good review, others will agrew with you, me i still think the gameplay is fun, and there are still many ways to kill enemies (just started laying mines than laying a dummy right on it O.o)

And ya the pipe thing gets a little boring, but it can be fun at the hardest setting

 That's just the Houdini Splicer default attack.

And yeah, I totally agree that there are many different ways to kill every enemy and that's why the Lasting Appeal and Gameplay section received as high as they did but the problem in this game is it's also the same basic 5 or so enemies.  Even with all the plasmids and tonics, there are only so many ways to kill these things that are fun and when you're doing that for 20 hours it gets old.  I love the fact they have only a few different classes of AI that perform beatifully rather than 20 poor performing classes but since this game really doesn't many set encounters everything just feels exactly the same.  With only a few different enemy classes this begins to get bad and just bogs down the really good gameplay they have going.

 Still though, as you said, the gameplay is fun.  Just as always the case with something new and innovative there's always risk involved.  The risk in a game with no set encounters with a few basic enemy AI is that you will quickly grow tired of these things.  In a game like Left4Dead this works because the game is short and very fast paced, Bioshock is long and has a very slow pacing which doesn't work great. 

All that being said though the game is fun and definitely worth a play just to see how you play through it and then see how your friends do things.  Don't remember if I mentioned this in my review but I thought I had the perfect solution for taking care of Big Daddies.  I would shock them with my shocker plasmid or shocking shells, shoot them with armor piercing shells until they got close, and then proceede to murder them with my wrench.  I was able to kill big Daddies with little trouble this way and I thought this was pretty much the best way.  This even worked better for me than trying to set traps (though Enrage always helped).  Yesterday I talked to one of my friends and he told me how he takes care of Big Daddies: lay two electric bolt traps, do anything to piss the Big Daddy off, and then let the big Daddy kill itself on the two electric bolt traps. 

This game does really well at letting emergent gameplay come through which is cool and really hard to do well and that's why everyone should give it a try (gameplay wise).

I'm not as far as you into the game, but I'm loving it so far. The Demo was a disappointment to me, but playing the actual game has been highly enjoyable for myself so far.

I don't know whether you just ruined it for yoruself by just 'going through the motions' but I like to play around and experiment with the AI and the different weapons, I like to put myself in the position where I have to battle for my power and battle to get through inch by inch...

Which difficulty are you playing on?

I'm playing on Hard mode, and the splicers move around so much and the Big Daddy's are incredibly hard to take down... I can have full First Aid and Full Plasmids and by the time i've taken down a single Big Daddy i'll have one first aid pack and maybe 3 or 4 plasmids left, and pretty much all of my good ammo is gone... AND i'm choosing to save the girls as well, I hope that isn't a bad decision, I'm probably not going to have full plasmid slots by the end of the game I expect.

I always play FPS on hard because anything less always feel weak, but its the only genre I play on hard... simply for the fact that the enemies are usually faster smarter and harder and that's the challenge of an FPS.

I'm playing on PC as well... FPS on hard on a console? No chance.

I'm not as far as you in the game so far, but I'm really enjoyed every moment of it so far... so much so that it is staving off my craving for Metroid Prime 3 at the moment.

@OriGin
I'm playing on whatever the default is (normal I believe) and it's not that bad. I do play around a lot with the AI but like I said, after 20 hours it just gets old. I'm probably going to play again on hard and do things a little differently but I imagine the gameplay is still going to get stale.

Also, I got my Bioshock fixed!

I first tried my original game and same ol' same ol'. I expected it but tried for grins and giggles. I tried my buddies copy and I froze in the same exact spot. I was ready to take my disc (not my friends) and snap it in half but then I remembered there was also a trick about clearing the cache. I tried that and it worked! so woohoo!

Anyways, I played the game to the ending and I'm disappointed. Why? Well I don't want to spoil too much but there was another damn fetch quest. I HATE FETCH QUESTS. I don't think I can think of a fun fetch quest in the history of video games. These things are usually reserved for the first hours of MMO's but for some odd reason the developers saw fit to bring this through all the way to end of the game. I also wasn't a fan of the part after the fetch quest (I won't say anything specific but if you've played the game you know the part I'm talking about-- like it or not). I didn't particularly like it mainly because I kept losing the subject which just caused all sorts of havoc and I was getting frame rate issues.

Of course after that the boss fight more than made up for it. It was fast, it was crazy, there's shit going on everywhere, and it wasn't easy. All in all it was a really fun fight. Sadly though, the ending blew chunks. It was a good idea and a neat concept for the ending (I got the harvester ending-- there are two endings) but it just wasn't pulled off very well. I actually thought at the end of the..er...ending my game froze again and reset. I had to go on Youtube and just make sure that I saw the whole thing because it was just a weird ending. Like I said, it was a good idea just wasn't pulled off very well.

And to tell you the truth, if I had done this review after I did this last small section I probably would have rated the gameplay section slightly lower, 8.5 or 8.6. The boss fight was great but I just hated the two sections leading up to it.

It's actually a little odd that Bioshock and Metroid Prime 3 put fetch quests at the very end of their games.

Fetch quests do suck, but to me in Bioshock it just gives me a reason to explore new areas... I just went into the Market area looking for that water and essence crap...

Loving it so far, starting to develop a nice tactic to take down Big Daddies... they don't seem so hard any more, especially once you can start modifying your weapons and creating different ammo...

Big Daddies become the easiest enemy in the game after getting the crossbow.

Yes but none the less they are using plasmids.

Also gameplay is really based on opinion, im 15 hours into it and still having almost as much fun as before. I mean as you go through the game, you get more and more ways to kill them. I can see how you got bored with only having a few different enemies, but the fact that they do not always act the same and so many ways to kill them it just makes it fun

 I will completely agree that gameplay is based on opinion, no argument there.  you may be enjoying yourself 15 hours in, but I just couldn't stand killing the same splicers over and over in the exact same situation.  Even with different tonics and plasmids it was always still the same for me.

As for the plasmids, the Houdini Splicers use plasmids and that's it (and Houdini splicers aren't even that common).  I saw one non-boss use ice and the rest just used fire and that's it.  Except for Houdini Splicers, the general splicer attack is to just blindly run at you and run away when hurt or hurting.  When there are almost no set encounters it just kind of gets dull after a while.  Even with Houdini Splicers their basic attack is warp, shoot fire, run as soon as you make an attack (even swing the wrench on the other side of the room).

Sorry to dig up an old post but I had to bring this up for anyone that hasn't gotten to this point or hasn't picked up the game because this is a pretty big flaw you should be aware of before playing that point and I just completely forgot to put it in my review. It's a semi spoiler but will be one you're happy to hear.

Before you go in to see the wharf master you have to send him your weapons in one of the tubes because he doesn't want you attacking him. Well before getting to that point silly me wanted to explore all the parts of the level I could first. I killed everything, searches everything, picked up the extra ammo laying around, and bought myself full to most of every ammo I was less 2/3 full on. By the time I got to the wharf master I was pretty much full on every piece of ammo.

So after the whole wharf master event you get your weapons back in another tube but there's a catch: you don't get your ammo back. You just get the default starting ammo for each weapon and that is fucking it. So all that time I spent getting my ammo near full in anticipation of a big fight was wasted and I couldn't go back to those areas where ammo was laying around because I already picked it up and I had already spent a good deal of money on ammo getting prepared. Way to fuck me over there Bioshock.

If I would have remembered this while writing the review the game would have probably been docked at least .1 points in gameplay for that because it just pisses me off. Not just because I lost A LOT of ammo, but because it's just pure lazy. It happened because some fuckwit level designer decided to be lazy at that point and just take away all the weapons and then give the default weapons back later because actually storing the ammo info would have been just a little more work.

-edit-
I suppose one good thing did come from it though-- it made me start using my wrench.