Which would be this game.

I want to like it more than I think I do, largely because I loved System Shock 1 & 2 . BioShock is considered the spiritual successor to the System Shock series (although rumours of SS3 have surfaced again, and I guess that would be the actual factual successor), and plays like them in many respects.

However, the gameplay feels a bit ’samey’, something I never really got with the other games. I’ve reached a point now (in Hephaestus, for those who’ve played) where I’m kinda sick of killing the same old bad guys (there’s really not enough variety, even if I am glad of the absence of arachnids), and I have to nuke the 3 big guys on the level to progress. I don’t want to. I’m out of ammo, the fights are unwinnable (for me, I’m not about the finesse. Or the using of med kits.) without repeated runs from the regen chamber, which feels kinda like cheating… whine whine whiiine.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m enjoying it. I love throwing gas canisters at stuff and blowing sheet up – a little too much perhaps. The story is intriguing, everything’s certainly very pretty, the interactive environment is nifty, and there are some scripted events that make you sit up and go oo! The sound is impressively multi-layered, but not at all ominous or spooky or edge of your seat “Dear sweet Jebus I don’t want to know what’s around that corner” suspenseful as was SS2. In fact, everything’s so loud and in your face, critters a couple of rooms away often sound like they’re standing right behind you – throws you off just a tad.

The storytelling mechanism is very very familiar, with tapes handily strewn about to provide colour, and the major characters patching directly through every now and then to order you around. Even the ‘cut scenes through ghosts’ and the ‘go fight your way through to this person to have them die just as you get there’ give you a bit of a nostalgic feeling – you’ve done it all before and it fits like a deformed and not at all fuzzy slipper. I have to say though, depraved as the Little Sisters backstory is, it hasn’t given me the “OMG that’s just WRONG” start I got from the Cyborg Midwives origin story in SS2.

FWIW, I’m mostly saving the little tykes. Mostly.

The plasmid system is nifty if not jaw-droppingly inventive, but I would like to know if anyone ever dropped zappybolt or mmmindbullets (that’s telekinesis, Kyle) from their lineup. They seem to be the most consistently useful abilities, although I have to confess I have become somewhat fond of throwing madly stinging bees at people.

Oh! And what the heck is up with having a code set by an Australian to the date of Australia Day, and then using mm/dd format? Australians use dd/mm! Come on people, work with me here.

I’m not done yet, and I will play it through, because like the SS games there’s a story behind all the carnage, and some intriguing characters taking part in it. And I do want to know where they all end up, even if Andrew Ryan is a poor man’s SHODAN and Atlas is basically walking in the well-worn footprints of Rebecca Lansing and ‘Janice Polito’.

Which isn’t to say it might not all turn on its head and bust out something completely different in the endgame. I hope it does. It’ll just have to be a major freakin groundbreaking whammy to nudge this game up to the level of its predecessors. Guess that’s the price you pay for attaching your game to one of the most loved series in computer gaming geekdom…

Sam’s just starting it now, and hasn’t played the SS series right through (he’s a Thief guy). It will be interesting to see what he thinks and how his feelings on the game compare with mine. Well, interesting for a certain subset of the population – which probably includes you if you read all of this. >.>

Update: I finished this while I was sick, but forgot to say anything about it. But I read a gushingly effusive review yesterday and thought I might as well give my parting shot.

Did it measure up to SS? Mmmmno. There were some cool bits towards the end, but the finale was fairly abrupt and left me scratching my head and wondering if I’d missed something vitally important. The “x is really x” twist wasn’t so much of one if you’d been paying attention to the main characters in the story; you pretty much know who you still need to run into before it all comes crashing down (and as previously mentioned, the Janice Polito twist in SS2 did the exact same thing).

So all in all, a good game, but not a great game. Certainly, I’m not gushingly effusive about it. Are we so starved for shooters with stories that one with a decent narrative is considered amazing? If so, it must be time to crank a few more out and raise the bar a notch or ten.