What I liked:
-The music and the soundtrack
-Some of the voice-acting
-The early game's art deco aesthetic (before it gets dull and monotonous)
-The idea of the plasmids and their theoretical gameplay appliances (and not their actual execution, which boils down to what made Skyrim's magic suck ass)
-The plasmid hand animations
-The underwater view of Rapture
What I did not like:
-Most of the voice-acting, especially that of clearly non-English speakers, who are clearly voiced by fluent English speakers and forced to put on exaggerated and ridiculous accents that make the voice acting almost laughable
-How the game dangles this gorgeous view of an underwater city while railroading you to undifferentiated hallways that are functionally the same and offer zero interesting visuals past the one-hour mark
-Bioshock's insistence on telling the bulk of its story through audio logs, which feature the aforementioned laughable voice-acting, but also make little to no narrative sense (why are so many people recording their thoughts out loud?? especially in what is obviously not their native tongue?? oh it's just for exposition? gotcha.)
-the way none of the guns or plasmids feel good, even for 2007 standards
-the way plasmids stop having useful gameplay applications past the one-hour mark
-the way the big daddies attack
-the stupid "gotcha!" plot twists
-the way most of what you're doing is just going from one end of the map to obtain an object, to another end of the map to obtain the second part of said object (because obviously)
-the map screen, which is genuinely one of the worst implementations of a map I have ever seen in a game maybe ever, even A Link to the Past got 3D maps right and that was in the '90s
-the implied queerness of Sander Cohen, which is so ridiculously unexplored that the inclusion of multiple mentions of his romantic interest in other men makes me think the writers were just too scared to make it overt
-this quote from one of the developers
"We also tried to hint at, without getting pornographic, Cohen’s conflict with his own sexuality. But people read that much dirtier than we intended. Go figure!"
-The music and the soundtrack
-Some of the voice-acting
-The early game's art deco aesthetic (before it gets dull and monotonous)
-The idea of the plasmids and their theoretical gameplay appliances (and not their actual execution, which boils down to what made Skyrim's magic suck ass)
-The plasmid hand animations
-The underwater view of Rapture
What I did not like:
-Most of the voice-acting, especially that of clearly non-English speakers, who are clearly voiced by fluent English speakers and forced to put on exaggerated and ridiculous accents that make the voice acting almost laughable
-How the game dangles this gorgeous view of an underwater city while railroading you to undifferentiated hallways that are functionally the same and offer zero interesting visuals past the one-hour mark
-Bioshock's insistence on telling the bulk of its story through audio logs, which feature the aforementioned laughable voice-acting, but also make little to no narrative sense (why are so many people recording their thoughts out loud?? especially in what is obviously not their native tongue?? oh it's just for exposition? gotcha.)
-the way none of the guns or plasmids feel good, even for 2007 standards
-the way plasmids stop having useful gameplay applications past the one-hour mark
-the way the big daddies attack
-the stupid "gotcha!" plot twists
-the way most of what you're doing is just going from one end of the map to obtain an object, to another end of the map to obtain the second part of said object (because obviously)
-the map screen, which is genuinely one of the worst implementations of a map I have ever seen in a game maybe ever, even A Link to the Past got 3D maps right and that was in the '90s
-the implied queerness of Sander Cohen, which is so ridiculously unexplored that the inclusion of multiple mentions of his romantic interest in other men makes me think the writers were just too scared to make it overt
-this quote from one of the developers
"We also tried to hint at, without getting pornographic, Cohen’s conflict with his own sexuality. But people read that much dirtier than we intended. Go figure!"