System Shock returns after 30 years after its release, with a remake to match. Find out everything about the game and how we live it on PC, in this note.
System Shock it came into our hands again this May 30 with a remake at the height of the Survival Horror of a single player born in 1994 by Looking Glass Studio. This remake carries the soul and love of the franchise to a new levelwhere the puzzles, scares and a futuristic setting will take you a long way to escape from the clutches of Shodan, the artificial intelligence who drives the ship Citadel, where we are captured. This installment is recreated in Unreal 4 and maintains the First Person Shooter genre in order to internalize ourselves more in our main character, hacker.
Although we are in a world where artificial intelligence is advancing by leaps and bounds and we increasingly have greater access to unimaginable things, Shodan becomes a current fear and not an unthinkable technology for the time, giving extra points to the return of this franchise.
At Cultura Geek we finished the game in its PC version and we tell you everything you need to know before falling into the hands of an artificial intelligence.
More technology, more space and more claustrophobic than ever
System Shock manages to broadly improve what its original tape created in the last centurywhere an artificial intelligence named Shodanvery fashionable in the ’90s, manages to obtain the control of the Citadel spaceship and play with our mind. within their nine levelswith a great detail when investigating the map and the claustrophobic environmentSystem Shock logra to do what many survival horror can not achieve todaygrab something from the real world and take notes so as not to get lost.
With the level of detail and difficulty that we will have when solving the different puzzles that Shodan will impose us to access different areas, we will have the feeling of claustrophobia, of not being able to do anything more than that and watching our backs so that no threat appears behind us to kill us or, worse still, capture them. Although we can solve them, this does not mean that it will be good luck, since, on several occasions, We will find ourselves with traps full of monsters or even worse, destroy the land.
This premise it seems simplea, go room by room, discover the different notes of the passengers who lived inside the Citadel, get passwords and continue to the next area, but is not. With our sheet of paper with codes written down on it, locked doors that we can access, and a great deal of time spent going back and forth between different rooms, It can make the game more complex on a large scale, getting lost if we don’t pay close attention.
The difficulty of the title is variable and is divided into four large groups such as the combat where the enemies will be more or less aware of us, The missionthe level of surveillance that Shodan will have on us, he cyberwhere security protocols will be more aggressive and he puzzlewhich would make it difficult to test the systems. This gives great variables for all playersalthough it is recommended to leave it at level 2 of each one, to have a pleasant experience.
Shodan, the grandmother of GLaDOS
He concept of an artificial intelligence as the main villainwas replicated for years by many games and booksespecially within Valvewhere we will have the Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System or GLaDOS in the Portal saga. Both are cruel AIs who just want to kill us, but the Portal franchise achieves something that System Shock does not, have a greater charisma as a villain and be more present. Shodan it is, but it is not at the same time, she controls everything and watches us with her cameras, but she doesn’t feel the same feeling of wanting to kill us at all costs to use us as one of her minions for the next one who tries to stop her.
Speaking of minions, too We will have the enemies that we will find in each of the rooms of the Citadel. When we enter into combat, he does not give the sensation that one would expect when finishing themThey simply fall and die surrendered at our feet. By finishing them off, we can take away the items on them, which could be scrap, ammunition, or specific objects to continue our adventure. These are divided into two main groups, biologicalthose that have mutated and will attack us mainly melee and mechanicsthat they shoot from a distance.
All that glitters is not gold in System Shock
After spending several hours inside the game, We will get into and deepen everything that happensbut it we will feel a little archaic, as if it were not of this century. This is due to several factors, such as the reuse the system that had the original copy and popularized in Resident Evil 4, storage by spaces.
With a very varied collection of objects that we can obtainfrom weapons to trays, many times we will be going and coming from room to room, only to grab objects that we left behind due to lack of space And power vaporize or recycle them to get tri-credits. The inventory screen will be one of the ones we will see the most in our adventure, spending more time organizing things than solving puzzles.
These objects, as we mentioned, They can be vaporized and create scrap to have more space in the inventory or recycle them in specific machines to get tri-credits. These used to buy ammunition, weapons and single use items in our adventure, such as grenades and healing packs.
In addition to everything we can vaporize, we will have our armament which is divided into two large segments, by hand and from a distance. The side-armssuch as metal pipe, they will be useful at the beginning of the deliverywhile the ranged weaponssuch as the RayoSparq Lazer or the mini pistol, they will be more useful throughout the other maps. It should be noted that the weapons of lazers, will use energy that we have below the life bar, while firearms use ammunition which, as expected, take up a slot in our inventoryfurther limiting it with each specific ammunition that each of these uses.
Hacking feels different, but entertaining
when we try access inside the matrix that Shodan controls the Citadelwe will enter the “cloud” or the Cyberspace with a ship, radically changing the game from a First Person Shooter to a vector spaceship game. After beat entities that Shodan will send us in this space, we can disconnect a portion of our enemy and get access new areas within the game that could, or not, make us move forward with the adventure.
This scenerycould give more than one a headachesince one handles ship in 360 degrees, being able to turn on oneself in any direction and manage to disorient the player in the process to continue advancing.
In summary, System Shock is a game that is not for everyone and this could define this great remake. With the improvements in the graphic aspect and the world that surrounds Hackerthe Ciudadela feels more alive, in quotes, than ever. Shodan manages to keep us on the edge of the saddle although he is somewhat absent in key parts of the adventure. He remake fulfills the objective of taking us to 1994 and re-experiencing the roots of the Survival Horror of the timebeing too faithful to the original idea and leaving some mechanics that could have been updatedas in the case of the new Resident Evil, where they managed to improve the user experience and create a better experience. It is not a game that is recommended for everyone.it is rough and hard, but achieves something that many games today cannot, wanting to think about how to solve things and not take us by the hand throughout our experience, returning to the roots of the genre that gave birth to the franchise. System Shock is available now for PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One and Series X/S, and PC.
RELEASE DATE | May 30, 2023 |
DEVELOPER | Nightdive Studios / Looking Glass Studios |
DISTRIBUTOR | Prime Matter / Plaion |
PLATFORMS | PlayStation 4/5 – Xbox One / Series X/S – PC |