I want System Shock 3, not this!
And then I heard the name. "Bioshock," okay so it isn't System Shock, but it was still a shock, and shocks are awesome! I didn't wait for the price to go down, I NEEDED to play this, to go back to my roots when I first got sucked into gaming.
I gotta say, it's a beautiful setting. I loved the aqua blue color offsetting the destroyed facility, I love the creepy hallways, the Bigdaddy's walking past your window. At first Bioshock was all I expected of it.
Then I started to notice something, the audio tapes I was picking up were generally uninteresting. "Blah blah blah, I hate this bleeping place bleeping Andrew Ryan blah blah blah..." In System Shock 2 the characters, although you barely ever saw one, had substance to them. You knew them, and you wept when they died. (alright, so I didn't weep, but I did feel bad!) In Bioshock, you don't really care who's who.
Admittedly I didn't enjoy the weapons, and killing splicers was fun right up to the end. The problem came when the world of Bioshock just didn't affect me anymore. The hallways just seemed empty, the bars and buildings seemed bland. And then it struck me...
There was no sense of urgency, everything in this game is underpowered! In System Shock 2, if you heard something in the background and you couldn't see it, you looked around frantically, because ever battle meant that you were using supplies that were rarely found! In Bioshock if you heard a noise, you walked around until you found the source and shot at it. There was always ammo, always health to be found. Even against the Big Daddy's I was practically invincible! I didn't die once. And on top of it all, Andrew Ryan is one of the worst boss fights you'll ever have. He's simple, quick, and again underpowered.
Did I enjoy it? Yeah, to an extent. I beat it, taking long breaks to play other games when it got dull, and then going back just to pick up the next tape recording only to find out that it was as dull as the last one. All in all it is beautiful, in the end it wasn't a dullness to the graphics, but a dullness to the supplies. There was too much working for you, too little against you.