Recently I took 10 mins to play a bit of the newly enhanced System Shock. Some observations:

Most importantly we have the option of mouselook. Shock was originally lumbered with clunky controls, where the mouse moved a pointer around the screen, and you had to click in certain places or use the keys to turn, or look up and down. It makes all those simple acts like moving around and looking at stuff just that little bit more difficult. Now though, the crosshairs stay centered and the direction in which you’re looking changes as you move the mouse. Just like a modern game.

You’ll still need the old system occasionally, to use the inventory interface or throw a grenade. Just hit the E key to toggle between old and new controls. If like me you prefer mouselook with the Y-axis inverted, there’s no option in the game itself, but just go into controls.cfg and set the y sensitivity to a negative value.

We also have some new options for graphics resolution, where previously the upper limit was 640×480. You can have 854×480, which is only a modest improvement on before, but it is a proper widescreen mode. Or you can go to 1024×768 with black bars either side. So basically you can have widescreen, or significantly sharper graphics, but not both. Which is odd. However I’m not a programmer and I have no idea what sort of work had to be performed on this old engine. Perhaps it’s like coaxing an old and temperamental piece of machinery back to life? Or summoning a recalcitrant demon?

Anyway Like RT said previously, the Enhanced Edition isn’t bundled up with Dosbox but instead somehow runs natively in Windows. I didn’t notice any problems running it under Win10.

Apparently the keys can be remapped, but I’ve not noticed anything else worth mentioning. So this is still System Shock as we remember it, just with a few adjustments for the modern gamer. I only spent a short while roaming the blue-panelled walls of the medical deck, soaking up the atmosphere, but hope to find a spare weekend to revisit Citadel Station properly.