You really honestly aren't missing much.
The combat is mediocre throughout - sure, there are tons of neat tools at your disposal, but actually using them isn't really enjoyable. Maybe the first time, just out of inquisitiveness, but you'll quickly find a combination that works for you, and thanks to the almost unlimited supply of money, ammo an health (even at hard) you'll be able to use that combination over and over. For just about the entire game.
I went with electrobolt/wrench for most of the game like everyone else, and decoy dummy/grenade launcher for big daddies. The whole emergentness of it actually shot itself in the foot. In most other shooters, there are lots of very specialised weapons with very specialised roles, and you ideally have to use that weapon in that situation. So you'll find yourself using a large variety of weapons. But not really in Bioshock,The game catered to myown desire for effective and efficient combat by making particular weapons/abilities simply more useful than others.
And as a roleplaying game, if you can even call it that, it's just bad. You can build a character to a moderate extent, but it's far more like Dark Messiah than Deus Ex. I do like the way they got away from the whole stats thing by giving players clearly understandable additional abilities (like an electricity shield or the ability to turn invisible when idle), but these just don't have any real impact on gameplay. Could literally remove them and it would not really change much. Any feature that can be removed without impacting the game is either pointless filler or a fun novelty - gene tonics are somewhere inbetween. Oh, and the moral choice has no real impact on the game at all, and there's enough Adam to buy just about everything.
Storywise, it's awesomeif you haven't played System Shock 2. If you have, there's utterly no reason to really pay attention to the story. The adio logs are terrible on the whole, there's utterly no sense of the horrors the people of Rapture faced, it's all very grey-coloured. Some of the characters are okay - Sander Cohen is one of my favourite insane computer game characters ever, but the rest are very forgettable, really.
Atmosphere is meh. There's utterly no horror (sacrificed for the emergent gunplay) and frankly there's almost never a sense of personal danger unless you try to have a fist fight with a Big Daddy.
It's not that it's a bad game - in fact, I think it's great, it's just that it's 10% of what it might have been. It's funny, I'm always looking for innovation and new ways of doing things, but with Bioshock I would've been happier if Irrational had just copied to the letter System Shock 2 from '98. Better atmosphere, horror masterpiece, better character development - I'd even say better combat, thanks to support mechanics like atmosphere and horror.
Yeah, though - you aren't missing much, and if you ever played Shock 2, you aren't missing anything. And if you never did get to play SS2, try and find a copy. It's a much better game.
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