REVIEW: SYSTEM SHOCK II

REVIEW: SYSTEM SHOCK II

WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR SYSTEM SHOCK II

I went into System Shock II with incredibly high hopes. The game is considered a seminal classic, despite middling sales at the time of it’s release in 1999. Beyond that it dabbles in a cyberpunk style that I’ve found irresistibly compelling since I was a kid. I love dystopian futures, I love rogue Artificial Intelligence, and I love cybernetically augmented humans; what could go wrong?

The Future is Asian.

An image from Blade Runner

From the jump, I’m engaged. The opening cinematic introduces us immediately to Shodan, the evil artificial intelligence who was the primary antagonist during the first game, before relaying the games backstory through a Paul Verhoeven style news feed (think Starship Troopers, Robocop), an extremely effective way to catch the player up to speed on the world the game takes place in. You take control of a soldier sent to investigate the distress calls from the massive research ship the Von Braun. Much of the game will take place aboard this ship, as you navigate your way from the cryogenic chambers of the lower decks to the command center on deck 6.

Detroit... 2014

As you awaken from stasis, the disembodied voice of Janice Polito (a scientist aboard the Von Braun) explains that you have been surgically augmented with cybernetics while you were asleep that will grant you abilities beyond that of a normal human being. As you progress through the game you will collect “cybernetic modules”, earned by completing tasks and exploring, which can be used to upgrade your character however you desire. How you spend these modules will determine your characters abilities, including what kind of weapons you can wield and your ability to repair and maintain those weapons, and what manner of psi powers you will be able to wield.

Use your cybernetic modules to upgrade your abilities at these scattered terminals

It becomes pretty clear early on that I’ve fucked up. I’ve misspent my cybernetic modules to turn my character into a half-assed traditional soldier, and as the opportunities present themselves again and again for me to hack security systems and cameras and I’m unable to, I begin to get a little frustrated. I neglect psi abilities early on as well, thinking “I’ll shoot my way out of this mess, no problem!”. It’s a mistake. Ammunition is a very limited resource, and your guns will jam up and break at the drop of a hat, leaving you with nothing more than a wrench to try and beat your way out of a jam. In one firefight I had to repair my weapon four times before I had defeated a massive security drone that couldn’t fit through the doorway into the room I was hiding in. There’s really not much benefit to engaging the enemy at any rate. You don’t earn experience for doing so, you merely deplete your meagre ammo reserves and leave yourself worse off than you were before. Toward the end of the game I’m basically ignoring enemies, running past them at full speed trying to locate the objectives set forth by the game. The strategy is surprisingly effective, there aren’t really any enemies capable of catching you as long as you make yourself a moving target.

Baaah! Security Drone! Good thing I have my wrench...

The enemies of the game early on are malformed human hybrids whose origins are explained through audio logs you collect as the game progresses. Most of the plot of the game is revealed through these audio logs, and they are incredibly effective at building tension slowly as the the main storyline is revealed in snippets here and there. 

Psssst!

Other story elements are revealed in the form of ghostly apparitions you encounter on board, reliving their moments of death in front of you. The ghosts are explained as a kind of residual cybernetic energy you are able to pick up on due to your implants. Further plot elements are revealed by researching artifacts that you pick up from enemies which will reveal information about the nature of said enemies. As it turns out, the ships A.I. Xerxes has formed an alliance of sorts with a biological hive mind called “the many” intent on taking control of the ship and it’s inhabitants.

Xerxes, the Von Braun's A.I.

It’s also nice that the game never really takes you out of the action. The audio logs and ghostly encounters negate the need for cinematics and you rarely give up control of the player character which allows for better immersion into the games dark atmosphere. As the story progresses you will be faced with a variety of enemies, the most frustrating of which to me were the spiders who are damn near impossible to hit and who will infect you with toxins if they manage to bite you; but, again, for the most part you can just run right past them, or lure them away from your objective using yourself as bait before quickly returning to complete a task.

 Ghostly Apparitions reveal plot elements

Nevertheless, you will die often in this game, and frequent saving is a necessity. The game has a series of built in checkpoints in the form of Quantum Bio-Regeneration Machines, but they are few and far between and will only restore your character to a certain percentage of their starting health. As you progress, turrets will kill you instantly as you climb a ladder, or a camera you didn’t notice as you entered the room will broadcast your location to every enemy on the deck. You will be cornered and mauled by genetic abominations, and you will die again and again and again. If you haven’t activated the QBC machine in a given area, you will be booted to the games main menu upon dying.

QBR machines serve as Checkpoints

You’ll want to loot everyone of the many bodies you come across in the game, as they often contain audio logs or passkeys essential to progress further in the game. On more than one occasion I overlooked a body and spent the next twenty minutes bashing my head against a wall trying to figure out how to continue through the maze of tunnels and tubes that make up the Von Braun.

The setting of the early stages of the games lends itself well to the graphical limitations of the era. Most of the game is devoid of other human beings, which is effective in two ways: it reinforces the isolation you feel, building on the survival horror atmosphere; and, it reinforces immersion by not showing you goofy looking human beings in the middle of an array of security droids and diseased hybrids. The human form just hasn’t quite been perfected yet in System Shock II and when you do run across an NPC character they look blocky and unconvincing. The hard edges, circuitry, long panelled corridors, robots, and mutants of the Von Brauns maintenance level on the other hand work perfectly within those limitations, but tend to get boring after awhile. It’s not until you get the to the crew living quarters deck that the environment takes on any real character for me. Engine cores and shuttle bays and coolant chambers and maintenance shafts and intensive care units are all functional, but become sterile and uninteresting after a while. The movie theatres, living pods, casinos, and sex simulators of the crew living deck on the other hand reflect personality and are far more relatable to the average person. 

Hmmm... Maybe there's time to catch a movie.

Everyone's a winner in the Von Braun casino!

On the sixth deck, it is revealed that Janice Polito, your sole source of human contact through much of the game, has been dead the whole time. The voice that has been guiding you and setting your objectives is none other than that of the evil artificial intelligence Shodan, primary antagonist of the first System Shock; and, she is hell bent on seeing an end to The Many, her creation which has sought to overtake her. The reveal adds a gravitas to the earlier events of the game, and you can’t help but feel slightly violated by the fact that you have been the unwitting pawn of Shodan from the onset. It was she who gave you your cybernetic implants, and she who has been rewarding you with precious cyber modules as you do her bidding like a good pet.  

Shodan revealed

The driving, frenetic, electronic soundtrack of the game is well suited to the environs, but seems to operate independent of the action of the game, unless I’m missing something. Early on, the soundtrack picks up to a feverish pace as I’m putting around in a medical ward looking for supplies, and I jump behind a gurney, sure that some abomination is about to pop out from behind a nearby doorway to make me it’s breakfast. But I wait, and nothing happens. Perhaps this is the games subtle way of telling me to pick up the pace, but I’m more used to musical cues of this intensity having to do with an oncoming enemy. Eventually, I’m all but ignoring the soundtrack. It’s shifting tempo and immediacy become background noise rather than an integral part of the game, and I turn the music volume down a ways in the master control as it sometimes obscures the already disjointed dialogue. When Shodan communicates, it is often through several juxtaposed voices breaking up with static, and the game lacks the option to turn on subtitles. The human voices revealing the plot through scavenged audio logs on the other hand are well done, though sometimes fall flat when they are revealing some important piece of information or relaying a dangerous situation, lacking emotional connection to the words being spoken.

A colorful computer terminal... Preeetttttttyyy preeeettttttty

The game may overreach a bit as you progress, eventually leaving the Von Braun altogether and journeying into the biological wasteland of pulsing flesh known as the body of the many. Suspension of disbelief becomes more of a requirement here. You can see the zipper on the movie monster, so to speak. But, by the time I reach this stage in the game I’m so sick to death of labyrinthian corridors that the change is  welcome.

Reminiscent of leaving the womb, no?

I’m also totally fucked by the time I reach this stage in the game. With low health, low ammo, and poor weapon conditions, I spend the bulk of the games final stages saving repeatedly and attempting to bull rush my way through, occasionally pausing to bash an enemy with an exotic crystal shard weapon. By the time I reach the brain of the many, I have next to no resources and it’s only through perseverance and a series of minor miracles that I am able to defeat the brain. I lure the giant mutant “Rumblers” to a nearby pit using myself as bait, and jump into the water. They follow me in one by one, trapping themselves.

Hahaha! Trapped you, you son of a bitch!

I deftly run pass the floating psi guardians that inhabit the inner chamber, and hide behind the brain as the the enemies bang up against the other side, unable to reason out a way around. I jump in the air swinging my crystal shard at the floating stars that must be destroyed to engage the brain in combat and eventually figure out that by standing at just the right location I can hit them as they dip low in their orbit around the brain. Why, oh why, have I been saving over the same couple spaces, instead of making a variety of saves to earlier places in the game where my condition was not so tenuous?

The brain of the many

Upon defeating the brain and returning to the spaceship, the environment has been warped by Shodan who now has total control of your surroundings. My situation doesn’t improve, and the final battle against the A.I. has me tearing my hair out and pondering the meaning of my existence as I repeatedly try to hack the terminals necessary for me to defeat shodan with my piddly 30 hitpoints and my useless, ammoless weapons. It’s an exercise in futility, it’s simply not possible for me to endure the unavoidable damage dealt out by an electrified floor in front of the terminals.

I love Shodan's interior design sensibility. A big improvement.

Ultimately, System Shock II has a lot to offer. The atmosphere is great, the story as revealed through audio logs and ghostly apparitions is compelling, and the unique cyberpunk environments can be entrancing. Shodan is a fantastic antagonist, whose mocking commentary on your actions will dog you as you progress, forced to do her bidding. There is a lot of cool stuff to see in the game, but there’s also a lot of this:

Ahhh, what a nice tunnel.

More tunnel... Hmmm.

White hallway... Good change of pace.

 White hallway... Sigh...

Have... Have I been here before?

Oh... It's you.

KILL ME NOW XERXES, KILL ME NOW!

Not seeming like a terrible idea right now...

I know that if I had allocated my cybernetic modules more effectively, conserved ammunition, and hung onto health stims, my experience would have been much more gratifying; but, the game does nothing to broadcast the fact that this is the route you should take early on, and by the time I realized my errors I was too invested to go back to the start and try it all again. The ability to customize which skills and abilities your character uses gives the game a large degree of replayability, but the frustration I experienced upon my first play through has sapped any desire I might have had to undergo the experience again. Rising to the challenging gameplay and completing a task can be very rewarding. But, ultimately I have to ask myself whether or not I had fun playing through the game, and the answer is no. Not really. More often than not I found myself frustrated, with my brain turning to mush inside my skull as I retraced my steps again and again trying to find an overlooked key card, or trying to differentiate an integral piece of machinery from the random set design of circuit boards and control panels. I’ll admit that I’m more of the wandering, head in the air type of gamer; more interested in taking in the scenery and enjoying the environment than in burying my nose in the in-game map trying to figure out where I’m supposed to go. There isn’t a dungeon, or cave, or underground ruin that has ever been created that has been able to hold my interest, even in modern blockbusters like Skyrim; and the entirety of System Shock II is more or less one big dungeon, done up with futuristic fittings. Ultimately, it took me a little over sixteen hours to complete the game, and that fact is infuriating knowing that somewhere out there is someone who can speed play through the entire thing in 20 minutes. By the time I was finished playing System Shock II, I was well and truly ready to be finished with System Shock II.  If you’re into classic gaming, cyberpunk environments, and challenging gameplay, System Shock II is definitely worth checking out. But I can’t in good conscious recommend the game to a casual gamer who is just looking to spend a few hours with some good old fashioned escapist entertainment.