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1443300cookie-checkSystem Shock Pre-Alpha Footage Shows Weapons And Enemy Freezing
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2017/03

System Shock Pre-Alpha Footage Shows Weapons And Enemy Freezing

Nightdive Studios rolled out some new pre-alpha footage for System Shock, the remade reboot of the classic System Shock 1. The new game is currently in development for PC, PS4 and Xbox One after being Kickstarted back in the summer of 2016.

The trailer is just under three minutes long, giving gamers a quick glimpse of what Nightdive have managed to accomplish with the pre-alpha build of the upcoming first-person horror title, showcasing the game running on the Unreal Engine 4 for the first time after switching off the Unity 5 game engine. You can check out the footage below.

The trailer starts by showcasing some of the game’s environments. The theme of the trailer is that the AI named S.H.O.D.A.N is watching and controlling those under her command.

After doing a few panning shots of the space-themed environments, we finally get to see a bit of the pre-alpha gameplay footage. This consists of the player-character wielding a pipe and wailing away on a space zombie.

Now I’ll be honest… it needs a lot of work. The combat is nothing special and typical to what you would expect from most FPS titles with melee mechanics, but there’s room for improvement when it comes to hit-detection and enemy reactions.

We also get to see a bit of the projectile-based gameplay. It, too, is standard fare… just until we see how the weapons can be utilized with the environment.

In one innovative sequence we see a canister of liquid nitrogen used to freeze the enemies. Usually freezing animations look pretty lame and when you hit the enemy they just kind of fall over with a frozen look. In System Shock you can physically deconstruct enemies when they’re frozen. Now that was impressive.

I’m sure they still need to work on the enemy pathfinding because it looked like they didn’t really have much to go on based on the trailer. Anyway, System Shock is still in development and moving slowly through the pre-alpha phase. I look forward to seeing some of the game and hopefully some major improvements with the AI.

You can keep track of development by hitting up the game’s official website.

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