Creepy and challenging, System Shock Remake (SSR) is an excellent blend of sci-fi shooter and survival horror that should appeal to fans of both genres.

After a brief intro, SSR starts with the player, known as the Hacker, awakening on Citadel Station, a massive research platform orbiting earth. Within seconds, it becomes apparent that something has gone horribly wrong and it is up to the player to deal with the problem. Gameplay is in first-person, with various interface screens for inventory, maps, and data logs. Items can be hotkeyed in a limited way and the hacker has two on-screen meters: one for health, one for energy. Energy is used to power upgrades and abilities or use certain weapons, and can be recharged from power pylons throughout the station.

Interactable objects litter Citadel for the player to find and pick up. Weapons, ammo, healing items, boosts, and equipment upgrades are all available. Some objects are just junk and useful only for recycling. All have a handy shimmer that makes them easy to pick out from the general background. Eventually the player will find cyberspace portals, which can be interacted with to fly into a six-degrees-of-freedom style of flying minigame, complete with digitized enemies and nodes that do various things when destroyed, such as open locked doors in the station. The cyberspace episodes are "meh" and all kind of feel the same. Only a few are mandatory, though most offer decent rewards if completed.

One of the main themes of the game is isolation, and SSR nails that aspect perfectly. Aside from finding audio recordings from other crew, the player is alone. No friendlies remain alive by the time the player reaches them. On the other hand, hostile mobs—from mutants to cyborg crew members to berserk robots—swarm the halls, all seeking the player's head. The rogue AI, SHODAN, taunts the player from time to time, sending direct messages informing the hacker of their hopeless situation.

SSR definitely revels in its survival-horror elements. Beyond the first few mobs encountered, combat is universally dangerous and damaging. Many enemies will execute an unprepared or unaware hacker in seconds, even on medium difficulty. Ammo is not plentiful; players will be counting bullets deep into the game and will probably have to rely on a rotation, temporarily caching weapons when ammo is low and using another until stocks for the first recover. Clearing a section or level of Citadel is no guarantee of safety, as each level will respawn a set number of foes. A player can exhaust a level's respawn but it is difficult and time-consuming, so beware as you backtrack ... and you will have to backtrack quite a bit.

In fact, much like its original namesake, SSR is not an easy game in general. On anything other than the easiest settings, there is no handholding, and no quest or directional markers. Players will have to rely on information obtained through logs and conversations (all of which can fortunately be reviewed at any time) to figure out what to do next or where to find a vital keycard or piece of equipment. Some of the second-half fights are especially painful. Many areas are choked with radiation or biological poison which can quickly wipe out an unprotected hacker. There is no shortage of ways to die on Citadel Station, so save early and often.

While there are three difficulty settings for each area—mission, combat, cyber, and puzzle—once the settings for the game are chosen, you're locked in for the duration. The only way to change is to start a new game. If a player feels at all casual or tentative with FPS or survival mechanics, I would absolutely recommend choosing the easiest setting for combat and maybe mission and cyber.

As the hacker moves through the station, the fights naturally get harder and less forgiving. The final confrontation, however, was annoying without being truly difficult. Although I was satisfied at completing the game, in terms of the story, the brief resolution was kind of a letdown.

The backstory of Citadel Station and TriOptimum is revealed through audio logs and email data sticks, detailing SHODAN's rise to power and the desperate fight for survival by Citadel's crew. The constant drip of information not only builds tension but provides tons of critical information, as described above.

Design of the space station makes sense to some degree. Levels such as the Reactor, Engineering, and Maintenance all have a grimy mechanical look to them, while the Flight Deck and Executive are brightly-lit and clean. I understand the spacing out of the elevators to force the player to move through the station in stages but honestly, a central elevator connecting all levels would have made much more sense in-universe and unless I missed it, there's no good explanation as to why that wasn't done.

SSR is basically sound but features several annoying issues. Bodies sometimes twitch violently—not as though still alive but as the game physics didn't like the way they fell. Corpses can clip through the floor or ceiling, as shown in this picture.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3725591459

Fans of the old games, especially SS2, may be tempted to use elevators as central storage units. Doing so in SSR will cause items to sometimes glitch through the floor and vanish. The developers attempted to account for this by sending anything clipping out of bounds to the garbage chute on the Reactor level, so technically a player could recover items but I never found anything.

Graphics are decent enough, though some textures look oddly low-res when examined up close. Ambient sound provides decent directional clues for oncoming foes and such, and the voice acting is clean and crisp. I was mildly confused that the player's footsteps always made a metallic sound, even in obviously-carpeted areas. I thought the music cut on and off at odd times, and I ended up turning it off completely.

Maxing Steam achievements requires beating the game on the hardest setting, and the game is hard to begin with, so this is a tough one to get one-hundred-percent.

Despite technical hurdles and the overall difficulty, SSR is a respectable remake. I enjoyed my time on Citadel Station and I think any player who likes grungy sci-fi setting ,and enjoys a challenge, would as well.

OUT OF THIS WORLD with the NEW VR Conversion Mod: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it758P6Y50s

Even as a fan of survival horrors, old and new, this wasn't for me. Started off very promising but quickly became frustrating. Navigating the map and keeping track of all the areas became a chore early on, there's lots of scrap to be fabricated and converted to credits, but a serious lack of ammo and dermal dispensaries. Enemies never stop respawning, even if you hit 0% security level, which I wouldn't mind, but when you're trying to finish a puzzle or connect two pieces of a quest together, it gets a bit annoying. For the most part - for me, anyway - the visuals were nice, but there were lots of textures that looked 144p compared to the rest. I'm sure a lot of people will like this one, but it felt like a chore to play after 2-3 sessions.