One of the most brilliant worlds ever created for a game, wasted on some of the most flaccid, lifeless combat I've encountered in a AAA shooter. There are so many genuinely great ideas in this game but the combat lacks any feeling of weight or impact. Guns feel like toys and melee feels like slapping enemies with a pool noodle. Plasmids could have been great but most of them are just things you shoot at enemies so they're hardly different from guns in practice.
It broke my heart a little to be so unenthused by Bioshock when it's one of the most highly acclaimed games ever, and everything outside of the gameplay is so rich and captivating, but when most of the game is shooting everything in your path, the way the guns feel will make or break the game. And Bioshock's shooting is just too limp and dull for me to enjoy. I also found its immersive sim leanings to be massively overstated by players. I will give it credit for having some ways to creatively strategize and interact with the environment, but it felt more like a mildly immersive sim-inspired shooter. It's generally very linear and the only way to progress is by shooting things with guns or shooting things with plasmids.
But I can see how it was an injection of boldness and ambition into the gaming landscape of 2007, so I can appreciate the impact it had at the time. Maybe it's one of those things where I had to be there to understand. That era was also a dearth of immersive sims, which didn't really pick up again until the early 2010s, so Bioshock's ideas were probably quite fresh compared to the other shooters of the time.
It broke my heart a little to be so unenthused by Bioshock when it's one of the most highly acclaimed games ever, and everything outside of the gameplay is so rich and captivating, but when most of the game is shooting everything in your path, the way the guns feel will make or break the game. And Bioshock's shooting is just too limp and dull for me to enjoy. I also found its immersive sim leanings to be massively overstated by players. I will give it credit for having some ways to creatively strategize and interact with the environment, but it felt more like a mildly immersive sim-inspired shooter. It's generally very linear and the only way to progress is by shooting things with guns or shooting things with plasmids.
But I can see how it was an injection of boldness and ambition into the gaming landscape of 2007, so I can appreciate the impact it had at the time. Maybe it's one of those things where I had to be there to understand. That era was also a dearth of immersive sims, which didn't really pick up again until the early 2010s, so Bioshock's ideas were probably quite fresh compared to the other shooters of the time.