I thought it was a decent game, but there are games which came before it which did everything it did and more...and better, namely their previous work, Deus Ex, which had an awesome inventory system and REAL decisions which effect how the game ends.
Bioshock is a watered-down FPS RPG for the console crowd because they were judged to be too stupid by Take Two to handle a REAL FPS RPG. The game is ridiculously easy, even on the hardest setting.
And once again, the praise this game receives while vastly superior experiences go unnoticed makes me want to kick someone in the teeth.
I'm not trying to be an asshole, but really, people: play Deus Ex from start to finish, then come back and talk about how great Bioshock is.
Let me toss out an example of where they differ and why Deus Ex was so vastly superior...
In Bioshock, even by saving all of the little sisters, you were rewarded with enough adam to get pretty much all of the upgrades, and not that it mattered, either, since the upgrades didn't even affect your playstyle that greatly. So you have all the plasmids you want, having no resulting weaknesses? Too fucking easy.
In contrast, Deus Ex faced the player with finding upgrades which did one of two things, but you only got to chose one. One upgrade allowed you to either upgrade your melee attacks or lift heavier objects, meaning that you could carry large crates into an area and use them as cover.
The point is, you had to actually PICK a play-style and stick with it. Bioshock allows you to use any playstyle you want and allows you to swap plasmids at any time, meaning you can pretty much "reclass" any time you want, which is a terrible idea because it doesn't equate "changing stats" when you're basically just changing weapons.
Let me give you an idea of what Bioshock's upgrade system COULD'VE been, had the Take Two execs not ordered it to be dumbed down:
Imagine you find the "element" plasmid, which allows you to acquire either a fire attack OR an ice attack, but not both. Then, as you upgrade their power (as you did in Deus Ex), each attack would acquire new traits, like an upgraded fire attack would cause enemies killed by it to explode and set nearby enemies on fire, and the upgraded Ice attack would allow you to shatter frozen enemies with your wrench, or allow you to lift them with the telekenetic plasmid and fling them into walls to shatter or fling them into other enemies.
Imagine an "engineering" plasmid which allowed you to upgrade the drone robots you found and enhance them, making them deadlier, and the highest engineering upgrade would allow you to build a robot out of raw materials at any time and maybe even control it remotely.
These are the kinds of decisions you're supposed to MAKE in a FPS RPG, decisions which DRAMATICALLY alter your play-style.
Bioshock is the equivalent of having 500 talent points to spend in WoW, allowing you to have access to all three talent trees and all included talents. The game was just too watered down and as such paled in comparison to the real definition of the genre.
"I mean, c'mon, Viva Pinata, a game with massive marketing, didn't sell worth a damn to the "sophisticated" 360 audience, despite near-universal praise--is that a sign that 360 owners are a bunch of casual ignoramuses that can't get their heads around a 'gardening' sim? Of course not. So let's please stop trying to micro-analyze one game out of hundreds and using it as the poster child for why good, non-1st party, games can't sell on Wii. (Everyone frequenting this site knows this is nonsense, and yet some of you just can't let it go because it's the only scab you have left to pick at after all your other "Wii will phail1!!1" straw men arguments have been put to the torch.)" - exindguy on Boom Blocks
