Reviewing System Shock 2‘s 25th anniversary remaster should have been the easiest gig of my career. A stone-cold classic lovingly updated by a studio that exists because of System Shock 2? Let’s whack five stars over a picture of SHODAN’s face and call it lunch.
Yet as I rattled through the corridors of the spaceship Von Braun for the nth time, a troubling thought arose. Call it heresy, sacrilege, or the malign influence of The Many’s spinning peanut hivemind, but I began to question whether System Shock 2 entirely holds up in 2025.
I would like to stress the word entirely here. I still love System Shock 2. I love its eerie sense of place. I love its piecemeal horror story of a spaceship caught in a war between two differently hostile superintelligences. I especially love its level design, which is a delight to creep around no matter how many times I play. I also, mostly, love Nightdive’s overhaul of it, which deftly polishes the game in ways I wasn’t certain would succeed.
But love isn’t worth much without honesty, and the truth is age has caught up with System Shock 2 in ways a straight remaster can’t fully undo. There are flaws and frustrations that require a deeper overhaul to fix. Many of these have been around since the game’s launch, but a lot has happened in the immersive sim space since then, and Irrational’s once-definitive sequel has, somewhat fittingly, been bested by its own children.
None of this should take away from the remaster itself, which does a fine job dragging the game a few years forward in time. Alongside features like controller support, ultra-widescreen support and an overhaul of its cooperative multiplayer, the remaster also updates the models and animations across much of the game. This includes weapons, enemies, and environmental objects like the Alien-ish egg sacs from which The Many’s annelid minions spawn.
The result is a game that looks a little smoother, a little cleaner, than before. I was sceptical about some of these changes, though. There’s an uncanniness to the lumpen, shaped-with-a-mallet appearance of the game’s telepathic monkeys and cyborg midwives that suits System Shock 2 down to its nacelles. Replacing these with more detailed models risked dampening the game’s fundamental strangeness.
Fortunately, the remaster largely preserves System Shock 2’s unique atmosphere, its peculiar mix of frantic survivalist action and low-level horror. System Shock 2 never tries particularly hard to frighten you. Instead, it allows the ambient dread of the Von Braun to accumulate in your mind over time, until you have to close the game because you’ve seen one too many rictus-faced corpses, heard one too many audio logs of your crewmates gargling euphorically as they transform into monsters.
A few elements are improved by the changes too. The saucer-eyed stare of the midwives is intensified as it bores into you above their blooded, skeletal jawline, while protocol droids now deform as you shoot them, making their polite offers of assistance even more disturbing as they try to blow you to smithereens. I also enjoyed how the pipe-wielding hybrids’ attacks have been tweaked to feel more lethal. Now you properly feel it when they thwack you across the skull while telling you how sorry they are about it.
The only change I’m not so keen is how many characters, including the hybrids, have been given lip-synced mouths. It’s a minor detail, but it does affect the feel of the game slightly, lessening that unreality I spoke of, as if all the game’s voice lines were playing out in your head. This is particularly the case in System Shock 2’s most famous sequence, where, I think it looks goofy and undermines the drama.
Beyond this, Nightdive judges the changes well. As for the game underneath those changes, much of its design remains outstanding. Like many games of its ilk, System Shock 2’s level design is a masterclass in spatial puzzling. The Von Braun’s five decks (plus the later levels set on the Rickenbacker and beyond) seem specifically designed to slip from the memory. You’re constantly learning and relearning its warren of overlapping corridors, pausing to check the map for the nearest security station or chemical storeroom. Puzzling out its nested objectives likewise remains hugely satisfying. System Shock 2 is the most relieved you’ll ever be to get an elevator running short of being trapped in one.
I also admire how agonising its character-building is designed to be. For at least its first half System Shock 2’s is an anxious scramble of needing everything and feeling like you can afford next to nothing. Yes, you could opt for improved weapon skills so you can wield that shotgun you just picked up, but you won’t be able to repair it when it breaks for at least another hour. This tension is compounded if you start out with a Psi character, as while game-breaking power lies in your future, you also start the game with the steepest slope to climb.
However you play, you’ll crave the drip-feed of cyber-modules your one companion on the ship, Dr Janice Polito, rewards you for completing objectives with. But SS2’s most powerful flourish is how it feeds this craving into its narrative. System Shock 2 plays with the same themes of player agency as its little sister Bioshock. But where Bioshock spends all its narrative currency on one big twist. System Shock 2’s denouement is slower and nastier, giving you plenty of time to appreciate the ramifications of being a good little soldier.
All of this is as thrilling and ingeniously devised as it ever was. But there are areas of System Shock 2 which, today, would benefit from a more thorough rework. For a large portion of System Shock 2, the Psi powers at your disposal are simply not worth the faff of trying to select them. Cycling through Psi power levels and then individual abilities to find the one you want is almost unfit to purpose, especially when you’re juggling them in the middle of combat. Nightdive makes a noble effort translating this awful system to controller, but the way the game organises them makes even this feel like you’re inputting Helldivers 2 stratagems, only instead of calling in a devastating airstrike, you’re conjuring a slightly underwhelming ice-ball or a completely invisible wall of fire.
This leads me to the fact that System Shock 2’s combat has not aged tremendously well. It’s still enjoyable from a problem-solving perspective—figuring out the best way to use the weapons and equipment you have against the threats you’re faced with. But from a tactile perspective, the furtive corner peeking and haphazard wrench-slapping feels extremely dated even through the fancier weapon models. This would less of a problem if we were talking about Thief or Deus Ex, where combat plays a much smaller role. But SS2 is far more of a shooter than those games—it just lets you choose what kind of shooter you want it to be.
Thief and Deus Ex are relevant here more broadly too. Both those games are, in my opinion, still the best at what they do. Certainly, nobody has made a better pure stealth game than Thief. With System Shock 2, I don’t think this is the case. I’m not going to start a bunfight by claiming Bioshock is a better game (which I don’t believe anyway, although it does do some things better). But replaying System Shock 2 made me appreciate just how extensively Prey improves upon its foundations.
The way Arkane’s immersive sim expands upon the same basic premise with creative new mechanics, more open-ended approaches, and deeply intertwined systems makes it a true spiritual successor to the MIT-brained design of both System Shock games, and it comprehensively surpasses the work of Looking Glass and Irrational in a way that is rightly becoming more appreciated over time.
In short, System Shock 2 remains great, but its star has dimmed slightly over the last quarter-century, revealing brighter celestial bodies in the process. Nonetheless, if you like your shooters brainy, your levels knotty, and your nightmares weird as hell, System Shock 2 still delivers in a way that’s more accessible than ever thanks to Nightdive’s sterling work.
System Shock 2 code was provided by the publisher.
