System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster Review

I’ll be honest: I had a very hard time imagining how the mere remaster of System Shock 2 could go shoulder-to-shoulder with Nightdive’s prior remake of the first System Shock. The two projects’ long and arguably infamous history connect them in more ways then one, with the remaster of SS2 always having been planned as a side-thing to the remake of SS. That’s all well and good, but comparing the two was inescapable and inevitable, even though they’re fundamentally entirely different projects. How is it, then, that I feel this mere remaster is practically every bit as good as a full-on remake?

Let’s circle back for a bit, though.

System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster Review

10.0Masterpiece

PlatformsPC, PS5, Xbox X|S

Release DateJune 25, 2025

DeveloperNightdive Studios

PublisherNightdive Studios

There’s precious little that needs to be said about System Shock 2‘s actual content. This is one of those games that somehow make their way into almost any top 100 PC games list that’s worth its salt. It’s timeless, infinitely entertaining, and horrifying in ways both mundane and exotic. System Shock 2 truly is one of the best games of all time, and so I feel woefully unequipped to tell you once again what makes it such a good experience. Heck, odds are good that you know why it’s such a good game to begin with, so you don’t need me on that front, anyway.

No, the truly big deal here is just how scalable, user-friendly, and flexible this remastered version of System Shock 2 is. Crucially, you can now play it on virtually anything out of the box, and it obviously runs like a dream even on low-spec hardware such as the Steam Deck. Can’t you do that with a regular, modded build of the original SS2 as well, though?

Ease of use, perfected

While my experience with System Shock 2 modding is quite outdated at this point, I do know for a fact that you can come reasonably close to making the original look like the remaster. You gotta use a whole slew of mods, of course, ranging from asset replacements to quality-of-life improvements, but it’s possible. With the Remaster, though, it all just works out of the box. It’s not like I haven’t pushed the game to its limits, either.

My main office/gaming machine has no regular, run-of-the-mill monitors hooked up to it, you see. The centerpiece display is a 21:9 workhorse with an auxiliary 16:10 rotated by 90 degrees. Most modern games work just fine on this setup, though some of them definitely don’t expect anything so extra. The great news is that SS2R works without any finagling on my end! Better yet, the game supports entirely arbitrary aspect ratios from the looks of it, as it works perfectly well even on the 16:10 Steam Deck.

And on that note, I did not expect to spend the majority of my playtime on the Steam Deck, but that’s precisely what ended up being the case. System Shock 2 is such a perfect fit for the handheld that I simply must recommend to play it that way, if you have a Deck at hand. The game works without so much as a hitch, with all the features fully intact and a rather excellent control scheme. In fact, since you don’t have to be pinpoint-perfect in your aim to get through SS2 (it still entertains the old kind of hitboxes, where they’re a literal box around the enemy), it’s a natural fit for gamepads!

My experience with System Shock 2 Remastered has been nothing but stellar thanks to Nightdive’s efforts in modernizing the game. On that basis alone, I was swept off my feet.

Your brain’s a liar, but you wouldn’t know it

I’ll admit that I didn’t think much of Nightdive’s visual efforts in this game ahead of its launch. At a glance, SS2R looks like a simple upscale with a slight uptick in polygons, and that’s about it, but this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Obviously, this game hasn’t been rebuilt and improved upon to the same extent as Nightdive did with the first System Shock, but every single aspect of System Shock 2 has indeed been touched upon to some extent. All of the assets, for one, have been replaced with massively improved versions that simply seem like the ones you might remember from back in the day. But boy oh boy are they not the same. You see, the remaster of System Shock 2 pulls the wool over your eyes in the best way possible.

Nightdive’s efforts in updating the assets, the animations, and the atmosphere of the game make it seem like a beat-to-beat retread of the 1999 original, but they’re in actual fact simply so true to it that they seem like they were always present. The mutants look more gruesome than ever, the texture work is reasonably solid, and the gun animations and whatnot fit right into the experience. It’s still janky in the same ways it was back then, note, but now it looks snazzier than ever.

I do think this is all System Shock 2 needed, to begin with. Its gameplay systems have aged more gracefully than you’d think, as it was an extremely forward-thinking game for its time. It’s a proper ImSim through-and-through, and you’ll absolutely be rewarded for thinking outside the box and playing creatively. In that sense, it can easily go toe-to-toe with the likes of Dishonored and Prey, despite its innate jankiness. Heck, we only started getting obstacle mantling in mainstream FPS titles very recently, and SS2 had that back in 1999. Imagine that!

On that note, you’re probably going to be interested in SS2R‘s co-op multiplayer, which I’m happy to report works just fine! It’s just plainly and clearly not the designated way to play the game, and so I can’t help but feel that it’s a fun aside and little else. Even then, you and your compatriots need to know the basics of the game, because your inventories aren’t shared, and so failing to listen to just one audio log might derail the entire session for quite a while. It is what it is, and it’s not the way to go for System Shock 2. Someone else might disagree, but hey, I’m the weirdo that plays Helldivers 2 solo, so make of that what you will.

The way to play a beloved classic

The most obvious aspect of the game’s substantial visual uplift comes thanks to its masterfully redone cutscenes. No longer are we stuck with blocky, splotchy, low-res movies that simply suggest what’s actually going on: the new ones are perfectly true-to-form and sharp as all heck, and they’re a joy to behold in motion. They are the one thing you couldn’t mod into the old 1999 version of SS2, and though that alone isn’t reason enough to get the Remaster, I still believe you ought to experience it.

There’s a sharpness to System Shock 2 Remastered that goes well beyond its newly upgraded visuals. It’s an intricate and challenging game — though not a perfect one — whose vision didn’t get muddled over time. In fact, it’s gotten sharper still, and I firmly believe everyone can still appreciate that. This remaster’s strongest feature, with that in mind, is that it makes jumping into System Shock 2 so easy and so effortless that there’s absolutely no excuse not to do so.

I couldn’t hope to summarize all the minor bits and bobs Nightdive has introduced to make System Shock 2 Remastered a compelling experience in 2025. The gist of this entire body of text, instead, is that the game is such a joy to experience that you’d be doing yourself a disservice not to. Just, uh, mind the audio logs. Those stayed the same, and they’re every bit as stilted as you remember them to be. Ah well! Can’t win ’em all, right?