Our review of System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Edition — a lovely game that’s showing its age a bit.
Reviewing System Shock 2’s 25th anniversary remaster should have been the easiest gig of my career. A stone-cold classic lovingly updated by a studio that exists because of System Shock 2? Let’s whack five stars over a picture of SHODAN’s face and call it lunch.
Yet as I rattled through the corridors of the spaceship Von Braun for the nth time, a troubling thought arose. Call it heresy, sacrilege, or the malign influence of The Many’s spinning peanut hivemind, but I began to question whether System Shock 2 entirely holds up in 2025.
I would like to stress the word entirely here. I still love System Shock 2. I love its eerie sense of place. I love its piecemeal horror story of a spaceship caught in a war between two differently hostile superintelligences. I especially love its level design, which is a delight to creep around no matter how many times I play. I also, mostly, love Nightdive’s overhaul of it, which deftly polishes the game in ways I wasn’t certain would succeed.
But love isn’t worth much without honesty, and the truth is age has caught up with System Shock 2 in ways a straight remaster can’t fully undo. There are flaws and frustrations that require a deeper overhaul to fix. Many of these have been around since the game’s launch, but a lot has happened in the immersive sim space since then, and Irrational’s once-definitive sequel has, somewhat fittingly, been bested by its own children.
None of this should take away from the remaster itself, which does a fine job dragging the game a few years forward in time. Alongside features like controller support, ultra-widescreen support and an overhaul of its cooperative multiplayer, the remaster also updates the models and animations across much of the game. This includes weapons, enemies, and environmental objects like the Alien-ish egg sacs from which The Many’s annelid minions spawn.
The result is a game that looks a little smoother, a little cleaner, than before. I was sceptical about some of these changes, though. There’s an uncanniness to the lumpen, shaped-with-a-mallet appearance of the game’s telepathic monkeys and cyborg midwives that suits System Shock 2 down to its nacelles. Replacing these with more detailed models risked dampening the game’s fundamental strangeness.
Fortunately, the remaster largely preserves System Shock 2’s unique atmosphere, its peculiar mix of frantic survivalist action and low-level horror. System Shock 2 never tries particularly hard to frighten you. Instead, it allows the ambient dread of the Von Braun to accumulate in your mind over time, until you have to close the game because you’ve seen one too many rictus-faced corpses, heard one too many audio logs of your crewmates gargling euphorically as they transform into monsters.
