YMMV / System Shock 2

• Anti-Climax Boss: SHODAN. She and her digital minions that accompany her during the final battle have one glaring Weaksauce Weakness in the form of EMP weaponry and ICE Picks, if you were smart enough to keep them with you throughout the whole game. Otherwise, she could possibly be That One Boss.
  • To a slightly lesser extent, The Many's central nucleus. It doesn't have any obvious weakness like the above example but the boss is stationary and by that point the player has more than enough weapons to destroy it in seconds.
• Awesome Music: Heaps. Intro. Medical. Security. Cyberspace. MedSci 1. Engineering. Command.
• Complete Monster: SHODAN. See here for details.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • The Annelid Arachnids, phobia-inducing, chittering spiders the size of a car tire. Their smaller cousins are relatively-easy, but these guys are bad news. Fast? Yep. Bullet sponges, even after you research them? Yeah. Resistant to energy weapons? You betcha! Worse, their attack is a toxic bite that loads you down with poison that can only be cleared with anti-toxin hypos. Don't have any? Better have found the regenerator station nearby, if there even is one! Worse yet, from the Command deck onwards, these utter bastards tend to be partially invisible, and no less fast, tough or deadly. Thankfully, they are still trackable; less-thankfully, it's via the sounds they make: a very distinctive warbling, hissy chitter.
  • Rumblers. They've got all the qualifications for Demonic Spiders. Very fast, tons of health, hits like a runaway train, and even exploiting their Weaksauce Weakness to fire takes much longer than any other enemy to wear down; and if you're using energy weapons, forget it. It gets even worse when you're in the Body of the Many and you can get blindsided by up to 6 of the bastards. The only true disadvantage that they have is their lack of ranged attacks, but even that is negated if you're not properly equipped to face one of them. However, the game-breaking assault rifle, when fully-modded, can down a Rumbler in four antipersonnel rounds— less than a second on full auto.
  • Security Droids. Encountered in nearly every part of the ship, they can easily kill you with their energy weapons, even if you manage to dodge them up close. They're a bigger threat in close spaces, which happens to be most of the ship, and even then you're entirely screwed if you come across one while in direct line of sight.
  • The Psi Reavers. While they don't appear until you're in the heart (or brain, considering that their "boss" is a gigantic mutated cerebrum) of the Body of the Many (you also get a preview of one in the form of Mutated!Korenchkin), they more than make up for their rarity by firing psychokinetic balls of energy that take away a very large amount of your health even on the easiest difficulty setting. Made worse by the fact that killing them only grants a temporary reprieve from further attacking you and they'll quickly respawn several seconds later to make you more miserable; the only way to truly prevent them from respawning is by destroying their primary brain that powers them which is located somewhere nearby in order for them to truly be eliminated. Also, like any other worm-based enemy like spiders, grubs or Rumblers, they resist energy attacks.
  • The Cyborg Assassins. While they may not have as much hp as the others (60, or 48 for the red kind), they throw ninja stars which a really hard to dodge, and are one of the few enemies smart enough to back up if you try to melee them.
• Even Better Sequel: The second game improves and expands on the first in just about every way. System Shock 2 is also the game that made SHODAN one of the most memorable and frightening villains in gaming history.
• Fan Nickname: The soldier often named "Goggles," due to his eye implants resembling them.
• Game-Breaker: The Assault Rifle. It requires 6 in standard weapons to use but is well worth it, as while it only has a base damage of 10, it still outdamages the pistol in every possible situation while using the same ammo, AND the antipersonnel and armor-piercing rounds do double damage against the appropriate targets; also, due to Arbitrary Gun Power not being in place, automatic fire does the same damage per shot as single shots, meaning you can waste a rumbler, spider or military robot in about two seconds if you have the right ammo, and anything lower-tier in three shots or less. When fully-modded and used with the correct ammo for a given enemy, the AR can down any shootable target ^note basically, anything that ain't an annelid swarm in the game, from hybrids, monkeys and grubs all the way up to rumblers, Psi Reavers, military robots, the Brain of the Many or even SHODAN and her avatar in five shots or less.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • The psychic monkeys eventually become nothing more than a minor irritation.
  • Annelid swarms. You can't kill them, all you can do is run away and wait for them to die off. Annelid worms also count, being small and hard to hit with a wrench.
    • The Viral Proliferator and the Annelid Launcher are the only two weapons that can actually kill the Annelid swarm, but they degrade ridiculously fast after each shot, so you must carefully manage the use of both of these weapons. For the Viral Proliferator, set the weapon to Annelid mode, and simultaneously fire and hold down the fire button to hit the swarm. It takes about 2-4 held shots to kill a swarm. It isn't worth using the Launcher, however, as it takes about 8 shots to kill a swarm, wasting the use of an already fragile late-game weapon and a lot of ammo in the process.
    • The best way to deal with Annelid swarms is to know the Pyrokinetic Aura psi power, which surrounds you with an aura of fire that rapidly harms nearby enemies — and can actually kill the swarms. You're still likely to take a little damage from them, as the aura is melee-range only, and you're not likely to be spending a lot of modules on psi abilities unless you're an OSA build.
  • Turrets. What's most annoying about them is that they are almost always around a corner, so you're almost guaranteed to get blindsided by them before you can react. The white machinegun turrets are bad. The blue laser turrets are worse. The yellow rocket turrets you find later in the game are worse yet.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: One of Korenchkin's logs says that he has found "the borders of rapture." Hmmm...
• It Was His Sled: A lot of what made System Shock 2 such a shocking and swerving game became common gaming knowledge pretty quickly. Also, the fact that SHODAN was on the cover and the icon for the game's .exe didn't help things. The trailer for the Steam version doesn't even bother to hide the plot twist, even showing Dr. Polito's corpse and SHODAN revealing herself.
• Most Wonderful Sound: "Research Complete". Yeah! Now the monsters die 25% faster!
  • The sound of any successful technical operation, especially when that leering ICE node you took a chance on played along.
• Obvious Judas: SHODAN doesn't really hide that she is only helping you for her own reasons. Although it's unlikely a blind player would be able to suss out that she's also been impersonating Janice Polito until The Reveal.
• Paranoia Fuel: The monkeys, which chatter eerily at you before proceeding to pound you with psychic powers. The cameras, which are everywhere, hard to spot, and will result in enemies spawning in to kill you if you set one off. But mainly, it's the fact that you hear all the enemies (and also the gentle whir of the cameras too) before you see them, so if you hear almost any noise you start looking around nervously.
  • At one point on a given deck, you find audio logs including a gruesome account of a woman being overwhelmed by spiders when her gun jams and a warning that a certain section of the deck crawls. You expect to be up to your armpits in Giant Spiders but you only find a few of the small ones that die in one hit.
  • The eerie, song-like sound of an Annelid egg whenever you enter a new area. You just know they're around somewhere and one wrong step can get you blindsided by Annelid swarms or grubs...or get a faceful of poison. Even worse are the ones hidden in a nook on the ceiling...
• Sequel Displacement: Gamers are more familiar with the sequel than the original.
• Signature Scene: The Reveal that Janice Polito had already killed herself, and the walls coming down to reveal who had been guiding you the entire time: SHODAN.
• Tear Jerker: Marie Delacroix's death, even considering you find out about it afterhand and don't see it happen, considering you read a LOT more of her logs than anyone else's and thus get to know her a lot more (well, as much as you can know a person without actually meeting them).
• Scrappy Mechanic: The weapon degradation system, so much so that some of the most popular mods are ones that just purge it entirely. It doesn't help that some weapons seem to degrade unnaturally fast and have an irritating habit of jamming at the worst possible time.
  • The "Pack Rat" OS Modification, of which you can only have 4 total per game, merely unlocks 3 inventory squares...which you could do by increasing your Strength stat by 1. It amounts to an incredibly unwise way to solve an inventory management problem.
• Scrappy Weapon: A surprising number of them in the unmodded game:
  • The laser pistol has a pitiful base damage (2) in it's normal fire mode. Its Secondary Fire does a more reasonable 12 damage, but requires 2-3 seconds to recharge after every shot, barring use of an exploit. As such, it's good for destroying security cameras and little else. Worse, organic enemies like hybrids, rumblers and those Goddamned spiders take reduced damage from it and other energy weaponry.
  • The laser rapier, despite its cool name and sounds. It has unreasonably high requirements (energy weapons 4, agility 3) and does energy damage, which is good vs robots, decent vs cyborgs, and pretty much crap against anything else, meaning the basic wrench is usually better, and the later Crystal Shard is better yet.
  • The fusion cannon seems meant to be a BFG, as it requires 6 in heavy weapons to wield, but it's damage is surprisingly low (20 on normal, 30 on the slower-firing "death" setting), and it does energy damage as well. Finally, the ammo for it (prisms) is pretty rare, meaning it's usually better to just use the grenade launcher.
  • The viral proliferator looks cool, but that's about it. It requires 4 in exotic weapons as well as 4 to research before you can use it, and uses worms as ammo, which require you to use the (surprisingly rare) beakers to collect. And while it actually does do decent damage against pure annelids on it's anti-annelid setting (about 40 per shot), its rate of fire is so low that the assault rifle on full auto with anti-personnel rounds is way better.
  • The EMP rifle isn't as bad as the others, but requires 6 in energy weapons, and while EMP is really good against robots and decent on cyborgs, it has no effect at all on anything else. It's better to just use EMP grenades from the grenade launcher (which only requires 1 in heavy weapons.)
  • The Stasis Field Generator, the mid-tier Heavy weapon, is also rather disappointing; it uses the same rare prisms as the Fusion Cannon, but unlike the cannon, it fires fast, swirly energy beams...which do no damage whatsoever in any circumstance, only freezing the target in place for a short amount of time. Only really useful to cover for an escape or set up uncontested melee, but otherwise a complete waste of time, ammo and modules for the 4 Heavy Weapons skill required to use it.
  • A couple of the Psi powers are outright duplicates of each other; most egregious is the Tier-5 "advanced" healing, which is less efficient than its tier-2 regular version on your psi-points, the only advantage being faster burst healing...at the cost of potentially hundreds of cyber modules depending on your difficulty level.
• Spiritual Successor: As Vindicated by History shows below, the game was absolutely revolutionary, but sold poorly, which led many other developers trying to replicate it and try to bring its awesome mechanics into the modern day. As Yahtzee puts it:
  Prey (2017)'s more of a spiritual successor to System Shock 2 than Prey (2006), not to be confused with the official spiritual successor to System Shock 2, BioShock; or Doom³; or Dead Space; or basically every sci-fi horror game since 1999. Even the first game's 2023 remake draws heavily from this one's mechanics...blimey, how many spiritual successors does one game need?! There'll be bloodshed at the reading of the will, I'll tell you that.
• Vindicated by History: While the game received good reviews when it came out, it was still a commercial failure and many critics failed to see how important it was to game industry. It wasn't until years later that gamers discovered it, its influence became known, and it's now considered to be one of the greatest games in history. In late 2013, it was released on Steam, even being ported to Mac, which introduced it to a whole new generation of fans.
• That One Level: The Body of the Many, which doesn't have a resurrection booth and is filled up to the brim with the most dangerous annelid creatures (expect to get blindsided by Rumblers and Arachnids a lot). In particular is the gauntlet at the end, which a serious test how how fast you can take out targets with at least seven dangerous enemies coming at you from all sides. It's blunted a bit if you have an assault rifle and lots of antipersonnel ammo, though.
  • Pod 1 of the Rickenbacker marks a serious step up in challenge compared to the Von Braun as a whole; for starters, the resurrection booth isn't found until the end of the level, meaning that you'll be save-scumming the whole way through. It's a massive labyrinth of twisting halls and chambers that's incredibly easy to get lost in, not to mention the high volume of very powerful robotic enemies that can slice off massive chunks of your health if you're not careful. Hope you brought enough first aid kits. Worse, you've got to sniff out and destroy a bunch of black annelid eggs— which are sometimes hidden in devious locations— before you can even get to pod 2.
  • The Von Braun's engineering deck, with its excessively long corridor and the cargo bays. The long corridor has an eerie whining noise, slowly opening doors which make your walk through it particularly slow, turrets which have the tendency to ambush you, and of course, that doesn't even cover the cargo bays.
  • Speaking of the cargo bays, they're dimly lit, have terrifying music, can tend to get a little 'too quiet' sometimes, and of course, the protocol droid crates which can open at any moment. Doesn't help the fact that you're virtually forced to traverse the entire section to find someone for a small piece of information. However, with sufficient hack skill and clever platforming, there are goodies aplenty.
  • The Von Braun's command deck is also a real pain; it marks the first appearance of the dreaded invisi-spiders, but also is where you run into your first psi reaver (as a boss fight) and the first appearance of rocket turrets. The entire deck is swarming with threats, and the regeneration stations are tough to find, being rather out-of-the-way.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Symbolic?: Not long after the Gravity Screw, you come across a chapel, and since the gravity currently thinks that you're supposed to walk on ceilings the crosses are now inverted, further enforcing the hellish landscape that the ships had become and the character of your one "ally". EA executives were a little disturbed by it, and sent a message to the developers asking if they noticed it looked a little sacrilegious.
• The Woobie: Erin Blume from the Hydroponics Deck is described as a very sweet and kind woman. which is why The Many decided to make her into the first cyborg midwife.

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