Outstanding atmosphere is hindered by gameplay that is mediocre at best. (Review edited after a second playthrough.)
I owe Bioshock something of an apology. I was not very favorable towards it during my first playthrough. Though I thought it was fairly good on the whole, it suffered from cluttered level design, awkward pacing, and poor gunplay, and that the story was not all it had been cracked up to be. I finally decided to play it through again, and after a second playthrough I can say that my opinion of the game has improved greatly-not because the flaws I mentioned don't exist, but because there are ways around them.
To be specific, I turned on subtitles and used the map more often. The audio design of the game can get fairly cluttered, what with enemies yelling all over the place and people talking to you over your radio and audio diaries playing when you pick them up. It's very easy to miss important dialogue because of this, which is a shame when the writing and voice acting is so very good. Turning on the subtitles makes the story much easier to follow and understand. It's unfortunate that it's such a necessity, though; it would be best if you could understand what was being said without having the distracting text along the bottom of the screen. In any case, unraveling the tale of Rapture's rise and fall becomes much more compelling as a result. I said in my original review that there's not much in the way of story, and I stand by that-while Rapture's fall is well-told, it mostly happens in the past, told through audio logs, and you have very little bearing on it. Again, the writing and acting is fantastic, and most of the characters are really memorable, though it's often not because of how you the player interact with them.
Using the map in the pause menu makes it much easier to navigate the game's cluttered levels. Again, it would have been better if you could navigate without having to constantly check the map, but it's better than nothing, and it's key to making sure you don't lose anything. One of the more enjoyable parts of the gameplay is scavenging around to find all the audio diaries, gene tonics, and other upgrades, and the map helps you make sure you don't scour the same area multiple times and that you don't miss anything. I found myself opening the map at the beginning of each level, looking forward with glee to all the places I could go. It goes a long way toward making up for the dark and confusing level design, in which it is easy to get lost and miss key items.
Gunplay remains the weakest link of Bioshock. The weapons are not much fun to shoot, although the plasmids liven things up. The level design hampers this aspect as well; the confusing, open layouts make it hard to place enemies for a gunfight, and so the game just sort of throws enemies at you with no rhyme or reason. Additionally, they often show up behind you or blend into the scenery so that it's hard to tell where they're shooting from. Again, there's not much challenge; lose all your life and you respawn with no penalty at the nearest Vita-Chamber. As a result, the combat is messy and poorly paced, and since the process of exploring each area and scouring it for items is a slow one, it can be very annoying.
On the whole, though, Bioshock is a very enjoyable game, and it can be made much more enjoyable by toggling a couple of menu options and checking the map frequently. Visually, the game has held up superbly, and the audio elements are individually excellent, from the voice acting to the songs that play scratchily on record players throughout the game. Rapture is a memorable setting and a joy to explore. It's a shame that the gameplay can't match up to the setting, and that subtitles and the map are pretty much necessary to get the most out of the game. Nevertheless, Bioshock overcomes these foibles to become a fascinating, if occasionally frustrating, game.
My original review is preserved below.
ORIGINAL REVIEW:
I like to think of myself as a games-as-art snob. It justifies me as a gamer: I often don't enjoy popular games such as Killzone 2 so much because they lack the art-house touch. So I decided to play BioShock, a game with, incidentally, even better critical reception than Killzone 2 and much praise for its outstanding story--and guess what? I prefer Killzone 2, with all its shallow, overly macho, profanity-slathered dialogue and derivative gameplay, to BioShock, a beautifully written, wonderfully acted, thought-provoking, artsy FPS-RPG hybrid.
One's initial impression of BioShock is very good: after surviving a plane crash in the Atlantic, you find a lighthouse on a rocky outcrop. Inside, you enter a bathysphere, and receive a brief, albeit quite interesting, spiel about the worth of one's own work, after which you see the underwater city of Rapture appear before your eyes. You soon learn that it was created as a haven for society's most gifted, where one could work unhindered by governments or morality. It's also apparent that something has gone very, very wrong, but you've probably heard all that already. Everything I can say about Rapture has already been said by more credible sources: It's a gorgeous, varied setting; the inhabitants are chillingly insane and brought to life via excellent voice acting; and so on. All in all, it's a terrific setting and vividly realized.
The story built around this wonderful atmosphere, though, is far from impressive. One could argue that it is told via the audio journals you find scattered around the city, but that's misleading. These brief recordings contribute less to the story than to the atmosphere, with their excellent writing and acting being at once chilling and thought-provoking, giving you the impression that you are not the only sane person in a city gone awry. There's an intriguing Objectivist bent throughout, for those interested in philosophy, which I view as ultimately being a rejection of that ideology--but that's something to be discussed elsewhere. The point is, as intriguing as these audio logs are, there's very little in the way of actual story. Like Half-Life 2, you'll be more interested in the scene-setting dialogue than any attempts at a poignant twist.
Half-Life 2 is, in my opinion, the best game ever, and BioShock, despite being similar in world design and story structure, is clearly not if it only earns a 7.5. The difference, therefore, is in the gameplay, which in BioShock is decidedly mediocre. It is a hybrid of FPS and RPG, with upgradeable weapons, multiple ammo types, the ability to search bodies for loot, and what amounts to magical powers. It is linear, but every area is chock-full of side rooms and all sorts of interesting nooks and crannies that hold ammunition, health pickups, and the like. The problem is that most of the environments are dark enough that it's easy to get lost in them, though you can toggle on a convenient directional arrow if this happens to much. This also makes it hard to spot annoyances such as gun turrets and security cameras, which will send an unending stream of flying robots at you if they spot you before you can disable them.
The gunplay in BioShock is divided between guns, which generally feel underpowered and not fun too shoot; plasmids, which give you intriguing superpowers such as telekinesis or the ability to shoot a swarm of bees at a foe; and your research camera, which lets you photograph enemies to gain combat advantages over others of the same type. It can be fun, but with the exception of the wrench you start with, it's not as exciting or visceral as the gameplay in other first-person shooters. A bigger problem, though, is the difficulty. Most of your foes are fairly easy to dispatch, but the dark environments mean they can sneak up on you. If they manage to kill you, however, you are revived at one of the plentiful Vita-Chambers, and return into the fray with no penalty, which makes the game too easy and very uneven. The Big Daddies, your most fearsome foes, are very lazily designed: They are incredibly tough to kill, but when dying is nothing more than being moved to a different place on the map, they are nothing more than a disruption in the already uneven pacing. It is apparent that no real effort was put into making the difficulty more coherent, which would have gone a long way into improving the pacing and the experience as a whole.
Ultimately, BioShock's excellent atmosphere and production values are offset by mediocre gunplay, strangely easy difficulty, and pacing that could have been much improved with some tweaks to the visual design and difficulty settings. Because of this, it falls behind shooters such as Killzone 2, which are shallower in both story and gameplay but which are infinitely superior in terms of gunplay and pacing. If nothing else, BioShock is a perfect example of how in an interactive medium, what the user does is infinitely more important to the experience than what they see, hear, and possibly even think.