System Shock 2 coming to consoles was something I could have never anticipated. It’s ingrained in PC gaming culture as one of the finest Immersive Sims ever made. I was closely eyeballing the remaster project for years, and was enthused to see the console version of the now-titled 25th Anniversary Remaster would come to Nintendo Switch. This was one of my more anticipated remasters, mainly because I can’t think of a studio to trust more to bring back a classic FPS than the people at Nightdive Studios.
Set years after the events of the original System Shock, you play the role of an amnesiac who wakes up on the spaceship Von Braun. You find out quickly that something has gone very, very wrong. The crew has been infected by a hivemind parasite called The Many, the main AI XERXES has gone haywire, and the ship seems to be exploding around you. Led by the commands of one of the only remaining survivors, Janice Polito, you have to navigate the devastated remains of the ship and make it out safely.
Before you wake up, you spend some time deciding how the first few years of your silent protagonist’s military career played out. This essentially sets the groundwork for how you build your class, and this can be pretty overwhelming for new characters. You have a series of stats, weapon types to specialize in, hacking, and psionics to dabble with. I’ve always enjoyed playing as someone who specialized in hacking, keeping my secondary weapons be energy weapons or traditional firearms.
The game is flexible, and not too limiting if you feel like you’ve specced into the wrong build. However, you are strongly incentivized not to spread all your upgrade points evenly. The best gear in the game will require high investments in certain stats, and you only get so many upgrade points throughout your playthrough. There are also permanent upgrade stations that drill this point home. You need to make tough choices and specialize in a particular role, even if it means you won’t be good at everything. Adapting to your weaknesses is part of the fun, and it can lead to really tense moments. This won’t be an issue if you have an idea on how you want to build your character before you get started, so I might recommend taking a look at all of the stats at the game’s first upgrade station and restarting from scratch if you want to have a better idea in mind on how to play.
From there, it’s up to you to survive the onslaught of enemies that have taken over the ship. You’re inherently powerless, needing to sneak around to avoid detection in the early hours of the game. If you get caught by a camera, XERXES will alert any nearby Many to your location for a period of time. You’ll need to take them out with a melee weapon, psionic blast, or gun. Your weapons can be damaged if they aren’t kept up properly, and it takes a bit of getting used to if you aren’t as familiar with late 90s FPS handling, but I think it works.
The Von Braun is an excitingly hostile setting, and figuring out all the ways you can interact with the world around you to solve puzzles while getting better at surviving The Many makes for a truly unforgettable gameplay experience. The way each segment of the ship feels cohesive yet still distinct and filled with unique challenges keeps you on your toes for most of the run, even if there are some moments of tedious backtracking. Progression can feel a bit obtuse at times, but I think that aimlessness, as the parts of the ship you can explore expand, adds a lot to the overwhelming dread.
Nightdive has done a fantastic job cleaning up the original System Shock 2. Atmosphere is crucial to making this game work, as I argue the pull of the game is less the plot and more of the experience of going around the Von Braun. So implementing critical community bug fixes is a great first step, but they didn’t stop there. All of the 3D models have been redone, but not so much so that the game has lost any of the original visual identity. Lighting and textures have been cleaned up substantially from the original version, making for a more legible moment-to-moment experience. One of the game’s most memorable reveals has gotten a particularly noticeable facelift, and it looks just fantastic.
They also added new animations for weapons, and I had to double-take initially when I realized this because it seems so seamless with everything else. I’m also impressed that they’ve gone the extra mile and remade all of the pre-rendered videos so that the old models used in the original videos wouldn’t look inconsistent with the upgraded models in the remaster. The changes all strive to enhance what made the original so great, never going overboard. This is the System Shock 2 you remember, just looking better than ever.
Walking down the blood-splattered hallways, picking up audio tapes, and solving puzzles is just as gripping as it always was. This isn’t the scariest game of all time, but the way it blends horror, sci-fi, and FPS puzzle solving comes together wonderfully. Hearing the stories of people in recordings minutes, days, or weeks before their eventual death to The Many is always effective in establishing what kind of crappy place the Von Braun was before you woke up. Walking in the flooded crew quarters as faint ambient music drones in your ears, or finding a spot people used as makeshift graves when everything started are just a handful of wonderfully spooky moments.
All of this beautiful tension is completely thrown out the window when you play with the newly restored co-op mod. System Shock 2 was intended to be a single-player experience, but I’m happy to say that all the systems work shockingly well in multiplayer, too. What it loses in unsettling horror atmosphere is made up for in how my group was able to repurpose System Shock 2 to be a fun class-based shooter. We had someone on modifying/repairing weapons, someone who would hack machines, and someone focused on psionics and research. Everyone had a role to play, and it made for a different but still extremely fun Immersive Sim.
Unfortunately, I was not able to play this mode on the Switch in the review period. Cross-play will be supported, but at the moment, the PC release and the Switch release have different version numbers. Trying to connect my two copies together would crash the mode, but I imagine this will be resolved once the console version properly launches.
I don’t think the original System Shock 2 is a perfect game, but I’m glad Nightdive understood that it needed to be preserved as-is anyway. I wouldn’t say the story is particularly mind-blowing, but as a dark mood piece, it works in keeping you motivated to continue exploring the halls where the crew of the Von Braun eventually met their demise. There’s interesting lore to find in how everything played out, but I think the game does lose steam at the end, as it’s clear that the original development team needed to rush to the finish line. I know it might seem silly to dance around a particularly obvious spoiler of a 26-year-old game, but the dialogue and performance for a particular antagonist is still wonderfully creepy and effective all these years later. That really is emblematic of the whole experience. Yeah, not everything works when you look at the whole picture. But those iconic moments and small details? That’s where the magic is.
One of the biggest victories with this remaster is the fantastic controller support. Mapping every function on a complicated keyboard and mouse RPG onto a modern controller is great, especially after the many headaches of trying to get the original PC version working on a Steam Deck. You can press in the left stick to lean around corners, and the interface has been tweaked slightly to be workable with just a handful of buttons. It still takes some getting used to, but inventory management doesn’t feel like an extra hassle like I was worried initially.
I’ve run through this remaster mainly on Steam, thanks to the delay of the console port. I was pretty impressed with what I played on Switch, and considering this is more or less the first classic Immersive Sim game to come out on the platform, I’m pretty happy to say you’re getting a good way to play System Shock 2. I do have some gripes, however. While textures still look clean, it’s clear there’s some compression artifacting depending on the spot of the ship you’re on. The baked-in lighting for certain walls in spots can look a bit blown out because of it, especially when playing in docked at what appears to be 1080p.
The HD Rumble is also particularly weak, especially compared to the haptic feedback on the DualSense I experienced when playing on PC. Feeling my footsteps reverberate slightly as I walk down the desolate hallways of the Von Braun added a lot when I played on PC, so it’s sad that an equal effect couldn’t be recreated. You’ll experience a generic rumble when you get hit, and I had to turn it up to max just to feel anything. The gyro aiming also just functions, but doesn’t really impress. Neither of these is game ruining, but I certainly remember them feeling more responsive on my DualSense when playing on PC.
I spent my time with the Switch version playing exclusively on my Switch 2. Outside of the previously mentioned minor texture issues, it looks really crisp when played on the system itself. There’s a 60 frames-per-second target, and I think I only noticed one time where there looked to be frame rate dips. There are no secret Switch 2 enhancements, unfortunately, but I’d love to see mouse mode implemented in a future update if possible.
There’s a tendency to look at groundbreaking older games and say “I love this, so it deserves a remake”. I certainly would never say no to a new interpretation of System Shock 2, but the 25th Anniversary Remaster proudly shows that the game really doesn’t need it. There’s certainly a learning curve, but the great thing about a remaster like this is that it only elevates what was there originally. The Switch version might not be as easy a recommendation as the other platforms, but I think it preserves and even enhances the atmosphere the original game excelled at. Playing a portable is just an intimate experience, and System Shock 2 works well. I hope Nightdive is able to bring over more Immersive Sims to the console, and hopefully be able to take advantage of the new Switch 2 hardware features.
Version Tested: Nintendo Switch
Review copy provided by Nightdive Studios
