More damning than making a mistake once is making it over and over again. No, its flaws are idiosyncratic to the development team, and the evidence -particularly when you look even further forward to Bioshock Infinite, but I'm not touching that just yet- is that the development team is unable or unwilling to engage in the self-reflection necessary to properly acknowledge and address these issues. It's not that System Shock 2 was trying to do something novel and difficult and its flaws are an understandable outgrowth of tackling such a challenge.
The counterpart to this is that System Shock 2 is also Not A Very Good Game, regardless of the critical praise it's received ever since its release, and many of its flaws become more damning when you look to the future and see that, yes, they just repeat these same flaws for no good reason. This being the case even though the goal of Bioshock was to do System Shock 2 Again, But Better. The majority of it, however, is that Bioshock is not very impressive of a game on its own merits -bar the handful of things I praised already- and then gets worse when you properly contextualize it by looking at System Shock 2 and finding that the development team is reiterating the same errors in the same way, with little improvement-by-learning to be found at all. Now, part of the reason I'm covering System Shock 2 after Bioshock is that I experienced them in that order. It turns out basically everything ever implied or claimed about the game to me over the years was a big fat lie. Then I happened to get a hold of and play the original System Shock, and it was a fantastic game that could easily be a precursor to the System Shock 2 people had painted in my head, raising my expectations still further.Īnd when I got to System Shock 2 itself.
I kept running across tantalizing bits suggesting something unique and interesting above and beyond the actual praise directed toward it, painting a picture of a game with high replay value, a dark story, and the potential to play through the game by hacking the technology around you instead of fighting everything.
System Shock 2 is a game I was hyped about for years.
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