Well, I just played through it, having never touched the first System Shock game, preferring the second.
The game runs like total shit on my toaster, that was to be expected somewhat due to it being a pre-alpha demo, optimization usually happens as the very last thing in development and for good reason.
But still, a game with such a relatively small scope and low graphical muscle shouldn't kill my PC this hard.
The options were very limited, the graphical settings were very brief and I don't believe that they even did anything apart from the FOV option.
The environments look pretty true to the original, angular square rooms and hallways, but the walls are three-dimensional and fully modeled now, they look really appealing.
The NPC characters look like very uncanny, the human corpses look less like humans and more like mutt goblins, the mutants looked dumb as well and animated weirdly, but the robots and the cameras looked fine.
The game gave me eyestrain from the extremely bright and flashy environments mixed with my abysmal framerate, it physically hurt playing through it, but the blame rests mostly on my shitty PC and not the game itself.
The pipe felt pretty weak compared to the original demo, instead of doing a bit swing with lots of camera movement, you do really quick jabs with it, it plays better but feels worse.
The Sparq beam looked nice and was extremely powerful, two to three shots down any enemy you can see, and it has practically unlimited ammo.
It's permanently set on high because the devs left out the firemode switching feature from the demo despite there being a keybind for it, so it's a power sucking death dealer.
The pistol looked very cool, the view sway, ammo counter and the way it's held like a vertical CAR-grip made it look very tactical and slick, so much so it feels a bit out of place compared to the Sparq pistol you unceremoniously hold one-handed.
Since it's lacking the firemode/ammo switch feature like the Sparq, you only get the first magazine of HP ammo for it, and all the other ammo in the map is FMJ so you can't reload it, which is a pretty dumb mistake on their part, I finished the map with 90 rounds in reserve and an empty gun.
The bioshock pipe puzzle and the wire puzzle halfway through were animated very well and were fun to solve.
Without the performance problems I would rate it 5/10, pretty fun, can be improved.
I was following this project for a long time and I'm looking forward to how it's going to turn out in the end.
Now I gotta rest my eyes, fucking shit.
