BioShock

Well I was disappointed with Bioshock. Everyone makes such a big deal out of it, how it's one of the best games ever and bla bla, but I just didn't get into it. Do I think it's a quality game? Yeah. But no matter how much quality there is in a game, if it doesn't hook me, it doesn't!

I think one of the big failures of the game is that it didn't make me interested in its world. I just was never that curious about rapture and what had happened there. I had previously read somewhere some bits and pieces of the story, like I knew that there had been a civil war and that most of the people living in rapture had gone crazy, so I had sort of developed the story in my head BEFORE it was revealed to me, and well, I wasn't too far off the mark. Some of the revelations were surprising, and pretty fun, but all in all there were not enough of them, especially in a game this long. So the story was a big failure. Also, like I just mentioned, the game is quite long, and the story felt extremely stretched out, and in some parts of the game there wasn't very much story at all.

Secondly, the gameplay is average. Now, the thing with me is that I'm not really a cerebral player, I tend to be pretty brain dead when I play my games and I'll usually play every game in the most simple and straightforward way that I can. For example, in WRPG's I pretty much always pick a fighter/warrior/soldier as my main character. They're the simplest to play, no spells to worry about, you just need to think about killing your opponents. And in JRPGs who allow you to choose your own classes, my party is always very heavily skewed towards melee attackers. Once again, simpler to play. And if you give me a game in which there are a boatload of imaginative powers at my disposal, but I also have a few guns that I can choose to use if I want too...you can be sure that my main focus will be on the guns. This is the case with bioshock. The problem here is that historically, first person shooter/RPG hybrids don't have good gunplay, like in System Shock 2, and here the same problem applies. The guns just aren't very fun to use. I'm sure that the game would be a lot more fun for the wannabe sorcerers out there, shooting fire out of their fingertips and lighting everyone in the game up, you can see a lot of spots in the game that just begs you to use one of your plasmids at that particular moment, such as enemies lying in pools of water (lightning), or barrels of explosive lying in oil (fire plasmid). But I just kept to my guns and shot everyone. And it was kind of boring. Sometimes I'm my own worst enemy I know. Stat based gun shooting just doesn't work well. In the early game the guns feel kind of good, it only takes a couple of shots to kill an enemy so they feel appropriately powerful, but in the late game, even with all of your enemies researched, the guns feel extremely flat and underpowered. You have to empty almost 2 full machine gun clips in ONE splicer (not all splicers though, only the occasional somehow overpowered splicer that you come across) to kill him in the late game, even with +++ damage due to research! That's pretty lame. Overall, for the way I played the game, the gameplay was very underwhelming.

There isn't much music I can remember, except for the main theme and some old timey sounding music. I suppose that's all part of the atmosphere in the game.

So all in all, would I recommend this game? Personally I wouldn't, however depending on the type of player that you are you might enjoy it more than I did. Research it a bit before buying and you'll know!