Bioshock is not the spiritual successor to System Shock

[LordTheNightKnight]

Ursus Horribilis said:

 

I'll start off by saying that Bioshock is mighty fine game. I don't think I've ever played a first person shooter where I would spend minutes at a time looking around a room, not to find ammo or health, but simply because it was damn interesting. The plasmids are cool, the script, sound, nearly everything. But I don't think it is as good as System Shock or even a spiritual successor to that game.

It does borrow some of the cooler elements of System Shock, you find yourself in the aftermath of a terrible calamity and try to put back pieces of the puzzle by viewing the destruction and by listening to recordings. Although this premise is sound in both games, I found myself a spectator in Bioshock. I listened to the tapes, followed clues, but for all purposes I was simply passing by Rapture. These people did something to themselves and perhaps I should find out what it is was the attitude.

That definitely was not the case with System Shock. In that game, the shit had hit the fan hard and finding out what went down was imperative to survival. With every piece of hectic recording and every destroyed barricade I felt not only closer to the answer to my survival but that much closer to what took out the whole ship in the first place. Quite a cool setup, wish they had managed to replicate it in Bioshock.

It's supposed to be System Shock 2, not System Shock.