Quick smacks of my pipe didn't register much of a reaction on the enemy's part, nor was it easy to tell whether I'd truly connected with my target. Where the controls and animations are wonderfully executed and 100% more intuitive than you'd expect, there's also a slight weightlessness to defending yourself. Where it might control like a modern game and, largely, present itself as a 21st century production, it definitely wrestles with some elements of its past that may not bother veterans, but could rub newbies up the wrong way.Īfter a smidge of combat, in which I bonked some aliens and some robots with a steel pipe, I felt the same push and pull of new and old. Voila! Only, like, it was an absolute ordeal that perhaps captured some of the original's finicketies. After a bit of a struggle, I found the right section of my inventory to then consult the keycode, went up to the door, and then manually popped the numbers in (manual inputs are an immersive sim's bread and butter). Later in my door opening saga, I encountered one that needed a keycode, so I circled the same few rooms endlessly, until I found the note containing said keycode and disappeared it into the depths of my inventory. It really does capture the feeling that you're trapped in the bowels of a ship controlled by an unhinged AI, and ensures it looks the part too. The colour palette is awash with neons and CRT greens, with pixellated building blocks when you inspect things up close. The atmosphere was spot on, it being all hisses of torn cables and the patter of your footsteps on cold, iron grates.

As a newcomer to System Shock, it seemed like a strong start as I pressed green buttons to open sliding doors and plopped discarded crisp packets in my inventory to stave off the oppression. Later I found myself in a claustrophobic space station populated by rotund robots, corpses, and sad aliens. It may only be a short rummage around your digs, but it's a neat step towards making an iconic immersive sim all the more immersive without harming the integrity of the original. In the original, you'd have a cutscene of your main character (referred to simply as the 'hacker') pottering around their apartment block, but in the remake the devs have turned it into a playable intro where you're actually able to stroll about and soak in the atmosphere. The demo kicked off right at the beginning of the game and immediately showcased one of Nightdive's licks of modern paint.

System shock 2 remake