Bioshock
Great art direction, good graphics, pretty decent storyline
bland, uninspired gameplay. My experience was colored by playing it on hard mode, which essentially meant that I ran out of ammo all the time and just had to let myself respawn at the vita-chamber and spam magic until everything was dead, but even if I had had ammo the guns weren’t very fun to use. I have a feeling that it was better on easy or medium, but nonetheless shallow. About halfway through the game I started running out of ammunition all the time and just decided to stop saving and start using the automatic respawn machine (called the vitachamber ingame). While the vitachamber reduced my use of quicksave/reload, ultimately I was having more fun when I was using quicksaves and actually conserving ammo. After the initial “new game” headrush I quickly became bored with the gunplay, which was too inaccurate for skill to take much account. The use of powers to lay traps wasn’t enough of a focus and most of the abilities were generic “do damage” types. Hacking was quite fun and an actually decent use of minigames, but didn’t seem to be that important to overall progress. The character system was annoyingly mysterious; there was no way to tell what powers were good or what expansion slots to pick. Waiting for Big Daddies to have little sisters around was also quite annoying, not to mention that on hard mode they take your entire inventory and then some to kill.
What really undoes Bioshock is not so much its weak gameplay as the final boss and ending. All along the binary moral choice has been weighted to reward dogooders more than evildoers (Raph Koster, anyone?). But the final decision is not yours; you must kill your enemy rather than spare him or rule at his side. Why make a game about moral choice and then take it all away at the most significant decision?
7/10, just for the art and story (up until the final battle)
April 7th, 2009 at 1:26 am
I’ve never given this a try, but I think it’s about time I do.