be seen or aimed into until you're right below them and they've already exploded, raining dozens of biting, hissing worms onto you.

---

*KLSymph, with his pistol, toes toward the big pile of nanites (money) sitting obviously in the middle of the dark middle strip at the end of the Ops deck.*

Okay, this is obviously a trap (there have been a bunch of worm appearances on Ops). I know it's a trap. I can even hear the trap (eggs make a sound). Where is it?

*Looks around. The entire perimeter of the section has been cleared and is brightly lit, so nothing's going to legitimately sneak up on me. Looks down. No visible trap plates a la Thief. Looks up. Very dark, very low ceiling, no obvious markings.*

...the closer I inch the louder the sound is. Maybe there's a sound glitch from another room directly below? That sometimes happens, when sounds from one room bleed into another. Besides, there's no way I could miss seeing a giant egg sac.

*Inches closer, leaning toward the nanite pile to try to grab it, but no quite close enough. Very close now, but still nothing.*

...well. I guess that must be-

*SHPLAAH*

*plop plop plop plop*

*HISSHISSHISSHISSHISSHISSCHOMPCHOMP*

ARGH HOLY SH-*BANGBANGBANGBANG-etc.*

---

Not one of my prouder, more coherent moments.

Turns out there were two eggs on the ceiling, but the ceiling texture was so dark you can't tell there's a rectangular box cut out of it until you're inches away from the lip, much less see the eggs which were high up.

I mean what the heck.