The ships are broken up into decks (medical, engineering, hydroponics, operations, etc), and each of those decks are broken up into sectors that are separated by bulkheads which often require keycards to access. This was a pretty cool concept at the time, which many games, such as Doom 3 and Dead Space, have since borrowed.īoth the Von Braun and Rickenbacker are both pretty large ships, and the game does not have any real “levels” in the traditional sense. The primary story of the game is told through many audio logs scattered around the ship that were left by the dead crewmembers, as well as visual clues in the levels that shed some light on what has been going on.

You spend much of the game trying to figure out what exactly happened while you were sleeping, getting ship systems back up and running, and coming up with a plan to stay alive. It appears that while you were sleeping some force has managed to hijack the ship. You, the player, wake up from Cryo Sleep 5 months after the ship has left earth. System Shock 2 takes place aboard the world’s first Faster Than Light starship the Von Braun as well as the UNN heavy destroyer the Rickenbacker which was tethered to the Von Braun so it could make the FTL jumps as well. It makes you realize that for all of the steps forward we have taken in terms of technology, in a lot of ways modern gameplay has taken a few steps backwards. This is great news, because while you might not expect it, I feel that System Shock 2 is the best of all the “Shock” games. The success Irrational Games has had with BioShock and BioShock: Infinite has interested people enough to want to check out System Shock 2, which was the first game Irrational created. It feels like System Shock 2 has been granted a second chance though. However despite the praise, not many people actually bought and played it. When it first came out in 1999, it was met with a lot of praise from the gaming press, winning over a dozen awards, including several “Game of the Year” titles, and since then it has appeared on several “Greatest Games of All Time” lists. System Shock 2 is an interesting game to review in 2013.

Bioshock vs system shock