BioShock has set an all new low standards for me in terms of gaming. For one thing, the developer’s lied their pants off to get this game sold. I remembered the time when they said this game would be absolutely non-linear ... in actual fact, not only is the game very linear, the actions are very repetitive!
The Unreal Engine used was bad, it made the engine used in Clive Barker’s Jericho feel like a dream when judging it in terms of ergonomics and gameplay. No matter how much you change or modify a game with Unreal Technology ... it’ll still always feel like Unreal.
I kept yelling out BS!!! Over 95% of the time I was playing. There were only three times I wasn’t feeling grumpy when playing this game, the first was the movie intro to the game, the second was when you encounter a guy named Ryan and third is at the end when you encounter a guy named Fontaine. That all adds up to about 5 mins of story. In other words, the story is crap. There are no surprises like most people say there is. A lot of people will say something like when you’ve done 3/4 or 80% of the game it gets interesting and you’ll start to understand what’s going on. Well I hate to be the bearer of bad news ... but that point will get to you in ONLY a few seconds in a rather stupid cut scene. That’s called a plot twist! There’s nothing special about that if you think about it. Here, I’ll invent a plot twist: You people may not have realised, but I’m actually a CIA agent posting this review on BioShock from Langley!
... of course no I’m not a CIA agent ... I’m just an young adult that studies Game Development at University. That’s what you call a plot twist and that’s about as exciting as the one in BioShock is!
To add to the lameness you get no rewards at the end when you’ve passed the game. Not even any bonus extras on how the developers made the game ... etc. So if I were you, I’d play it on easy ... if I could turn back time, I surely would have done that! In fact I was going to play it with cheats ... but for some reason they didn’t work ... dodgy huh?
The graphics are sickening, everything just looks the same. Even jacking up everything on highest and 1920x1200 resolution with my ATi HD3870 512MB graphics card did little to help me feel better when playing BioShock ... let alone the Dell 24” LCD monitor I was playing on !!! The audio is worst! In every regards! I was left bedazzled with fine tuning the SFX to low ... but could still hear clatter from machines that overpowered the barely audible voices that you get on your walkie-talkie (Voice FX).
I really don’t know what else to say about this game, because there isn’t much. I mean all you have are these special powers (called plasmids) that can do things like freeze enemies or set them on fire ... and then you have these range of really crappy weapons that don’t feel nice to use (believe me I used the wrench over 75% of the time in the game). So obviously you use these combo’s to stop enemies (called Splicers) from shooting or beating you to death while you run around this underwater maze (city called Rapture) finding pieces of cheese that’ll help you progress to the next maze so you can find a new set of cheeses (objectives).
There are pretty much no friendlies that you’ll encounter. All you meet are weird female folk that’ll try and beat you with a steel pipe (I’m pretty sure feminist activists would have something to complain about here) and annoying male counter parts that actually seem weaker than the female counterpart.
Did I mention that it is no fun to kill your enemies? BioShock is somewhat half RPG. You need to take ridiculous photo’s with a camera of your enemies just so that you can kill them more easily. I think I ended up taking about 100 photos before doing some serious damage with my wrench.
You can “Hack” these machines ... and ... well ... let’s just say after your first few hacks, you’ll just want to use the Auto-Hack throughout the rest of the game. As another tip, screw hacking machines to enable them to fight on your side because you’ll be wasting time. Once you’ve cleared the area you won’t be going back again ...
In conclusion I gotta say that BioShock is just not quite right. I’m even amazed how I killed the last boss in one go without dying! I think that’s a first as I usually die once when fighting any bosses in any games!
This game really blows no matter what the critics say! Don’t waste your time with BioShock. I’d even recommend anyone playing the also painful Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth before BioShock. Lastly ... how people compared this game to System Shock 2 ... I have NO @#%^&!G IDEA!
P.S: I had no problems with the patch and didn't notice any differences.
My Score: 37%
