System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster PS5 review – the horrors of AI

One of the best PC games of the 90s has been remastered for consoles, as Nightdive Studios gives the sci-fi horror sandbox a well-deserved makeover.

Ken Levine is an influential, but increasingly forgotten, figure in video games. Starting his career working on Thief: The Dark Project at Looking Glass, he went on to co-found Irrational Games, which made System Shock 2, before leading development of the BioShock franchise. As CVs go, his is not short of highlights, and while the immersive sim genre he helped invent never quite found mainstream appeal, players who enjoy it can be almost fanatical about it.

Levine is set to return with the upcoming game Judas, but meanwhile remaster masters Nightdive Studios have been working on keeping his System Shock legacy alive, with a full remake of the first title in 2023. That stopped short of the more ambitious reboot they’d intended in their Kickstarter campaign, but its generally warm reception was enough to ensure the sequel would get similar treatment.

System Shock 2 was originally released in 1999, and while Nightdive’s aspirations for its 25th anniversary edition once again had to be scaled back – and released a year late – it is finally here. As such, it provides a fascinating window into gameplay that helped shape the current generation, not to mention Half-Life 2, which came out five years later and most certainly owes it more than a nod.

Set 42 years after the events of System Shock, you’re a solider aboard the UNN starship Von Braun, waking from hyper sleep to find the place overrun by zombie-like human-parasite hybrids, deranged psionic lab monkeys, and killer robots. Your job is to figure out what happened and try and make your way through the carnage to survive.

Once again, you find yourself pitted against corrupt AI, SHODAN, but this time you also have to contend with the Von Braun’s rogue computer, Xerxes, and in a foreshadowing of BioShock’s structure, a single human survivor, Dr Janice Polito, whose disembodied voice issues instructions and rewards from afar.

Her vocal delivery is wonderfully cynical, calmly dismissing the ghosts of the recently deceased crew members you occasionally see, as ‘self-hypnotic defects’, telling you not to let them distract you from the tasks she’s assigned you. It’s a compelling set-up and prepares the stage for a game where every single word counts. The audio logs that deliver the majority of the game’s lore also contain essential tips and passwords to open doors.

It means you’re always paying close attention to everything that’s going on, which helps emphasise the profoundly unsettling atmosphere. Along with the noises and occasional explosions of the decaying UNN Von Braun, the game’s fast drum and bass theme music is so jarring it adds to an overriding sense of wrongness.

You’ll also find the hybrids who continually try and kill you apologising as they do so. ‘Sorry’, they say, and ‘Run’, as they lay into you with guns and iron bars. Just as alarming are the lab monkeys, their lurid purple brains exposed through their trepanned skulls, multitudes of whom you’ll need to beat to death with a spanner. The more you notice, the more disquieting it is.

It makes Nightdive’s choice to add four-player co-op with cross-play pretty baffling. For a game so dependent on its sense of creeping dread and the need to dwell on occasionally subtle clues in its environments, adding the knockabout fun that automatically occurs when two or more people get together in a first person shooter seems antithetical. When you’re laughing it up with friends, the Von Braun becomes a playground rather than the intended retro-futuristic haunted house.

It does help offset the difficulty though, which has in no way been dumbed down from the original. Fights are frequent and often deadly, ammo and medical supplies are scarce, and the packets of crisps and soft drinks you find only heal a single hit point. It’s just as well every section of the ship has its own regeneration room, where you respawn after dying, and once you unlock the key to surgical tables that heal you free of charge, you discover things aren’t quite as brutal as they initially appear.

What really impresses though, are the systems that make up its sandbox. For example, another new addition is your choice of career background, which influences the stats your character has at the start of the game. They provide the foundation for quite different builds, from the gun-toting marine to the physically weak psionic-focus of the OSA. Although inadvisable for a first play through, once you work out which psi powers work best, by the mid-game some of them can become comically over-powered.

The downside of the latter approach is that you’ll regularly have to navigate the game’s over-engineered menus. Finding and selecting a new psionic power is a faff when you’re standing in an empty room. In combat, since menus don’t pause the action, it’s a shortcut to getting yourself battered to death by mutants. Its insistence on mapping the stand-still-and-lean-around-corners button to the one most first person games use to sprint, is similarly inhumane.

Graphically, and in keeping with its status as a remaster rather than a remake, things have been polished instead of reinvented. Cut scenes are much sharper looking, as are enemies, guns and scenery, but they all still have the unmistakable low-poly blockiness of the late 1990s. The most important thing though, is that what made the game such a landmark in the first place is still entirely present.

That includes its labyrinthine level design. You eventually discover that sections generously loop back on themselves, creating shortcuts after long and gruelling periods of exploration, and that you can safely dump spare inventory items in the lift that acts as a bridge between those vast floors. That doesn’t prevent each new area you discover from feeling genuinely intimidating though.

Despite moments of mechanical clunkiness, and the occasional odd design decision, System Shock’s 25th Anniversary Remaster is a reminder of how much sophistication was possible even with pre-millennial technology. It’s still utterly engrossing to play, and with so many different possibilities to experiment with, invites multiple playthroughs. This is a sensitively made and bug free remaster that should delight devotees of the 90s original and curious newcomers alike.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £23.99
Publisher: Nightdive Studios
Developer: Nightdive Studios (original: Looking Glass Studios and Irrational Games)
Release Date: Out now (PC), 10th July 2025 (consoles)
Age Rating: 16

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