As long as we're on the topic of 1999...
System Shock 2 sucks ass.
It was weak at the time and it sucks even more nowadays. Plot is an insult to the great SS1, combat is dogshit, the RPG elements were a really stupid unnecessary inclusion, Citadel Station has more charisma and intrigue in a single room than the Von Braun has in its boring-as-fuck entirety. Even the music is ass. Wow, nice fucking dnb loop, must have taken you at least two full minutes to make.
SHODAN in a robot body flying around shooting at you. Hahahaha. Way to misunderstand what made the character so frightening and alien in SS1. In SS1 SHODAN
was the station, and, other than that warped inhuman shape in cyberspace, had no physical representation other than a bunch of static arranged into a parody of a human face. In SS2 SHODAN is a robot with tits who can hover or something. Jesus. Plus the character has changed from having indecipherable alienesque motivations beyond your human comprehension to being your lame token-evil-teammate sidekick who talks like a Disney villain. "YOU HAVE PLEEEASED ME, HERE ARE SOME UPGRADE TOKENS, HUMAN FILTH!
" Utterly laughable.
System Shock 1's premise of "christ, the station's going to blow up and the mining laser is going to fire and the bridge is about to separate, let's get fucking cracking" replaced with absolute mind-numbing boredom as you shuffle about the Von Braun like an incontinent old man trying to find a bathroom. All the fun siphoned out and replaced with agonisingly lame "survival horror" shit. Allows fans to pull the "well the game doesn't
need good combat, it's survival horror, it's about resource management!!" argument. Then if you criticise the resource management as being shit and the game as not being scary, "well, it's an FPS, it doesn't
need to have good resource management!" Schrodinger's Crap Game.
"The Many" are about as scary as a litter of kittens and the less said about the ending with the flesh tunnels the better. Even fans won't stick up for this crap. Oh and you're suddenly inside the Medical deck of SS1 now, ooh, spooky! It's no surprise that an outside-the-box mastermind like Ken Levine would go on to make such blockbuster hits as BioShit: Infaggot.
Respawning enemies too. Oop, triggered an alarm, better stand in a room until it ends and systematically smack any dolt who wanders in with my wrench. Check it out, a pile of 15 identical bodies piled up in the doorway as these fools continue to walk in, single file. Comical. Might as well start playing the Seinfeld bass whenever you trip the alarm.
A lot of its problems come from being such a shit sequel to SS1, but even if it had been its own thing, it's the weakest of the immersive sims without question.
