I finished my first playthrough tonight, played it on hard and stuck to human abilities exclusively and I am just so impressed with this game. This game has filled me with so much hope for what games like this can be going forward, something that I thought would be a lost cause as BioShock, Eidos-Montreal's Deus Ex, and even Arkane's Dishonored have left me feeling like the experience was a compromise.
And while I've always respected System Shock 2's design tenets, I never actually liked System Shock 2 all that much itself with its samey corridors, and hard slant towards survival horror. This game is the System Shock I always wanted.
Between the music, the art, the area designs, the atmosphere, the mobility I had, the smart means the game allowed all the junk you collect to actually amount to something, the encounter designs, being able to spec out your character how you want, the options I found available to me, and actually having secondary characters that I'll snoop e-mails and audio logs about and then care and have an actual grasp on their personalities (this is perhaps a first for me).
This game is a special one for me, and it's something I wrote off very early on as I just expected it to be another BioShock, but I am so happy with how wrong I was. I did run into a handful of glitches, lost an inventory item or two, had weird NPC interactions, even had a point where a slot on my weapon hotbar just stopped working and I could no longer use the weapon attached to it regardless of what I did (EMP grenades, so thankfully nothing too important), but even still it's been easy to look aside for the kind of experience I got out of it.
I plan on diving back in and trying a run without neuromods.