You can definitely see they've done a lot of iteration and refinement, even with the stuff that felt fairly 'finished' in last year's demo. They dialed back the fleshy subsurface scattering on the zombie skin, which doesn't look as good but maybe feels more consistent with the rest of the art.Better visual variety for enemies, more animations and behaviors.Encounter rate and difficulty feel ramped up, but this is appropriate since the improved controls make combat a lot easier.Places feel a little more lived in and grounded in their functions than the sometimes samey corridors of the original. Level design, while still following the basic layout of the original, takes a lot more liberties with the map now.The gamepad controls are way, way better, and it now feels comfortable to play the game on just a controller (where previously some functions were keyboard only and menus felt bad on controller).This sequence doesn't stand out as especially great to me, but it sure beats the old text scroll and it helps ground the game in a world a bit more. The most obvious change is, of course, the new intro sequence and opening in the apartment.

It feels like a big step up from the old one, even though it's essentially the same chunk of game. Sunk a little time into the demo finally. I really liked the hacking too, even if I wasn't sure of where I was going. I mean, it's not DOOM Eternal, but it does the job and feels nice enough. Thankfully the shooting feels much better, at least based on the two weapons I've tried. More like hitting the enemy by swinging the weapon, it seems that the important thing is to have the cursor above the enemy when you click on the attack button, which feels kinda weird to me. , the melee combat with the pipe feels like shit. They nailed the cyberpunk-terror vibe I guess they were going after. Environments make great use of colorful lights and the ambient music is pretty nice, so great atmosphere overall. The voxel/pixelated vibe gives it a very unique look, and it's clear that a lot of care has been put into that.

This is an easy day 1 for me, specially given the 40€ price tag. Tried this for about 45 minutes, don't want to keep going to avoid spoiling anything until the game releases.

System shock 2018 demo