The System Shock Remake Is Ridiculously Good

you are not welcomed here remove yourself sorry lady not interested [Music] hey guys this video is sponsored by expressvpn so make sure to stick around at the end of the video to find out how you can get three months for free on your next order well here's yet another game I didn't think I'd ever be playing and that's the system shop remake developed by Night Dutch Studios I backed this thing on Kickstarter way back in 2017 which honestly feels like a lifetime ago now and over the last few years it's had a steady but kind of ambiguous development cycle with a lot of people wondering if it would ever see the light of day either way though it's finally here and honestly I think it's been worth the wait because night dive Studios have really done the impossible here and really brought Looking Glass Studios classic into the modern age do not be fooled into thinking that you have preserved the home of your species the best way to describe the Remake is that it just feels like a labor of love which it probably should be after being in development for so long and the sheer amount of time and effort that's clearly gone into this thing becomes apparent as soon as you start playing big disclaimer though this is definitely not gonna be a game for everyone and it's almost kind of unabashedly old school in a lot of ways for all intents and purposes System Shock does not want you to succeed it doesn't like you in fact nobody likes you it'll make you I don't like you unlike Resident Evil 4 and space both of which had adjustments and additions made for their remakes System Shock just kind of sticks to its guns and offers up a more accessible version of the same game that came out almost three decades ago still though I think we can add this one to the list of recent remakes which absolutely knock it out of the park also too if you do want to pick this one up make sure to use my Gog affiliate link which I'll put in the video description which will also get you a tight little discount on top of its listed price goody gun drops right so the story is unchanged and still takes place in the futuristic year of 2072 which is seeming less and less futuristic with every passing day opening with an all-new and very old-school inspired intro flying through a large cityscape and would it really be an Unreal Engine game if it didn't open up with a flight through he's right you know in the original game all of this was pre-rendered low resolution narrated cinematics which definitely felt a bit disconnected from the engine but now this has all been done in real time to the player's perspective which gives a huge bump to immersion your character is some super Elite hacker arrested after trying to hack into tri-optimum Corporation servers only to be captured and taken before a shady executive named Edward Diego Diego's brought you to Citadel station a station involved in robotic and genetic research and he wants you to remove these ethical restraints on their AI system called Showdown she controls just about every system on Citadel station in return for this she given a military-grade cybernetic implant which is what you were trying to steal in the first place consider it the gift but I think anyone who hears the phrase remove ethical restraints and AI in the same sentence should probably run quickly in the opposite direction however without any real other alternative you do what you're told and as you'd expect that causes things to go tits up then before you know it you're knocked out and then soon wake up in the medical wing of the station to find that showdown's taken over the entire place and it's all now under attack by mutants and Rogue cyborgs goody gumdrops goody gun drops so more or less your job is to reach Showdown and put those ethical restraints back on and find a way to get the hell off the station but yeah man that's easier said than done this is a task that'll take you across all nine floors of the station from medical where you first wake up right through to the bridge for the final showdown appearances might be deceiving but when you go back and actually play through that original game you'll see that it really was at its heart a first person shooter just with a lot of focus on exploration and puzzles Shield generator is ready so it's safe to say that all of that stuff has been carried across into the Remake Shield generators ready with most of the same weapons having been brought over from the original just with a few notable exceptions and additions so you'll still start off with the lead pipe and then much later on you'll find the laser Rapier but they've also added in a very System Shock to look and wrench which kind of seems like an awesome way to connect both of those games together the dart pistol is gone and now you've just got the normal pistol which again has both standard and Teflon rounds and then later on you'll also find the Magnum the ride gun is replaced with a more traditional looking shotgun and the mag pulse has also been updated to have a forearm grip and also the option to charge additional shots for extra damage the submachine gun and the assault rifle also make a return now looking much more like their namesake mini assault rifle for instance now has a burst fire mode compared to more or less just being a cannon as it was in the original then for those energy weapons they're still the spark the iron rifle and the plasma rifle just with the removal of the stun gun and the Blaster and then finally if you can find ammo for the damn thing the railgun impressive as well as a brand new fully fledged grenade launcher so overall it really feels like a more refined roster of weapons and that's kind of Handy considering some of those just kind of felt like they were doubling up on each other to begin with like for the grenades for instance now you've either just got the frag the EMP or the gas grenade which makes it much more easy to use any of these in a pinch early on you'll most likely use the pipe and the pistol because that's about all you've got at that point and then soon after that the spark which does a good job of being like a handy fallback weapon with an overcharged mode that basically turns it into a handheld rail gun but then late game again these weapons do become kind of irrelevant the SMG replaces the pistol the laser Rapier replaces the pipe and then the iron rifle and the plasma rifle replace the spark in fact that iron rifle pretty much carried my ass for the entire second half of the game my leg combat is still kinda janky being little more than just trying to whack someone and then back up so they can't whack you in return but then it doesn't take too long before you've got a bunch of ranged weapons and you're probably not going to use the melee combat that much anyway and even then once you find that laser Rapier and can start one or two shotting enemies becomes even less of an issue actually really cool too how a lot of these weapons have now been modeled in that original game they were just really basic looking Sprites and even by 1994 standards some of which were just almost unrecognizable as to what they were even supposed to be based off now though a shotgun looks like a shotgun pistol looks like a pistol and you also get these neat little animations every time you pick one up for the first time being able to easily swap through the ammo types with the Press of a button is an absolute godsend now during combat saving you from having a bug around in your inventory for those precious few seconds and I think what's probably the coolest new update is the way grenades work able to be primed to blow up sooner and even shown off that awesome new dismemberment system where you can basically just completely de-atomize enemies foreign goes for those proximity Minds which I kept forgetting I even had in my Arsenal in fact there's still so many mechanics and toys that half the time I forget to use them like the reflex boosters which more or less give you bullet time but even some of those more basic implants like the energy shield and night vision all those fully upgraded boots which pretty much let you fly around whatever you want [Laughter] but I guess what's the point of all of this [ __ ] if you've got nothing to use them on well don't worry because showdown's gonna definitely keep your augmented hands full enemies include mutants cyborgs and absolute Army of reprogrammed security Bots and then these things which kind of look like floating covert clusters oh yeah and how can I forget about the gorilla Tigers yeah gorilla DNA splice with the tiger it's like every 12 year old boy's biggest fantasy if you killed on any of the floors before turning off the cyborg conversion Chambers you also get that really nightmare inducing death screen showing your character getting converted by a cortex Reaver though it is slightly less traumatic to watch now than that original cinematic which is the stuff that PTSD is made of dealing with the enemies almost kind of becomes like a puzzle in and of itself because all those different ammo types work for better or worse against each of them so it's like this constant Battle of Tron are not burned through your resources but also figure out what's going to work best for each situation now despite its archaic nature System Shock is still actually a pretty forgiving game even if it does feel like it's got your nuts in a vice like grip if you run out of ammo for your standard weapons you can always just fall back onto energy weapons and there's always an energy recharge unit somewhere on that floor and even if you are killed as long as you've disabled the Sarbor conversion chamber on that part of the station you can respawn pretty much as many times as you want without any penalty for doing so overall there's just a much better shooting system and the controls are smooth and responsive with really polished animations and a nice feel when just moving around and aiming and just the animations in general are improved across the board from sitting in the medical beds which now heals you in real time through to get a zap from a battery to recharge your energy meter I also really like a lot of those small attention to detail moments like how pop in a berserk Pack's gonna cause you to hallucinate and see all these pixelated enemy Sprites from the original game it's just one way in which you're constantly reminded how this remake hasn't forgotten its roots I see you are still alive insects having said that though there are some notable additions which are worth mentioning like for instance how you can now vaporize junk items and turn them into scrap which can then be turned into credits at recycling stations you find on each floor [Music] this is Handy for spending on extra dermal patches extra ammo or just on these all new important weapon upgrades it's actually almost kind of broken in a way because you can vaporize every single piece of junk you come across and easily make like a fair bit of credits really early on there's also what's more or less like a poor man's item box from Resident Evil in the form of the cargo lift that you can access on most floors the only downside here is that this is kind of small and you can't really hold all that much stuff but it is a handy feature if you just don't want to let go of a particular weapon or an item but I think by far the biggest Improvement is how the cyberspace sequences now work now in the original days with just really crappy and kind of confusing wireframe mini games which looked like an old Atari game and they're about as fun to play through as it is dipping your taint in a bowl of hot sauce mostly because it was just kind of difficult to tell where you were supposed to be going and what constituted as a wall because none of the surfaces had any kind of texture and not to mention the combat aspect was piss-poor at best now though it feels much more developed like a proper Mini-Game with these basic flight controls like a poor man's descent we get into these digital dogfights with all of these Road programs unlocking bigger and better weaponry and navigating through these tron-like environments and even just from a visual standpoint they're so much more better to play through the other thing is that you can't save during the middle of these so you've got to beat the whole thing in one go plus they also do start to get a bit tedious and repetitive being not that much more than just spamming both your basic attacks over and over and grabbing a healing item when it's needed but they are essential for getting through locked areas so love it or hate it you're kind of stuck with them [ __ ] [Applause] either way though it is an objective improvement over the original ones and look unless you're some kind of weirdo that just likes being a contrarian for contrarian's sake I can't imagine anyone's gonna dislike this update but if there's one aspect that they've definitely spent a whole lot of time on and one that they have absolutely nailed without a doubt it's the presentation and look dog you don't need 20 20 Vision to notice that this is just an absolutely gorgeous game it's right you know it's got this really unique combination of almost cartoonish style modeling for the enemies and the weapons combined with much more realistic looking effects so you'll see things like the reflections of neon signs and the metallic flaws and the way that lights off and filtered through panes of glass just looks amazing you can even go around and shoot out all the fluorescent lights in an area if you really want to does it do anything not really is it impressive yes foreign Vibe going on where it feels like the lighting's been put there for mood and tone as well as purpose and it's just so rare that we get lighting like this in games anymore you know what I mean considering so many modern titles these days just seem to be the same boring generic open world trash where you spend 90 of your time running around in a [ __ ] Forest out in the middle of nowhere [Music] but you can't truly understand just how amazing this remake looks unless you really start to look at the original and the remakes environments back to back [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] impressive very nice it's just one of the few times I've actually seen Unreal Engine being used properly until its fullest and even just the amount of prop detailed is really impressive with junk scattered around every area that you explore from things like books notepads and pencils through the pdas and bottles of alcohol it's one of those games too where you enjoy it more and more with each playthrough because you can worry less about the enemies and the objectives and just really appreciate all the effort that they put into the world itself I mean Citadel station it feels and looks like an actual place really putting the immersive back in immersive Sim but you know what's even better than that is that it actually runs well and yeah I can hardly believe I'm playing an Unreal Engine game in 2023 that doesn't run like complete [ __ ] what year is it about the only negative thing I had happened was a weird physics glitch where corpses would like Ragdoll when I rate entered areas of the station loading up a quick save is almost instantaneous in the transition between each floor of Citadel station is hidden again through the elevators to make the whole thing feel more seamless which it is which it is I just don't understand how big developers like Arcane Studios and even respawn entertainment can somehow [ __ ] up PC optimization so much but then a smaller Dev team like night dive comes along and somehow completely dominates him foreign [Music] track is pretty awesome too composed by Jonathan Paris really doing a great job at making you feel like you're right there in the not too distant future at a time when AI has learned to become self-aggrandizing and when medical machines can magically rebuild a person with all their clothes and items still intact [Music] and you've got to give props to the audio design too which is still really unsettling and Atmospheric it's so awesome to hear Terry Brosius back doing Showdown and there's still something just really unnerving and creepy about how monotone that character is shown a complete lack of empathy for her actions yeah you know probably because you're the [ __ ] that turned that emotion off and it will turn all Earthly life into a festering pile of postulant mutations Showdown I think is still one of the most underrated villains in video games and she still manages to send a chill up your spine and A tingle up your [ __ ] every time that voice Chimes into mock you it's kind of like this odd combination of being scared but then also wondering what it could be like clapping those AI cheeks I have complete control of this entire level fine there's also one other very crucial way in the way that the Remax also faithful to the original and that's in regards to the level design and the objectives both of which can be still borderline nonsensical and often outright sadistic welcome we talking back to what I said earlier how this really isn't going to be the kind of game for everyone kind of amazing to think that there's people still alive today who beat it all those years ago without a walk through in fact in some ways you could argue it's even more crushing in the remake with the environments now having even more nooks and crannies safety interlocks disabled and those wiring puzzles now being trickier to solve a big part of the challenge comes from the absolutely Labyrinthian field to the station the original came out when a lot of games especially first person shooters were still taking that maze-like approach to level design whilst Doom is only just kind of starting to push these Trends in a different direction Citadel station definitely has notable features and standout rooms in each level which makes it easier to get your bearings and of course the minimap definitely helps but it's still a very confusing game and it's the kind of thing where you need to constantly pay attention to every little detail that you come across there's no Mission briefing or objective screen or anything like that and about all the help you get as to what you're even supposed to be doing comes from these scattered audio logs placed all around the station some of these audio logs only exist for World building but a lot of them give crucial clues for door codes or how to outright complete one of your main objectives way to stop the mining lasers to fire it into the station's own Shields and if you're not paying attention to these or misfying them entirely well you have no idea what the game expects are you like one of the audio logs that you find in medical the first area in the game tells you what you're going to be doing for the next three to four hours and if you missed this well you'll be up that proverbial [ __ ] creek without a paddle the last time I finished System Shock one was when that enhanced Edition came out which has got to be going on like seven years at this point yes seven years [ __ ] what year is it so playing the Remake again for this video was more or less like going back in blind again and to say that I got stumped along the way is a bit of an understatement I mean I should have played the goddamn game with a life jacket on sun because Lord knows I was drowning in confusion that's not even taking into account all these new wiring and fuse puzzles and look all I can say there is go make a cup of tea or something because you're going to be getting pretty comfortable where you're trying to figure these ones out for roughly the first half of the campaign you've got to destroy computer nodes on each floor of the station to remove Showdown security influence and after blowing up these nodes on the first six floors you're going to notice a number pop up on a nearby Monitor and the reason is because about eight hours later you'll need to input all of these in the correct order to activate the station's self-destruct and if you didn't know that ahead of time or just weren't paying attention which is most likely but you're going to have to go back through all of them one by one jotting down which is weird Shin did I mention two these are randomly generated every single time you play the game you serious the code for one door requires you finding two separate audio logs on opposite sides of the level where One log mentions the first digit and then the other log mentions the third and you need to find these because it unlocks a storage room containing an all-important biosuit and again like if you're distracted by combat or something else you can really easily miss an important detail like this later in the game you need to go through three separate biodomes or Groves and remove the Safety Lock so they can be jettisoned into space and one of these is completely irradiated yes Cy said you need to find that biosuit so not only do you have to figure out where the Safety Lock is and access it which is hard enough but also deal with the abundance of enemies along with doing it all under a very strict time limit because your health is slowly being widded away by radiation how about going through four separate identical looking maintenance tunnels checking a few dozen different terminals to find the one that's got a faulty part that needs replacing along with having to destroy a small army of security bots of Patrol each area I mean never mind the combat just that constant sense of where the [ __ ] do I go is what's most challenging about this game and yes I know you had to do all these things in the original game I get it and I know they're complaining about System Shock being confusing is like complaining about Casablanca being shot on black and white film but I think it's important to highlight just how faithful this is the original in that way for better or worse and a lot of first-time players just might not be expecting that kind of approach if the thought of exploring literal mazes for hours at a time given very little to no assistance does not sound like your cup of tea well there's nothing wrong with admitting that I mean trying to make my way through system engineering one of the last areas in the game was an outright test of character in between getting [ __ ] over constantly by the absolute toughest enemies in the game and just feeling like I was running in circles I think I would have been better off turning to a cyborg at that point kind of reminds me too of when night dive remastered Turok 2 one of the most infamously challenging games for the Nintendo 64 featuring levels like the lair of the blind ones which stumped countless Gamers back in the day so when they remastered this they added in the basic mechanic of objective markets as well as fiddling around with the placement of teleporters so it wasn't as outright modeled now I'm not saying the Remake had to do the same thing I'm not after a glowing marker popping up on my map or arrows that point to my next objective but even something as simple as a text prompt in the journal that told me what to do next you know what I mean just like a minor quality of life inclusion would have done wonders for the game's overall flow especially for newcomers and that's why I think a lot of people look at System Shock too as the superior game it took the whole concept of being stranded on a space station against the Rogue Ai and then they just developed it further in a way that felt more natural the objectives were better explained plus also jotted down in your journal the environments were less maze-like plus there's a lot more replayability with the class selection and those ionic abilities System Shock one though is still unabashedly old school in that way and look there is a definite sense of fulfillment you get when something finally clicks but I just can't help but wonder if this aspect of the game is going to turn off a lot of new players [ __ ] this [ __ ] some people might go into this thing having seen the screenshots and the gameplay footage and think it's just gonna be a really fun little cyberpunk shooter which it is which it is only not expecting the brain meltingly confusing time they're gonna have trying to actually finish it I still don't think that means it's bad though and on that note you've actually got to come in night dive for pulling all of this stuff off without any kind of hitches you know outside of those ragdolls defying the laws of nature I mean I play through the entire thing twice and not a single time did an objective glitch out or become inaccessible you can see how with so many different things to do here it could be really easy to soft lock yourself but I never had a single problem with that across two separate playthroughs considering there's so many big budget AAA games these days that barely launch in a playable State and they're often laid in with so many performance issues that it makes you wonder if they've got monkeys on typewriters working in their staff you stupid monkey so for the entirety of this remake and it's many many objectives environments and NPCs to function as intended [ __ ] man that's downright impressive the system shark remate will no doubt make a few new fans out of people who've never played it before but the folks who are going to benefit it from the most though without a doubt are going to be those hardcore fans the people who know all the access codes to every single locked door like the back of their hand four five one 705 199 Etc I don't know if I just outright recommend this to everyone but patient folks who can appreciate an updated and far more accessible look into how crushing and hardcore 90s Shooters used to be they won't be disappointed oh now night dive Studios do the whole thing again this time for System Shock 2. 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Channel: GmanLives

Views: 904,634

Keywords: system shock, system shock remake, system shock gameplay, system shock review, nightdive studios, system shock remake gameplay, looking glass studios, system shock demo, system shock remastered, system shock 3, system shock 1, system shock reboot, system shock 2, playstation 4, xbox one, system shock 2 review, warren spector, steam next fest 2023, immersive sim, system shock 2023, xbox one x, system shock walkthrough, gmanlives, gggmanlives

Id: eGQ4bs_1MRE

Length: 27min 55sec (1675 seconds)

Published: Mon May 29 2023