System Shock 2 is set on a futuristic star ship bound for the deep reaches of space, when something goes terribly wrong, and you are the sole survivor. Now, hearing this you might be thinking the same thing I was: “Great, another first-person shooter.” Not exactly, this one stands out from the crowd of the 3D shooter clones. First of all, you have much more freedom in deciding how to go about your mission of saving the day. Your character starts out in one of three branches of military service; after basic training you are stationed aboard the doomed vessel headed for deep space. While browsing the corridors of the ship, you can begin to improve your character any way you want, by using certain power ups and training downloads placed about the ship.

The character development thing was very cool. I experimented with the three basic types of characters from the ground up and found the progression of the game very different for each type:

(1) Your basic marine, a run-of-the-mill 3D shooter type for the short-sighted. I tended to run out of ammunition a lot with the marine and instead beat enemies to death with a wrench.

(2) As a technician in the navy, you are skilled with the technological skills necessary to hack security programs. I found this particularly useful and hacked my way through the game. Even though I had found plenty of ammo with this character, I still relied on the wrench because of poor weapon skills.

(3) The third character is OSS, a sort of psychic CIA. You develop psychic powers and can learn to do all sorts of neat things. However, I still relied on the wrench because psionic power only lasts a short time before running out.

Of course, all of this is for early levels--later on in the game the lines between character types blur, and you get better hand-to-hand weapons.

The only thing that bugged me about this game was its enemy AI. The enemy characters (no matter what they were) acted like zombies, mindlessly walking toward your fierce wrench of doom. The AI reminded me a bit of Quake II. The monsters would walk or run right up to you to attack, so why use anything but melee weapons? As far as I could figure, guns were used for stationary targets like security turrets, cameras, and the occasional protocol droid.

The graphics were quite good and were capable of projecting the mood of any given area within the levels. You could go from one extreme to the other, sneaking around the corner into a well-lit room full of blazing security turrets and then duck into the safety of a research lab to hack a computer. After a while it was easy to predict what was going on around me based on the way an area looks. But don’t get used to it--level four breaks those rules in two. The first portion of the game is spent in a quest to hook up with your contact on level four. And, once you get there, you see why the game is called System Shock.

The sound is really good, and it left you with a serious case of the creeps, or heart-in-your-throat action. The enemies would constantly mutter to themselves and it is creepy, to say the least. As with the graphics, the sounds gave away some of the surprises in the game, but not all. Sometimes the enemy positions were given away by their creepy rambling, fewer times it was hard to tell if they were above you, below you, or around the corner.

Despite my grumbling about the artificial intelligence of this game, I found it very enjoyable to play. What I enjoy about System Shock 2 is the high degree of freedom you have in deciding what directions to develop your character. I enjoyed finding out what worked best for me and then improving it. If you like role-playing and you like first-person shooters, then this is a game that comes highly recommended. But be very aware of this game’s system requirements, the full installation takes just a little over half a gig.