Announced in late 2015, successfully Kickstarted in July last year, provisionally scheduled for release in December 2017, and subsequently pushed back to 2018—Nightdive Studios' System Shock remaster, a so-called "faithful reboot", has kept us on our toes. It's now teased two minutes of pre-alpha PC footage and Citadel Station has never looked so creepy.
Powered by Unreal Engine 4, the following snippet shows the player pottering around the space station, laying waste to aliens and ultimately leveraging their surroundings in a bid to take down the imposing threat. It's pre-alpha, but it already looks pretty impressive.
In June last year, Nightdive released an alpha demo of its System Shock reboot, so as to demonstrate the direction of the '94 classic's reimagining. Richard Cobbett enjoyed his time with it, suggesting it "isn’t just an HD remaster, but a complete rebuild intended to take advantage of what was almost unthought-of technology for the time." Here's an excerpt of his thoughts:
"The interface is completely new, and a great improvement. System Shock came out before exploring 3D space was a solved problem. Its interface was part mess, part MENSA test. Now, WASD controls and mouselook are your friends. You press buttons and rewire circuits with right-clicks, while left-clicks swing your trusty pipe and fire bursts of the Sparq side-arm—as in the original, an exquisitely flashy yet pretty much entirely useless gun. It all works fine, making a mockery of Shock’s original tutorial without cutting down on options that matter. You can still lean left and right for instance, there’s just no crazy need to click on a little man to do it."
That demo is still available to download via Steam and GOG. Nightdive's System Shock reboot will release in full at some stage in 2018.
