by Tim Peters

Created on: June 02, 2009

Released nearly a decade ago, System Shock 2 still packs more suspense than many recent games, even with now-dated technology. Calling it a first-person shooter simply doesn't do it justice. While the original System Shock pioneered FPS technology and gameplay mechanics, System Shock 2 innovated the FPS with a compelling story rivaling some movies. And even today, it's a story guaranteed to unsettle anyone.

You play an unnamed soldier assigned to the Rickenbacker, a military spacecraft with orders to escort a faster-than-light startship, the Von Braun, on its maiden voyage. You wake up on the cryo-deck of the Von Braun, and must escape quickly with the help of Dr. Janice Polito. From here, things get tricky. The ship has been taken over by The Many, an alien race that infected the Rickenbacker and Von Braun. All that remains other than a few unlucky survivors are mutated crew members. Even the ship's AI has been subverted and reprogrammed. And they all want you dead.

Your soldier can be trained in the same fashion as a role-playing game, starting with military training designed to focus on one of three career paths: Marines (weapons experts), Navy (hackers) and the CIA-like OSA (psionics-users). You can further augment your character's skills with modules given as rewards for missions (or just found on the ground). It's a good system in theory, but in practice, the game heavily favors hacking specialists. Not that any of it really matters, because you're going to be too scared to worry about game balance.

System Shock 2 is NOT a typical run-and-gun FPS. If you run in with guns blazing into every encounter, chances are you're eventually going to run out of ammo when you really need it. Every shot counts, especially against the menagerie of horrors you face in this game. Everything from gun-wielding mutants to rogue security robots to psychic savant chimpanzees is lurking around every corner, and you often hear them long before you face them. And the primitive warped faces the graphics engine tends to produce actually work to the game's advantage, guaranteeing you wouldn't want to meet any of the misshapen creatures in a dark alley. But it takes a little more than this to build atmosphere. It requires suspense, and Looking Glass Studios has that covered.

The scripted events that would later become standard in games like Half-Life, Halo and BioShock are used to maximum effect in System Shock 2. They always seem to pop up when things are

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