Bioshock fucking sucks.
First, the combat sucks. It's the same guns that appear in every shooter ever made: pistol, shotgun, grenade/rocket launcher, machine gun, melee weapon. And it never gives you enough ammo for any of them.
"But that's the point! It's supposed to create tension!"
Yea, but it ends up just creating frustration. Limiting your resources in order to create tension has been done and done well, for instance, by games like Marathon, FTL, Zelda II, and Dark Souls. But the problem is that when you die in Bioshock it doesn't return you to a checkpoint, it warps you to one of those Vita-Chambers, and you don't get any ammo back. More irritatingly, they also charge you a fee, so not only do you not get your ammo back but you don't have any money to buy more ammo. And more irritatingly still, it respawns the enemies that you used up your ammo failing to kill in the first place, so you're even more stuck. So you've used up your ammo, your first aid kits, the enemies are back, and you have no money to replace all your resources.
Though, maybe that's the point. Bioshock is supposed to be based, loosely, on themes related to libertarian extremism. If we leave everything to market forces with no regulation or social safety net, then one mistake has you in poverty with no ability to get back up. The game's mechanics tell you that you should pull yourself back up by your bootstraps, and teases you with the fact that you can't and that getting unstuck will be more about luck than anything else, a fitting metaphor for criticisms of Laissez-Faire economics.
Or maybe it's lazily designed. I'm more inclined to believe this, because...
It's disorienting, in a way that suggests that no one bothered to test it. First, there's the point of your character being like 3 feet tall, which really throws me off. Literally 5 minutes of play testing would have revealed this problem. But it's not just that. The areas are too easy to get lost in, and opening the map isn't seamless. The dark environment made things even more difficult, failing to create any atmosphere or tension and instead succeeding only in obscuring any navigational landmarks you could use. Again, other games have done this well. I return to the example of Marathon, which had an active map that you could still move while looking at. Metroid Prime frequently had dark areas and these were made to work superbly with the gameplay mechanics (where the dark was in many cases an obstacle that you had to find the X-ray and thermal visors to see through). But while Metroid Prime and Bioshock were similar in their approaches to how they carried you through a semi-open world by directing you towards objectives, Metroid Prime made very sure not to waste any space, there was never the problem of not being able to figure out which way to go to get somewhere. It also gave you an active mini-map.
Dark Souls didn't have much in the way of navigation tools either, but it really made you feel like you were exploring. Dead Space has a dark, oppressive, and sometimes disorienting atmosphere, but it's in a way that adds to the horror. In all 4 cases, Marathon, Dead Space, Dark Souls, and Metroid Prime, I never spent too much time being lost, however in Bioshock I spent way too much time just trying to figure out how to get anywhere.
And despite royally sucking, because it was a big-budget shooter released at a time when big-budget shooters were the next big thing, everyone lined up to worship it, causing there to be 2 sequels, the first of which didn't even need to exist at all and the second of which, which in my opinion was much better for streamlining the experience, didn't need to be called Bioshock.
Okay, that was a good rant.
First, the combat sucks. It's the same guns that appear in every shooter ever made: pistol, shotgun, grenade/rocket launcher, machine gun, melee weapon. And it never gives you enough ammo for any of them.
"But that's the point! It's supposed to create tension!"
Yea, but it ends up just creating frustration. Limiting your resources in order to create tension has been done and done well, for instance, by games like Marathon, FTL, Zelda II, and Dark Souls. But the problem is that when you die in Bioshock it doesn't return you to a checkpoint, it warps you to one of those Vita-Chambers, and you don't get any ammo back. More irritatingly, they also charge you a fee, so not only do you not get your ammo back but you don't have any money to buy more ammo. And more irritatingly still, it respawns the enemies that you used up your ammo failing to kill in the first place, so you're even more stuck. So you've used up your ammo, your first aid kits, the enemies are back, and you have no money to replace all your resources.
Though, maybe that's the point. Bioshock is supposed to be based, loosely, on themes related to libertarian extremism. If we leave everything to market forces with no regulation or social safety net, then one mistake has you in poverty with no ability to get back up. The game's mechanics tell you that you should pull yourself back up by your bootstraps, and teases you with the fact that you can't and that getting unstuck will be more about luck than anything else, a fitting metaphor for criticisms of Laissez-Faire economics.
Or maybe it's lazily designed. I'm more inclined to believe this, because...
It's disorienting, in a way that suggests that no one bothered to test it. First, there's the point of your character being like 3 feet tall, which really throws me off. Literally 5 minutes of play testing would have revealed this problem. But it's not just that. The areas are too easy to get lost in, and opening the map isn't seamless. The dark environment made things even more difficult, failing to create any atmosphere or tension and instead succeeding only in obscuring any navigational landmarks you could use. Again, other games have done this well. I return to the example of Marathon, which had an active map that you could still move while looking at. Metroid Prime frequently had dark areas and these were made to work superbly with the gameplay mechanics (where the dark was in many cases an obstacle that you had to find the X-ray and thermal visors to see through). But while Metroid Prime and Bioshock were similar in their approaches to how they carried you through a semi-open world by directing you towards objectives, Metroid Prime made very sure not to waste any space, there was never the problem of not being able to figure out which way to go to get somewhere. It also gave you an active mini-map.
Dark Souls didn't have much in the way of navigation tools either, but it really made you feel like you were exploring. Dead Space has a dark, oppressive, and sometimes disorienting atmosphere, but it's in a way that adds to the horror. In all 4 cases, Marathon, Dead Space, Dark Souls, and Metroid Prime, I never spent too much time being lost, however in Bioshock I spent way too much time just trying to figure out how to get anywhere.
And despite royally sucking, because it was a big-budget shooter released at a time when big-budget shooters were the next big thing, everyone lined up to worship it, causing there to be 2 sequels, the first of which didn't even need to exist at all and the second of which, which in my opinion was much better for streamlining the experience, didn't need to be called Bioshock.
Okay, that was a good rant.
