It's a sci-fi FPS with heavy RPG and horror elements, and one of the first great FPS games that emphasized atmosphere, environment, backstory, and text. In many ways, it presaged some of the major changes in FPS games today: we now expect an FPS to have characters, to have lore (often delivered in the form of audio diaries), to have politics or social issues, to have RPG elements or progression, to have different playstyles.
Put it this way:
BioShock is basically System Shock 3, made by many of the same people but they didn't have access to the name anymore. (dead city, research system, diaries,
)
Dead Space started off as a System Shock game. (dead city, horror elements, crafting/upgrades as a proxy for RPG mechanics)
You can go back and forth on whether System Shock 2 is
better than those two games, in many ways the answer is yes, but the point is that they are direct descendants of it. And if those two games represent the kind of things you like in an FPS, and you can stomach older graphics and textures, I think you'll find a lot to love.
In something like a sale thread where not much discussion is going on it's common. Or in a breaking news thread where someone posts a reaction and leaves. But in something like the normal Steam threads, no, it's mostly a community of regulars.
