I finished
Bioshock tonight.
It's excellent. Bravo to those who made it.
(Also, first FPS I've played much at all, let alone finished, on console. I'm more of a PC guy. But it was excellent nonetheless.)
You may now make spoiler-related comments should you be so inclined. :)
=== SPOILERS CONTAINED WITHIN ===
Bioshock was pretty great and a fun time. But I wouldn't give it 10/10 (so the 9.9 rankings I've seen seem off to me).
It didn't have as much RPG elements as I would have liked. Yes, there was some "character design", but that was -mostly- a consideration about which weapons you want. And while there were some differences between weapons (and I'm counting most plasmids as weapons here), it was more a matter of having diversity or guessing what enemies you'd be facing and choosing the Best Weapon appropriately.
The beginning of the game was good for incorporating a tutorial, but kind of bad for the excessively linear gameplay. There's virtually no choices to make for the first few hours (unless you want to be perverse and try killing things with the wrench, but that's not really a meaningful choice presented to the player). Normally you get -some- choices before the game even starts, often significant ones. I'm sure this part is pretty boring for repeated plays. This is going to be true for many games, but this is a further distancing from any kind of RPG elements of character design.
The middle of the game, especially the early middle, is pretty great. I liked the picture taking aspect of the game just for throwing in some variety. The different enemies are quite good.
The climax of the game, with the Big Reveal, is well done. Right up until that point everything rocks.
But after that (maybe even before that, but the plot pulls things along for a bit), it gets kind of repetitive. Getting the crossbow isn't all that exciting when you get it (and I played "stealthy" almost as much as possible). There are no new plasmids except for stronger versions of your old ones.
The final fight is anticlimactic. On a lark I tried it a second time and was able to pull it off with one weapon shooting at one enemy. A big, imposing enemy with some interesting art and animations that I hardly noticed.
Most enemies aren't that interesting. Spider Splicers, while not unique, are at least kind of cool and keep you on your toes. And the final third of the game introduces zero new enemies. I really wanted to see something new. This might be an impossible task, but I think enemy variation was frontloaded far too much. I'm sure that helped with their review scores, though, since most reviewers probably didn't finish the game.
While it makes it easier on the player's brain, it's a lot less interesting with the four different plasmid & gene groupings. There wasn't a -huge- choice between choosing to be worse at combat to be a better hacker. Perhaps it was just how I was playing, but I ended up getting a lot of free options, which meant I always wanted to buy more slots just to use what I had (that was -sort- of a choice, but an easy one), which meant I always had a whole bunch of hacking bonuses no matter what, even if I never got more from the Gatherer's Garden.
It would probably be overwhelming to have up to 24 generic slots, but I would have liked more choosing between the different four areas. It felt ridiculously right to just buy more slots of things you already could support (because you found them or got them from taking pictures).
The combat plasmids were also pretty redundant with the weapons. Once you had most of the weapons (the crossbow really did nothing new), you could produce fire, ice, and electricity in a number of ways, so all of those combat plasmids weren't especially exciting. Frankly, the plasmid I enjoyed most was Telekinesis. I tried using the Cyclones to lay traps, but they either weren't very effective or I was lousy with them -- I often laid them off the line by a small amount and the enemy who was wandering around just missed them. Maybe I'm incompetent, but it meant that the one other option that seemed interesting just wasn't working out for me.
Overall, I enjoyed it greatly. But the late game really needed some more unique content (I was absolutely plowing through some areas late in the game without paying much attention), or they needed to shorten the already not-long game (which probably would have been fine). And I personally really wanted more RPG.
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The other thing that felt missing was interaction with what normality was left in Rapture. There's clearly a few people with a shred of sanity left, and you're isolated from them in a way that feels artificial.
As far as 10/10 review scores, I wouldn't rate it 10 of 10, but I would rate it as highly as other games that get ridiculously high nonsensical review scores.
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