1. Renegade Ops (PC)(Multidirectional Shooter)2. Borderlands 2 (PC)(FPS/RPG)3. Gunpoint (PC)(Puzzle Platformer)4. Robotrek (SNES)(RPG)5. The Tick (SNES)(Beat 'Em Up)6. Alien vs Predator (SNES)(Beat 'Em Up)7. X-Kaliber 2097 (SNES)(Action Platformer)8. Metal Slug (MVS)(Run and Gun)9. Shadowrun (SNES)(RPG)10. Quake II (PC)(FPS)11. The Twisted Tales of Spike McFang (SNES)(RPG)12. Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number (PC)(Action)13. A Story About My Uncle (PC)(Platformer)14. Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II (PC)(FPS)15. Star Wars Jedi Knight: Mysteries of the Sith (PC)(FPS)16. Catacomb (PC)(Top-Down Shooter)
17. Catacomb Abyss (PC)(FPS)18. Catacomb Armageddon (PC)(FPS)19. Catacomb Apocalypse (PC)(FPS)20. The Catacomb (PC)(Top-Down Shooter)21. Catacomb 3-D (PC)(FPS)22. EarthBound (SNES)(RPG)23. Quake II: Ground Zero (PC)(FPS)24. Quake II: The Reckoning (PC)(FPS)25. Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader (PC)(RPG)26. The 7th Guest (PC)(Puzzle)27. Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness (PC)(RPG)28. Loom (PC)(Point and Click Adventure)29. Castlevania: Dracula X (SNES)(Action Platformer)30. System Shock 2 (PC)(Survival Horror FPS)Once again I prove I'm the scariest son of a bitch in the room.
System Shock 2 is a gorgeous game. It's dark, it's eerie, it insults me while praising me and beckoning me forward. It had moments where I think it approaches the sublime and moments that made me hold up and cautiously analyze my next move in great detail. While there are elements I found a little clunky at times, nothing about the game drove me away in frustration. Instead, it sucked me in until I had lost track of time, only to find myself hours later knee deep in mutant corpses with a grin on my face.
Let's start at the beginning: I love FPS games, and I love horror games. I have a unique approach to them. I study them, analyze them, mentally rip them apart to see what makes them tick. If I meet an enemy, I don't run up to it or run away from it, I just sit and watch and see what it does. I listen to it, I stalk it, and when I feel the time is right, I kill it. And then I move on to the next. And the next. And the next. Learning, examining, memorizing, killing. This has been the way I have approached the genre since I first cut my teeth on Resident Evil 2. At one point in RE2, I could enter a room and then tell you both the types of enemies inside and their numbers, not from memorization but because I recognized the unique sounds everything made.
System Shock 2 continues this tradition. Every enemy made noise(and was kind enough to get louder the closer I approached, eventually giving a sense of position similar to echolocation), so even in the darkest corridors I knew what I was up against, and once I had fought a thing a few times, I knew it well enough to form tactics to fight it. I was cautious, though fast enough to try and avoid the surprisingly fast respawn rate. Over the course of the game, I only had one enemy respawn on top of me, and I had left his area and come back to grab something. And the game supported my method by letting me research enemies to give damage bonuses or learn valuable information about the kinds of weapons and ammunition most effective against them.
But the research aspect is only one piece of the content available in System Shock 2. For my run, I didn't use PSI, instead preferring to rely on my guns, my wits, and my technical proficiency. But if I wanted psychic powers, the option was there. So were a variety of weapon types that I never even touched, upgrade capabilities I hardly looked at, cameras and turrets I could hack, objects to feed into recyclers for more nanos, different OS upgrades to try out, a variety of materials to read and listen to...I was surprised at the amount of things I found and just how big the world was, even if I was confined to the limited expanse of a couple of starships. Even the character creation system is unique and inviting; I must pick a military branch and then choose the career I have experienced to obtain my starting stats. That's awesome!
I mentioned earlier that SS2 can be a bit clunky, and it can. Immediately upon booting up the game, I found I needed to modify my controls, some of which I never needed. I think I leaned around a corner once during my entire playthrough, and I walked...maybe twice? Going directly into the map brings up the inventory, but then closing the map left the inventory still open, and I could move to an extent with it open but still suffered a handicap...I would rather have not been able to move at all and been able to open certain menus without opening up my gearbox at the same time. Also, hitboxes get weird with some of the smaller enemies. Crouching helps, but against the monkeys and worms, I never really felt like I was entirely sure if I would hit the hitbox or not. I more just developed a feel for it over time.
So, just how scary is System Shock 2? Well...it's not. Or at least I never thought it was. It can be creepy and make you feel anxiety and dread, but I never felt actually scared. But I've played a lot of this genre, so I am heavily jaded. The days when a game really dug into my head and gave me nightmares is long past, and the few times I find games really scary nowadays, well, those games have really gone the extra mile and done something unique. Also despite being arachnophobic, I'm so used to squashing spiders in video games that they just don't seem that frightening in a virtual format anymore, and it's weird to think they ever might have.
But enough of that. Is System Shock 2 worth playing for FPS fans? Yes, absolutely. I loved it and had a blast playing it. It's an awesome game, and I highly recommend it to all of you who haven't tried it. If you like horror games or FPS games with heavy RPG elements, this is the game to check out. It has a great story expressed through email transmissions and audio logs. But is it better than Deus Ex? Yes, I think it is.
