System Shock (2023) Review

When discussing any old game, especially one that has the immersive sim lineage that System Shock does, I believe that it’s important to set a foundation for my experiences and expectations. I was too young to play the original System Shock when it first came out, and I didn’t get the remake when it was released on PC in 2023. I did play and enjoy System Shock 2 and Deus Ex, so I went into System Shock (2023) wide-eyed and full of excitement — and I wasn’t disappointed, but I was punished.

First of all, if you already read a review of the PC release last year, this review probably won’t tread any new ground. I played the PS5 version, and while I enjoyed the game immensely, I feel that im-sims are best played on PC with mouse and keyboard. That feeling only expanded as I played, for one very specific reason.

System Shock has a grid-based inventory system, which is a pain to navigate with a controller, and this struck me as weird — I played Resident Evil 4 Remake on controller, and had no issues with the attache case system. This bugged me so much that I had to load up my RE4R copy and try to figure out why I was hung up on this.

The RE4R tile snapping is, well, snappier. System Shock’s tile snapping feels a little floaty, and there’s no indicator on how you can reorganize objects (Square button for auto-sort) or how to rotate items (I still don’t know.) You can manually move objects with either the D-Pad or the right analog stick, which is a plus, but since the game doesn’t pause while you’re fiddling with your inventory, this can put you in danger if you’re not careful.

I don’t care for the system of selecting the recycler, dragging junk items to the recycler manually, exiting my inventory, hitting a different button, collecting the coins, and repeating the process to get junk out of my inventory. I kept searching for an “Add to recycler” option, but could not find it. Fiddling with this stuff became such a pain on the controller that I ended up just avoiding picking up junk or tossing it out of my inventory. I actually got so frustrated with this that I ended up trying to plug a mouse and keyboard into my PS5 just to see if it would work (it did not.)

Inventory grievances aside, the port played well in general. I did not notice any hitching or frame drops outside of one specific area towards the end of the game, and it was minor enough that I had to test it to see if I was imagining things or not. If you are more of a controller savant than I am, this version of the game is well-optimized as far as I can tell. From here, though, we’re getting into territory you will already know if you’ve played the PC port.

Combat is difficult enough that you have to plan which encounters you want to engage with, and which ones you want to put off for later. This is OG im-sim territory, which means that you aren’t given a whole lot of information to work off of in terms of goals. You are exploring a derelict space station filled with robotic and mutated horrors — very few map markers, no pings telling you to kill Shodan, just explore and survive. System Shock expects you to piece together the story yourself via data and audio logs. It’s, well, extremely immersive.

I will say that the enemies do look a little…goofy. I was expecting more “horror” in the “body horror”, if that makes sense. The fleshy enemies all look like they were carved out of playdough, which dulled the horror aspect a little bit for me. This feeling eventually went away the more I played, but even looking back at my screenshots the monsters still look a little silly. That doesn’t make them any less dangerous, however — rounding the wrong corner too fast can wind up with you taking a lot of laser damage by an enemy across the room, or having Alpha from Power Rangers mess you up in short order.

The game’s autosave is not terribly forgiving, which I think is fantastic for this type of game — plan your route and battle strategy better, or make multiple saves. You can save just about anywhere, so there’s no real reason to rely on autosave. It was a bit of a shock (heh) realizing this the first time, though: I cleared most of the medical ward with no trouble, accidentally aggro’d too many guys, died, and started way back at the beginning of the game. In short, save and save often.

My game clear file took just under 18 hours, and I felt I was being fairly meticulous in dragging my face across the map looking for secrets, but I also know that I missed a lot of optional rooms. I suspect that if you are absolutely thorough in searching for everything, you can rack up well over 20 hours of gameplay.

If you like horror shooters, immersive sims, or science fiction, you will most likely enjoy System Shock. The PS5 port is good, runs well, and is perfectly fine for people who prefer playing it on consoles as far as I can tell. It’s hard for me to negatively criticize a game port because my personal preferences didn’t quite align with how the game controls on console, but at the same time there are other games that did it with no issues, so if controller fidelity is of concern to you, you may wish to get it on PC and use a mouse and keyboard instead.