I decided to write a pretty moderately thought out review at 2am due to seeing some really lenient reviews as well as some scrub-take reviews so, here's my 2 cents. I'd give this a middle thumb, but that doesn't exist so pretend the thumbs up is a middle thumb.

-Great gameplay: Probably the most important part of any review is to talk about how fun it is. When this game works.... it works well. The general gameplay loop is you manage a small army while upgrading your mobile base, establishing world contacts, and managing resources all while random events and missions pop up with the urgency to complete them. In the actual missions, it's exactly what you'd expect from a XCOM game. There's some slight balance issue where certain classes are clearly better than others, and some classes are just flat out unusable in most cases/situations. Overall though, it's not exactly a broken mess with the said balance. You can pretty much play any way you want to and it will for the most part work, which is all I could really ask for from a tactical game like this.
-High replay value: Sometimes you will flat out miss out on some items, weapons, upgrades, characters, or facilities due to the time limit the game puts on you with the Avatar Project, especially on a blind run. In a way, knowing that there was something you missed out on or could have improved on gives you a reason to run through the game again sometime just to experience it. It accomplishes this by giving you a pretty good time the first time around, so naturally you start wondering just how fun or interesting alternatives could also be.
-Mod support: This is always a big plus. Sometimes games almost need mods to be fixed, fleshed out, or polished due to either development hell or incompetency from a developer/publisher. I don't think this game is one of those cases, where both on console and on PC I felt as if I didn't NEED mods to make the game enjoyable.
-Actual challenges: The game comes with multiple difficulty adjusters to make the game easier..... or if you're not a game journo you can make the game much harder. This is separate from the difficulty selection as well, so you can really customize how hard you want this game to actually be. The enemy variety is already decent and the WotC expansion adds even more to that as well.
-Pacing: As mentioned earlier in the review, the game constantly keeps you moving and will eventually force you to make decisions that can make or break your playthrough. It's not breakneck and it doesn't push you to fast to move on, but it won't let you sit there and grind everything to max before you start your first raid. It has plenty of things it wants you to do, and it will make sure you do it all but still allow you to enjoy doing it.

-Stability: This one is not nearly as big as an issue as it is on console. To make a long story short, on consoles this game crashing is 100% guaranteed to happen a few times due to the way it loads things, and console can't handle it as well. It's notoriously difficult to play through the game on consoles due to the terrible stability and occasional softlocking to go along with the threat of a game restart. PC thankfully has MUCH less issues but that is not the same as none of the issues. Snapped cameras not going back to neutral, loads taking too long, turns being ruined because a unit didn't actually move where you wanted it to, reloading a save moving units across the map instead of where they were last, etc. This game when it runs, runs very well. But that's only when it DOES run.
-2K's idea of mod support: For some unknown reason, 2K decided to turn the XCOM 2 launcher into an advertisement for Chimera Squad and Civ 6. How does this affect mods? This launcher broke mods entirely. XCOM 2 has this thing where you get annoying alerts and sometimes broken save games when mods that were active on a save file get loaded when said mods are not active. The devs complained and had 2K try and reverse this and presto, mods are working again... not really. Mods that worked with both base game and the WotC expansion do not work still, unless of course they are updated to do so. The main issue here is a lot of the best mods in the game's existence are dual-compatible mods. Well this is an older game with an issue that was created in June 2020. Most of these amazing mods? 90% of them right now are no longer being supported or haven't had an update in years. So, unless you use fanmade launchers like AML you just can't use a majority of the best mods this game has. That being said, AML is a great launcher that even shows compatibility issues with mods and is worth downloading in order to get the best current XCOM 2 experience. But this doesn't excuse the fact that what you are paying for was tampered by the publisher just to run an ad, and might one day update the game again to break AML for no reason.
-Price: This game is years old, has a $40 expansion so good that it pretty much makes the base game look like a joke, and has multiple DLCs for both the base and WotC expansion. Yet... despite the DLCs being priced more than a full game in total....... the base game needed for all these expansions is still normally $60. This game is well over 100 buckaroos for the full experience. The fact that you HAVE to wait for a sale to be able to experience this amazing game at a FAIR price (not even discounted, imo the sale price should be the NORMAL price) is not just a negative, but a hefty one at that.
-The Lost: This complaint is only really for the WotC expansion, but in all honesty you should be playing WotC over the base game anyways so I'm including that here. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ awful. Literal zombies that ruin the flow of the game and are just there to be annoying. I once had a standard 8 enemy early game mission take 2 hours due to the sheer amount of Lost added to the level, and it turned an 8 enemy mission into a 93 enemy mission. They can't even really hurt you and you get free turns when you kill 1 of them. They are a waste of time, they are unfun to fight against, and they have no tactical aspects to them. They feel so out of place. This game already had zombie-like enemies, so I fail to see how LITERAL zombies add anything to this game. In fact I'd say they subtract from the experience. Thankfully there exists a mod that quite literally removes them from the game, and that unironically made my WotC experience instantly better.
-Various QoL improvements that haven't been added: And, they wont ever be. Faster menus, faster overwatches, less nagging from npcs on the radio, better civilian AI, etc. There are a ton of QoL improvements just begging to be made that won't make the game any easier or harder, yet they won't ever come. Thank the lord for mods, absolutely look into QoL mods when playing XCOM 2.

All in all, an objectively good game. There's plenty to criticize and I probably did not get it all in this quick review. Most of the criticism seems to stem from either the launcher being absolutely terrible now (which is 100% justified) and the Lost in its entirety, or its more @scrubquotesx material where somehow having lots of content to revisit makes the game bad somehow or not being able to breeze through the game quickly due to the Tired feature making the game longer than 10 hours as I saw someone complain years ago. Again if lots of content and longer than a day's worth of gameplay bother you then dear lord stay away from most games, XCOM 2 included. Go play some unmodded Skyrim and maybe a pinch of SWSH if you got a Switch. That being said, the ACTUAL cons are real. Stability, poor mod support from 2K, QoL features lacking, and the price can seriously ruin the game to a lot of people, and those are the real issues that should be talked about imo. But dang man, game is longer than 10 hours get the pitchforks people.

This game shifted from being a 3rd installment into a Remake, then delayed over and over for what felt like forever, I finished my education by the time this game came out. I had every reason to believe this would have been a disaster, another Matt McMuscles "What Happened" video. I've seen so many games wind up like this. One look at my game review history and it's evident I keep running into them. I am so, so happy that after what feels like L after L in the gaming industry, that we finally have a game that was delayed to hell and back come out shining.

I cannot think of any major flaws with the game. I have a handful of minor complaints, but none of them stop this game from reaching a Kino status. By all means, this is THE way to play the first System Shock, which is something almost every remake ever made fails to achieve: the ability to "replace" the original.

There are some weird bugs, but nothing awful. I really mean it when I say "weird" because none of them on paper stop me from playing the game. Sometimes, at a recharge station, I'll clip into the floor and have to jump to get out. I don't have to reset or anything, but it is a bit annoying. Sometimes, loading a save makes the game run a bit less smooth and I cap at 60-ish FPS instead of my normal 144. Again, nothing that stops me from playing the game. Sometimes, I have to re-enable my Enviro Suit when reloading a save as well if I had it on when I made the save. This only mattered once, and as seasoned players can guess, yes... I found out this happens in Beta Grove LOL. I wish the sound effect for whacking someone with a pipe or wrench was a bit meatier, but once you get the plasma rapier this very much does not matter. I also wish the final boss had a bit more player feedback for when you actually deal damage to it, even if it is just a cinematic fight. That's it. That's every major flaw I can possibly think of about this game.

The game carries the same level of difficulty the original did, while allowing the game to be baby easy for people who cannot stomach classic game difficulty, so everyone wins. I lost an hour of progress in Research because I threw a grenade too close to me, and i hadn't saved in a while. This is how I found out that this game doesn't do autosave BS every 5 seconds to hold your hand, and what would have made me rage in almost any other game I instead found myself falling in love with the game because of it. UNLESS YOU PLAY ON THE EASIEST DIFFICULTY, it doesn't hold your hand and it feels like you have to explore every nook and cranny of Citadel Station, and you feel as if you are actively discovering and uncovering the plot and the importance of everything around you without the game directly telling you. It's a game where you cannot just run in a straight line to complete it, but I never once outright needed a guide to finish the game on a hard difficulty. The way the graphics were done is beautiful, and I wish more games went in the direction this remake did things. Everything is pixel crap and it doesn't try smoothing it for graphics made in 2013. No, it's all pixel garbage and it doesn't hide any of it, and instead uses creative lighting to make everything look beautiful when you're not pressing your face against it. It does a wonderful job looking both modern and old at the same time. It's just Kino.

You know how there are people who say they wish they could un-see or un-play a form of media so they could re-experience it again? That's what this remake is. As someone who has poured countless hours of his life and childhood into the original 2 games, I found myself falling in love all over again with System Shock thanks to this remake. Everything felt so familiar, yet so different in the right fields and only just enough to still maintain its identity. This is the gold standard for how video games should be remade. No random timeline ghosts. No using AI to upscale assets. No changing the story and re-organizing plot points around for zero reason. You make the game again by following the recipe, you just use modern fresh ingredients. This game is TESTIMONY that it is not impossible, and you as a customer should be demanding more video games are made like this and not the slop glop fed to you constantly.