The Gamers Arms

I installed System Shock 2 last night for a bit of nostalgia, while it's leaps and bounds ahead of the first game it's still very clunky. It's basically Thief in space with RPG elements. Great game but time has been less than kind.

Out on Tuesday....

25 bucks on CDkeys....

I dunno....

That's a definitely wait for reviews game.

The reviews are good so I've gone for it, and having played an hour or so I'm really enjoying it. System Shock 2 is one of my favourite games of all time, but I never got anywhere with the first game and its completely awful controls, so the fact that the remake has done a good job is a real treat. It's how a remake should be: respectful of the original but not slavish to its crappier aspects. The gameplay is fluid, mostly intuitive and challenging, the enemies are intimidating and the atmosphere is one of near-constant danger, which is all what made SS2 work so well. The graphics are done cleverly too, looking mostly modern while retaining a slight pixelated feel reminiscent of the original. It feels spot on.

The only minor complaint I have so far is that the puzzles (basically different forms of pipe minigames) provide no clue as to what's going on or what you're meant to be doing. It's not terribly difficult to muddle it out and of course there are already guides online, but some form of a tutorial clue would have been nice.

I'm downloading the demo of this from Steam to give it a try.

Both SS games passed me by as they were way before my PC gaming days. I do own SS2 and booted it up to give a it a try one day but it is so dated and without the nostalgia it just didn't draw me in.

Story and setting-wise, they're very much my kind of thing.

Edit: Didn't finish the demo, died a couple of times, popping a cyborg skull is incredibly satisfying, atmosphere is cool, I think that this is a buy for me.

I’m 15 hours in, I think nearing the end. It’s 90% superb and 10% incredibly frustrating, mainly due to old school game design but in a way that the remake could arguably have fixed. In short, it could use some sort of critical path indicator, even if it’s just a vague direction or a map marker. There are things you need to do later on that are quite confusing, spread all over the place and have minimal clues as to what you’re meant to do. Even googling it made little sense.

That said, the game on the whole is excellent, every bit as fun as SS2 and a triumph of a remake.

I believe you can select a mode at the beginning that enables some waypoint markers.

I bought it immediately after my post but have only had about an hour to play. Really liking it so far.

It's certainly on my to-buy list, but that's quite a crowded list right now. I don't play an awful lot of single player games these days, with most of my gaming time taken up with co-op gaming on the Discord. I think System Shock will have to wait while I play Tears of the Kingdom and (hopefully) Jedi Survivor.

Raid wrote: ↑

Sun Jun 04, 2023 7:43 pm

It's certainly on my to-buy list, but that's quite a crowded list right now. I don't play an awful lot of single player games these days, with most of my gaming time taken up with co-op gaming on the Discord. I think System Shock will have to wait while I play Tears of the Kingdom and (hopefully) Jedi Survivor.

Is Jedi fixed yet?

No idea, honestly, but I've ordered most of a new PC (everything but the GPU and one m.2 drive) which should arrive next week, and I'm hoping it'll be enough to power through some of the issues. It's not going to prevent any instability, which I'm hoping is something they've focused on patching. I'll do a little more research this week to see if it's worth buying yet.

ManBearSquid wrote: ↑

Sun Jun 04, 2023 7:40 pm

I believe you can select a mode at the beginning that enables some waypoint markers.

Ah, that’s good to know! I went for the default difficulty on each setting, but on a replay I think I may lower some of them. It’s about as challenging as I can stomach at the moment, which to be fair is appropriate for the setting and has raised the tension throughout.

Well... shit. I've just done A Big Thing to usher in what is presumably the end of the game and I've encountered a game-breaking bug which means I can't progress until it's fixed. Having googled it, it's not just me either. The irony is that I've had basically no issues with the entire game until this point, but this one is something of a bastard.

Did you ever get around this bug that you experienced?

I'm still loving this game. It's not without its minor faults here and there (no game is, really) but I honestly think that it's brilliant.

Here's hoping that they do the same for the second game.

Yep, it’s been patched now. I’m still stuck though because the difficulty has massively spiked and I have no healing stuff left.