Bioshock manages to stand out as an excellent shooter, but is not without some problems. Its not System Shock.
Bioshock is supposed to be an FPSRPG, in which you must select what you are good at, and in so doing, will make yourself not so good at other things. This is generally how a balanced system works. Bioshock is not a balanced system. Bioshock gives you the ability to use every weapon, upgrade everything, be a hacker either way, and all that other bullsh*t you had to level up to do in SS2. One would also think that the powers (or plasmids) would also have a similarly balanced system, and they do, you have enough ADAM to be awesome at pretty much anything you want.
This isn't to say that the powers aren't fun to use, the powers are highly entertaining, its just that they really don't do very much. When I entered this game, I was under the impression that my ability to shoot lightning from my hand would do a little more than make an enemy itchy for a while. The bee hand was kind of cool, but the one where the Big Daddy becomes your friend was just ridiculously overpowering.
Bioshock's premise would have you believe that this is a survival shooter, where ammo and health kits are sparse, but you collect enough money to fund a small company, and you trip over those annoying clown shops like they were f*cking mice. The premise might also lead you to believe that Bioshock could be horror, which leads me to my next point.
Difficulty, this is something that games can often screw the pooch on. Unfortunately the Bioshock team's greatest flaw was this. Bioshock is almost unbearably easy. Since there are vitachamber's pretty close to wherever you are, and there's no penalty for using them, they make absolutely everything into a nice walk in the cakey-gooey park. As a result, Bioshock's potential to be truly brilliant survival horror is lost because there's no way you WON'T survive, and the difficulty make even the scariest part look like fun and teddybears.
I have to say that Bioshock LOOKS awesome, the team of people that did the water need to be congratulated models are really quite good. The problem is that one can't really tell how good a lot of the graphics are because there's no way to LOOK at a lot of them. The game is so f*cking gaping with giant spots of dark spots that it may well have been drawn by Frank Miller. I realize that it's supposed to be kind of a horror element, and that its reasonable at that depth, with no power, but come on, gimme a flashlight or something.
The only other problem I have is with some of the concepts. Bioshock is, at heart, a Steampunk game. And this is a little strange since there are cameras and auto-turrets which can apparently recognize your DNA signature which they seem to have already discovered despite the game's time period. I also don't really know how adding some f*cking gears onto your shotgun is going to make it shoot better, or how anything other than a giant f*cking shield is going to prevent your grenades from damaging you.
As for my usual main concern, the plot, it doesn't need mention. Its not bad, but its not good. It sits in some limbo of mediocrity. It doesn't help that despite being an "FPSRPG" your character is an emotionlessm, faceless mute who appears to do very little but shoot things and follow orders while occasionally stopping to listen to some old tape-recordings.
This all is not to say that I disliked the game, because as you can see I gave it an 8.0. The game is really a quite excellent shooter (not an RPG), and has some really great little elements added into it, but the difficulty in particular mars this games stellar potential.