Reviewing System Shock 2’s 25th anniversary remaster should have been the easiest gig of my career. A stone-cold classic lovingly updated by a studio that exists of System Shock 2? Let’s whack five stars over a picture of SHODAN’s face and call it lunch.
System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster reviewPublisher: Nightdive StudiosDeveloper: Nightdive Studios, Looking Glass Studios, Irrational Games.Platform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on PC. Out in the first weeks of July on PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series S/X.
Yet as I rattled through the corridors of the spaceship Von Braun for the nth time, a troubling thought arose. Call it heresy, sacrilege, or the malign influence of The Many’s spinning peanut hivemind, but I began to question whether System Shock 2 entirely holds up in 2025.
I would like to stress the word here. I still love System Shock 2. I love its eerie sense of place. I love its piecemeal horror story of a spaceship caught in a war between two differently hostile superintelligences. I especially love its level design, which is a delight to creep around no matter how many times I play. I also, mostly, love Nightdive’s overhaul of it, which deftly polishes the game in ways I wasn’t certain would succeed.
But love isn’t worth much without honesty, and the truth is age has caught up with System Shock 2 in ways a straight remaster can’t fully undo. There are flaws and frustrations that require a deeper overhaul to fix. Many of these have been around since the game’s launch, but a lot has happened in the immersive sim space since then, and Irrational’s once-definitive sequel has, somewhat fittingly, been bested by its own children.