I'm playing on a budget-focused Nvidia RTX 3050, but even with every graphic setting turned up to 'High' or 'Ultra,' and the resolution set to 4K, it looked about the same. I wasn't expecting a modern AAA shooter, but the rough pixel edges on some objects and textures caught my eye. Enemies perpetually respawning in areas you've already visited might make sense narratively, but it's a mechanic I might have left behind. The melee combat feels just as stiff and non-kinetic as it did in the mid-1990s, which is not a good thing.

But I've also noticed some things that left me wondering if there's more to be fixed up in the finished product. So I certainly enjoyed seeing familiar faces: the grungy mutants, the Picard-as-Borg-like cyborg drones, the trash-can-looking bots that flail their arms at you. All that to say: I'm a fairly soft target. I backed Nightdive's Kickstarter for the game in 2016, when it was expected to arrive by the end of 2017. Getting it to run on my dad's Gateway office computer was a big part of my computer education. You can still spend far too much time meticulously organizing your inventory and collecting scrap for junk credits, while supposedly in the midst of a humanity-endangering crisis.įor context, and disclosure, I played the original extensively in the era when Looking Glass still existed. But the beats of the story, the puzzles and enemies and traps, the very core of the innovative, quirky game is still there. There are some new conveniences, like an entirely overhauled interface with better shortcuts for secondary items, like grenades and stim patches. And, of course, you can play the game on Steam, GOG, or Epic, rather than having to find an ancient CD-ROM. You can blast and pipe-bash enemies, but they aren't Wolfenstein-era 2D sprites anymore. You can punch 0451 into the medical storage locker like it's 1994 again, but this time at modern resolutions and frame rates, using far more comfortable controls, even a gamepad. If you played and loved the original, this demo, and likely the full game, is almost certainly worth your while. Having spent a couple hours in the first level, I'm certainly impressed but curious about some of the decisions and focus areas. I've been waiting to revisit Citadel Station and its malevolent AI since the project's announcement nearly seven years ago. Nobody was expecting to see a PC demo for the System Shock remake this week, least of all me. Enlarge / Dark corridors, cyberpunk lighting, low ammo, mutated humanoids: same as it ever was.

System shock game length