So, I finished Bioshock a little while ago and ended up fairly disappointed. Although the environments continued to amaze and the Alice In Wonderland fullness of the art and model design remained sexy, in its way, the gameplay and narrative faltered badly in the last quarter of the game.
As is par for the course in the *Shock games, a huge plot twist hits about 2/3's through the story. This twist is so predictable and uninteresting that my suspension of disbelief was ripped apart like a rope bridge in a hurricane. Not only that, but after a certain point, maybe halfway through the game, my upgrades had made me so powerful that I really feared no encounter and sped through the last half almost always full on hypos, health, eve and ammo.
There is a severe pacing issue here. The final battle is something of a joke and the seemingly endless possibilities and "tracks" of avatar development prove illusory as every useful plasmid, tonic and overpowered weapon/ammo combo becomes available. Using multiple strategies to dispatch enemies might be fun, but it is certainly not expedient. And hacking becomes so simple and tedious by the end that you will want to scream. Replay value suffers as a result.
This is clearly not an RPG but a first-person shooter through and through. It's a fun shooter, too, most of the time, with lots of great detail and an addictive nature. But it does get repetitive and does lose momentum as the story wears on.
I give it a solid (8.1/(100/10) * 100) out of 100
