Bioshock

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It certainly seems like I won’t be writing any reflections on non-mainstream titles for the rest of the year. Lack of time, I suppose, and there are a lot of major releases that you don’t want to miss out on. I’m not even going to try being original here, I’ll even copy the general idea of the review from Zero Punctuation.

So I’ll get the important things out of the way first, Bioshock is most likely one of the best – if not the best – single-player game for the 360 and there’s no reason whatsoever not to get it. It is also, not surprisingly, overhyped.

I never played either of the System Shock games so I’m not qualified to make a comparison between spiritual predecessors, my reasons for thinking Bioshock is overhyped are strictly based in the gameplay world. Bioshock does presentation – and by extension, atmosphere – incredibly well both aesthetically and technically, and the gameplay is good enough to not destroy that. The problem for me is that the gameplay is hardly perfect. The Death system feels silly at times, I found myself struggling with the controls on several occasions, some parts felt really unbalanced, the “hacking”-puzzles were kinda poorly designed and not properly implemented (since it created unsolvable puzzles sometimes) and the internal economy felt a little skewed since I had to leave ammo and money on the ground because I carried to much for the better part of the game.

That is not to say that any of these issues is severe and more than a minor annoyance every now and then. Many other games have similar issues, but that’s just the thing. The actual gameplay in Bioshock doesn’t feel particulary interesting or original, it’s good but not spectacular. It just seems that a lot of reviewers (at least the early-adopting online reviewers) are directly translating “great atmosphere = great gameplay”, which to me is a major step back because that would make the ultimate game a movie.

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Posted on Nov 12/07 by Saint and filed under Reflections | No Comments »