Date: 2/18/16
Review Number: 20
Game: System Shock 2
From (Creator Publisher): Irrational Games/Looking Glass Studios
Played On: Steambox (w/ Controller)
Steam Price as of Review: $9.99
Total Time played: 35 minutes
Review:

Time to take another trip down gaming lane, picking out a random door to knock on and run away giggling while the owner comes to the door with a shotgun to chase me away. This time the random house happens to belong to System Shock 2, the critical darling of 1999 and FPS RPG of legend. This one had already seen a good number of hours of playtime both in and out of my Steam collection, however they had long since been removed, so I was working with a new install and a new game, which was just as good, because it appears that I have completely forgotten how to play.
Now, I will say that I do remember why I really enjoyed this game after playing for the thirty five minutes I moved through for this review. The gameplay is unique, implementing both standard first person shooter elements and RPG elements seamlessly, the storyline is fantastic and complements the story perfectly without becoming too intrusive, and the controls somehow manage to incorporate a lot of technical data in as direct a way as possible (though I will say a lot of button remapping needed to be done to the steam controller before all the possible combinations were covered. This one may be a mouse and keyboard only sort of game for any long term playing). The graphics, especially in the character models are significantly dated, but it doesnt vastly interfere with the game, and after some digging I believe improved models have been released, which should mitigate some of that. But really what makes this game so worth playing is that the whole thing is tied together in a cohesive way that is missed in a lot of games that have been released since. Many games focus on a single point or two and focus on them often to the exclusion of everything else (see most of the AAA titles that focus so much on graphics that they ignore everything else) but this game takes the entire experience of playing as a cohesive whole, and brings together all the pieces to make a story, writing, sound, graphics, gameplay, and everything else. In the end, any trip to nostalgia FPS lane would be incomplete if this game was missing. Definite buy!

Game’s Fate: Uninstalled, really just because I’ve played it enough times to not want to get into it again.
Buy/No Buy: Totally worth buying. A game that takes some of the best aspects of FPS games and RPGs and puts them together.