Let's dive into the horrors of Citadel Station with a classic DOS game, revised and enhanced!

A cyberpunk-themed horror with RPG elements? That's old stuff! From 1994, to be precise.

System Shock is a first person action game with shooting, puzzle and horror elements. We will find ourselves trapped in a space station, trying to survive against mutants and robots under the control of S.H.O.D.A.N., an artificial intelligenze that went rogue.

Graphics

Graphics are dated, but the better textures from the enhanced edition give a fresher look while keeping it rooted into the DOS game.

Sprites use the "billboarding" technique (all sprites are facing the player from all angles), like DOOM 1 and 2.

Setup and Performance

Setup from GOG (via the Galaxy client) is painless and performance is good even on low-end PCs.

For the best result it will be necessary to dive into some modifications that are not too hard, but still require a bit of attention (see next section).

Sounds

Music is absolutely miserable . But it's not the game's fault.

The game uses MIDI tracks that have been created to work with a Sound Blaster 16 sound card, sadly Windows's MIDI synth is laughable; music comes out as flat and some instruments are completely missing (or such instruments are at such a low volume they are impossible to hear).

Do yourself a huge favour and install a decent MIDI synth, like VirtualMidiSynth and download a good (I liked Fatboy but some suggest WeedsGM3 or Giant Soundfont).

Sound Effects are typical from the DOS era, satisfactory and they just add to the game's atmosphere.

S.H.O.D.A.N.'s voice is really synthetic and "glitchy", giving even more the impression of a rogue AI. Its speech patterns and words put the player in a continuous state of uneasiness.

Gameplay

The original gameplay is tough, hard to understand and frustrating at times; since you don't have any mouse-look (like modern FPS) but you can still aim with your mouse while managing your inventory in real time.

The Enhanced Edition added "the sacred E button", which allows to switch from "FPS mode" (with mouse-look) to "Inventory mode", by pressing the E button. This improves playability a lot.

The game allows to select the difficulty level in any of the 4 main areas: missions, combat, puzzle and cyberspace; guaranteeing a flexibility that is not often seen in games.

Cyberspace missions break the shooting and exploration monotony, allowing you to explore spaces made up from wireframe, using all 6 degrees of freedom, which can result in some confusion.

Conclusions

If you want to try a game that made history of the horror and shooting genre, System Shock is surely something you should try, if you play with the comforts offered by the Enhanced Edition.

The final judgement, as usual, goes from 0 (shoot this game into outer space) to 100 (possession of this game should be part of all international conventions since the 1800).

My score is: 90/100

Thanks again for reading and see you in the next post!

Penaz.