Decided to play through the Bioshock series. Have only played Bioshock 1 before, but it was over a decade ago, so I started there.
+ Game still looks and plays pretty well. Had some issues with mouse sensitivity being way too high but aside from that no issues.
+ Areas are fairly complex with some non-linearity.
+ Not too much handholding or waste of time in the tutorial area after the prerequisite Half-Life-esque intro.
- Wrench is obscenely OP and overshadows most of the weapons
- Poor enemy variety
- Way too easy on the resource management.
It's a real downer to the game that there is only 5 real normal enemy types of the game. These are: melee splicer, gun splicer, melee splicer-ninja that crawls on ceilings, grenade splicer, splicer with fire magic. Of these, the melee splicer is trivially beaten by walking backwards with a wrench. The melee ninja is slightly more annoying, mostly because of more health, but fairly similar. The splicer with fire magic is just a joke and will never hit you if you are dodging at all. The grenade splicer just has way too much health, eating huge amounts of ammo while his grenades are easily dodged. And the gun splicer is by far the worst enemy of the game. I'm not sure why they have so much health, you'd think it'd make more sense to give lots of health to the melee splicers, but the gun guys take huge amounts of damage to put down. Bullets basically don't scratch them unless you get a headshot and its pretty hard to get a headshot with how they move around (also mouse controls still not quite being perfect). Mostly you end up doing the "one two punch" as the tutorial describes which is sort of your cure-all for everything: shock with lightning damage then wrench. This takes them out in one or two hits without suffering any real damage in return.
As far as other enemies go, there's turrets, cameras, drones and big daddies. Turrets/cameras/drones are all best dealt with through shocking and hacking, so they kind of don't exist except as annoyances. Hacking doesn't take any in-universe time to complete so you can hack turrets and drones in the middle of firefights no problem, and in fact you should be doing that. It really lowers the strategy involved in dealing with them. Big daddies have two types, melee and ranged. The melee can basically be circle-strafed with an object in between you and them and aren't that deadly. The ranged ones are basically just a pure DPS battle early on and one of the few things that really depletes your resources since they just hitscan you while you dump ammo into them. By the midgame though there's a really easy trick to handle them: all it takes is 1 point of electric damage to trigger the stunlock state, so keep swapping between the chem thrower with electric ammo and the crossbow to quickly take them down.
As far as balance goes, the game really pushes you to use the wrench most of the time. Most of the weapons just fall off in damage. Every enemy escalates in health with every level while weapons only get 1 damage upgrade. Because of this the pistol quickly becomes mostly worthless even when using the specialized anti-personal or anti-armor ammo. The tommy gun fares a bit better, especially with AP ammo vs. big daddies, and can work decently for the midgame. The shotgun becomes almost entirely useless as the wrench just gets better at close range. The grenade launcher/chem thrower/crossbow are all the high damage weapons that can scale well enough to enemy HP and take down big daddies. But the wrench just kind of destroys everything. Assuming you are saving little sisters and doing the research camera stuff then you get lots of free wrench and melee upgrades which make it capable of killing in one or two hits most normal enemies the game so long as you shock or make a sneak attack with it. There's like a dozen ways to increase its damage or make it freeze enemies or make it swing faster or make it leech Health and Eve and so on. The whole research camera system is a real waste of time, you just buy 100 film with your massive cash and spam it at enemies for bonuses. The fact that hypos work instantly with no need for an animation also lends itself to a wrench playstyle, all you need to do is be watching your health bar and pressing the hypo button when it gets low to survive.
Regarding plasmids the actual amount of Adam you get when saving little sisters really stops you from trying to explore the variety since most of your income goes into buying the basic Health/Eve upgrades. It feels like a lapse in game design to base your game around cool magic powers and then disincentivize players from actually buying and using those powers because buying the basic upgrades you need to keep pace with enemy damage costs 75% of your income. And since saving the little sisters already predisposes you towards a melee build the natural incentive is to buy the one or two remaining melee buffs rather than risk your Adam on something like the bee plasmid when you have no idea if its going to be a total waste or not but you know that another wrench boost is good. This would change if you didn't save little sisters but everything about the game basically says that you are Hitler if you do it (even the ending cinematic) so I don't consider that a real option even if it means getting another 25% Adam or whatever. There's also the issue of a lot of the plasmids being ones that only work on groups of enemies, like several that cause them to attack each other or security to attack then or distraction plasmids, but since large groups of enemies are fairly rare (2-3 is generall the max and usually you are encountering 1-2), these feel like they'd be a waste to pick up.
I get the feeling the the game was originally much more like SS2, with the player needing to have weapon skills to do things and spend money to upgrade their guns, but that this was then thrown out around 80% of the way through development. The way you just find a bunch of 1-use weapon upgrade machines seems to confirm this (it doesn't make much sense as a gameplay system IMO, just something slotted in to allow upgrading guns in another fashion). There's also just way too much ammo and money lying around, as if you weren't supposed to be able to take full advantage of half the ammo and the money was supposed to go into something else. You have a $500 money cap and you will probably bit capped out on money for 80% of the game, only rarely stocking up on hypos or some anti-Big Daddy ammo. This really kills the resource management of the game as the only resource you really need (hypos) is both maxed out and the resource you use to buy the hypos (money) is also maxed out. In this situation I'd argue that you could make the game feel more difficult by making it easier. This isn't an oxymoron, the solution is to let players buy Adam with money. Even though this is objectively a buff to player potential it would make resources feel more relevant since you'd be more interested in constantly scrounging together more cash for plasmids rather than running around thinking "I have infinite hypos and nothing could ever kill me", and you'd also be able to toy around with more of the weirder plasmids.
Another thing giving me the feeling that the game was originally more SS2-like: the fact that items like alcohol and food exist. It makes little sense without an inventory system to allow you to use them when needed. In fact they often turn up with other items on containers and there is only a "take all" key, so you can't avoid downing alcohol that lowers your Eve in exchange for Health if you also want to pick up the bullets or cash or whatever that are on something.
Regarding the plot, maybe I missed something. From what I can tell the whole reason for Jack's (the main character's) creation is the fairly mundane fact that Bathyspheres could be locked to Ryan's DNA but that close relatives could still use them. Is that it? They completely revolutionized several fields of science with the ability to speed-grow humans with fully adult skills, mental brainwashing, all in the midst of a societal collapse, just to get around what is effectively an electronic lock by using Ryan's son? I mean there's even a quote from one of the in-universe characters stating something to the effect that "they may say that their system is un-hackable, but we'll hack it", but we're supposed to pretend that the freaking public transportation system is so impossible to crack that this workaround was necessary? On top of that this is explicitly a universe where re-writing people's genetic code is commonplace to the point of commodification, so... just do that to someone's hand or something? Or, shit, just get a big daddy outfit and go for a swim? All Fontaine wanted to do was kill Ryan so he could have just sent a loyal lackey. It feels like all this SCIENCE! could have been put towards innumerable other obviously better uses, like genetically engineering a race of domestic catgirl servants.
Also Ryan killing himself seemed entirely illogical for a character that is supposed to be logical. Jack didn't cause Rapture's demise, he didn't really ruin any of Ryan's plans. Ryan proved that he could control Jack. Why commit suicide? If it was because of Rapture going to shit then he should have done it long before, Jack didn't do anything to add to that. It's not clear if Rapture is 100% fucked or if we're seeing the shitty parts with other sections that have normal people holed up until things get better, but either way nothing Jack did screwed that up. Even if Ryan was afraid Fontaine had some secondary control method and so saying "would you kindly go kill Fontaine and put some earplugs in first so you can't hear him" wasn't an option then he could have said "would you kindly lie down in these restraints while I buckle you up".
Overall, game was OK. Not much replayability, maybe in another 10 years. It was decently enjoyable and the pacing was good for the first 2/3rds of the game. Will be interesting to see how much is changed in Bioshock 2, which I've never played.
. I'm going to complete it but I certainly won't be playing it again
