Review: System Shock 2 (1999)

Edited and re-uploaded from one of my old Steam reviews.

So after my bloated tangent on horror game design in my RE7 review, I thought it’d be interesting to go back and look at one of the few first-person horror games (“few” because I haven’t played very many) to actually freak me the fuck out, and that’s System Shock 2, released in 1999. Along with Deus Ex, released the next year, SS2 was one of the OGs of the first-person sci-fi RPG genre. It’s at the base of a pretty sizable family tree, from the Bioshock games to the Dead Space games, to Doom 3, Alien: Isolation, Soma, Prey 2017, you name it. But of the games on that list I’ve played, SS2 is still the best in terms of raw survival horror because it understands how to make you piss your pants and never sacrifices its tone for the sake powering you up. The feeling it wants you to feel never goes away, at that feeling is science-fiction terror.

It’s July, 2114, and you awaken from your cryogenically frozen slumber aboard the Von Braun starship, the first transport capable of traveling beyond the speed of light. Such a feat of engineering would be incredible, but this is cyberpunk - the project was funded by capitalists eager to get the clout, and now something has horribly malfunctioned. Not only that, but the ship has also been invaded by an alien hive-mind called the Many, who have subjected crew members to bodily mutations in order to bring them into the fold - AND it's taken over the ship's AI and security systems. Everything is out to get you, and the only tools you have to fight back are a security badge, an oversized wrench, questionable weapon repair skills and the one remaining living person on the ship over the radio. Good luck.

The first thing you’ll probably notice when jumping in is that the gameplay feels kinda shitty. It goes without saying that the graphics are awful. Depending on whether you’ve ever been drunk, you may feel quite comfortable taking control of your character. Jumping feels floaty, changing direction feels sluggish, like you’d develop enough inertia to make you pass out from the G forces, and for some reason walking on an angle while holding A and D makes you go faster. The engine SS2 runs on is the Dark Engine, which was made for Thief: The Dark Project. That was a stealth game where crouch walking is mandated by law, so running and jumping weren’t really a priority.

The melee hitboxes are fucked, especially for those monkey bastards and the mutants with lead pipes can wind up and swing before you have a chance to back away. It’s pretty thrilling, dashing in and out for quick hits or ducking back into cover when you hear the screech of a security camera while your heart jumps into your mouth, but it takes getting used to.

The inventory screen is horrendous - I’m not convinced the developers didn’t t design it by sneezing on their screen and then tracing lines between the drips of snot until almost the entire thing was covered. Level, exp, health, psi points, weapons, ammo, armour, healing, upgrades, documents, audio logs - it’s all there in its early-3D, eye-gouging-shade-of-green glory, by the same logic as a child leaving his room messy so that all his clothes and toys are easy to see. Oh, and the game doesn’t pause. How rude.

And of course, there’s the weapon degradation. Constantly needing resources and points sunk into repair to maintain them, the constant stress of wondering whether they’re going to jam in the middle of a fight. 

So no, SS2 isn’t what you’d call free-flowing, but it’s also not insisting that you fight legions of mutants and rogue robots at once. The word of the day here is “vulnerability” - you need to fight as surgically as possible to minimise the resources you use up. Should you try to kill these two mutants with just a wrench? Or would it be safer to take them out from afar since you’re light on healing? And what types of ammo should you use? Anti-personnel rounds are best for squishy targets, armour-piercing for robots, slugs for long range.

This all sounds fair dinkum for a survival horror game, I’m aware, but what sets SS2 apart that it absolutely does not fuck around - if you waste resources too much, you will not be able to progress properly. End of story. You need to be dodging as best you can with the wrench. You need to be using AP rounds on robots, when they’re available. Otherwise you’ll eventually be forced to load a save before you fucked everything up. 

Now, the potential for such a massive setback may sound like an awful addition to gameplay. And the looming necessity of quicksaving might sound like the developers trying to get those infinite monkeys at the typewriters to design their difficulty curve for them, since in many cases it’s possible to get through any encounter by bolting for the next loading screen, with enough trial and error. However, as I said in my RE7 review, for a horror game to work, there needs to be an actual threat of punishment - preferably something beyond simply reloading the last checkpoint - and I think this does just that. Planning fights beforehand is a core part of gameplay, and core gameplay doesn’t end at a single death and reload. Being wasteful creates a long-term punishment, which creates constant tension. 

But for the most part, it’s balanced. It really is. The difficulty curve leaves a decent amount of wiggle room in the early game. You also eventually get the knack for being economical. And the euphoria when you do clear an encounter - it’s incredible. Both when you’re left at low health after you fuck up somewhat and when your planning pays off and cut through all enemies with surgical precision. Weapons might be annoying to handle, but the audio of each one is super satisfying, too. The guns are, anyway - pistols, shotguns, assault rifles and grenade launchers. 

But even with those small victories, you never feel safe aboard the Von Braun. Even while looting a dead hybrid or activating a healing bench, you can never escape the ship itself. The creaking metal, the droning vents that pump air like it has a smoker’s lung, it’s like the ship is a terminally ill patient that’s constantly fatigued and aching, trapped in a hospital bed and in their own body.

And at any moment, a weird, distorted cry from a mutant or harsh beep from a robot could cut through that “silence” (and a decent number of walls) and set your teeth on edge. How many rooms away are they? You have no idea. So stay frosty.

SS2 also has an underlying existential horror with the nature of the Many. One thing that often makes characters in stories (and people in real life) so terrifying are the little snippets of humanity that live alongside a bottomless capacity for evil, and that’s the alien hive-mind to a T. Yes, it’d get rid of loneliness and stress and responsibility, blah blah blah, but the Many’s methods are clearly very evil and conceited. Mutating some crew members that seem to be in pain, forcing them to attack you, killing others so that you don’t get to be an individual or part of the hive mind either. It's like a conservative parent in the 80's "forgiving" their kid for listening to rock music and then tearfully deciding to beat the shit out of them anyway.

And yet as angry as that might make you now, the feeling that manifests in gameplay is fear. The Many’s efforts to force mutations on the crew ironically leaves the player feeling utterly alone. The threat isn’t just death, it’s the loss of all the things that make individuality valuable - love, passions, all lost to a void of a personality whom you thought just for a second might have had a sliver of integrity to them. So it’s gratifying the sheer variety of methods you have to kill them all.

For alternate playstyles, you’ve got psi powers and hacking abilities. Hacking lets you get extra nanites, one of the game’s currencies, from various locked doors and crates aboard the Von Braun as well as repair weapons more easily.

Psi powers, to me, are the most interesting playstyle in that they’re more about survival than brute force. They’re mostly support and movement-based, like shields against different damage types, transmuting resources into ammo or nanites, self-heals, stunning enemies, even teleportation. There are damage-based ones like cryo- or pyro-kinesis if you’re boring, but on the whole, it’s cool. It does take a while to get to the really interesting ones, though, which forces you to stick to melee and crappy ranged weapons for a while. The pistol is still satisfying to use, but that’s not what I came to use, y’know? I think this is one of the few times where the game screws up its balance between fun and vulnerability.

The other time is, uh, well, the whole game? Kinda? Let me explain. I didn’t bring up Deus Ex idly in the first paragraph - the gameplay on the whole is clunky, but one thing the game has on SS2 is that you can’t completely fucking mess up your playthrough by putting points into the wrong skills, which is what happened to me. My first playthrough was a Marines weapons-specialist build where my main method of progressing was taking broken shotguns from downed mutants every time mine broke and doing a little hack to repair them. A ghetto method of playing, I admit, but it worked - for about 18 hours, according to Steam. Switching from regular to armour piercing to long-range slugs where necessary and peeking in and out of cover to deal damage. The game is hard, even on easy, but it’s a horror game. I’m here to feel vulnerable. 

And because it worked, I started putting skill points into other skills like research, etc., rather than repair or upgrade skills that would let me keep a single shotgun from breaking and continue to up its damage. Which meant that, even with the right ammo type, I literally did not have the damage to progress or the health to run past everything, nor did I have the cyber modules to fix my build. So I gave up. 18 hours in, I got up and turned off the game with blue balls that rivalled the planet Neptune.

For a while that left me feeling down on the game, but I still recommend it, especially for a price as low $9.99 AUS. The story and themes are good, if not on the level of Bioshock, but in terms of gameplay, I think SS2 holds up best as a series of individual moments - holding out on low health after tripping an alarm, repairing a shotgun for a last line of defence seconds before a robot rounds the corner, the awesome audio design of the Many trying to communicate with you. Those are the experiences that make the game an absolute classic. So go buy it.