Bioshock is the most overrated game I've ever played. I got excited when it was announced because I was a big fan of System Shock 2 and was waiting for another game like it. But Bioshock isn't anything ilke System Shock 2 other than the fact that you still have someone yelling at you over a radio throughout the game and the story is in the form of badly voice-acted audio logs. It's really a lot like Doom 3, except with weapon upgrades and pretty water effects. And just like Doom 3, you start with a shitty pistol and then you find a shotgun which you use for about 90% of the game.
There's only three types of enemies: splicers, automated turrets, and the big daddies which aren't really that tough at all. In fact, nothing in this game is really that tough. Everything's all consoled out, dumbed down, all the complexity and difficulty is gone. All the scary moments from SS2 are gone. The whole game you are just running back and forth doing fetch quests for the voice in your head and killing the same enemies and doing the same Pipe Dream minigame to hack into stuff.
The RPG elements don't help the game stay afloat for long, about 3/4ths of the way through I was just plain sick of playing it but I pressed on to see where the story went. Unfortunately, the big plot twist near the end is painfully predictable, and both the good and bad endings to the game are nothing more than 20 second long pre-rendered cutscenes that are just plain retarded. The moral choice system is a completely overhyped element that doesn't really add anything to the game. It doesn't even affect the game in any way, all it does is determine which ending you get and both of them suck.
I will say, the graphics and the atmosphere are very well done. But it seems like the developers thought they did such a terrific job on designing their big gilded underwater city that they didn't need to give you anything to do in it other than fetch keys and flip switches and shoot monsters with a shotgun. The beautiful visuals just aren't enough to compensate for the dated, simplistic FPS formula and the RPG elements feel tacked on and almost unnecessary.
I paid 60 bucks for this mediocre repetitive piece of crap and I still regret it. Don't buy Bioshock. If you want to play it, rent it. Or better yet, ask a friend if you can borrow it; trust me, he won't mind.