BioShock Comments by Dan Whitehead

[MILD SPOILER AHEAD] The PS3 demo was good but the only way it should get a 10 is if they've completely changed the final boss fight which was pure House of the Dead cheese compared to the rest.

I see a trend on this site...

A review is posted and people bitch like little girls because a score doesn't suit their own idea.

Every review is getting the same treatment.

Brilliant game. Most of the people on the first page are heretics!

"Pretentious" and "cynical" are the epithets we give to those we fear are laughing at us.

Jeez. The effort some people put in to complaining about the work someone's done in writing a review. For me, I admire any game that's strong enough to push for a distinct visual personality and stay with it all the way through. Interesting graphic design is always worth a look.

I'd also like to pointlessly slag off the reviews I read, but I'm self-aware enough to ask myself why I continually read them if they annoy me so much.

@knocker. bringing kiddie games into a grown up discussion = twat.

@lebowski. Brilliant fantastic - but not a 10 ? What does it have to do then ? brilliant fantastic and blow jobs on demand ?

@ChthonicEcho Brilliant. All we need now is a game where you chase busty beauties around to the benny hill music with double entendres galore and it will score 11million

Good review Dan.

When Bioshock first came out, i rushed out and bought it on my PC, and have to admit didn't enjoy it at all.

However, a year later i returned to the original for "one last blast" before i scrapped my PC rig and found myself enjoying it immensely.

I D/L'ed the PS3 demo and again found myself enjoying something i had first dismissed as "not that great".

Rather tempted to pick it up now and sit down once and for all and play it through.

Maybe it's just because it's set underwater, but I thought this was one of the most immersive games I have ever played.

Heh, I kill myself.

Definitely 10/10. There were times when I was so wrapped up in the environment and story I forgot I was playing a game.

It can have my 10. I loved it. Fort Frolic has to be in my top five 'Greatest Moments in Gaming'.

@ Cannonanball

"I see a trend on this site...

A review is posted and people bitch like little girls because a score doesn't suit their own idea.

Every review is getting the same treatment."

Y'know how you are supposed to get surprised at least once a day? Today wasn't one of them.

I actually only just finished the 360 version last week (long story).

I must say as a shooter its nothing special, solid 8/10. It does have the extra adventure element, a fantastic story, and plasmids, tonics etc. but it still ranks well behind out and out shooters like Gears, COD or Halo.

Apart from the ableit excellent atmosphere the games creates the actual mechanics are fairly ho hum in my book.

Every man to his own I suppose.

@CannonAnBall agreed, and it's making the comments thread almost unreadable. Throw in fanboy rants and you get rsi from all the ignores. That LBP review needed an "ignore all" button.

Was not expecting a 10! may buy this after LittleBigPlanet :)

I'd like to know what is considered a 10/10 game by those who say Bioshock is nowhere near that good.

And oh dear... yet more PC gamers getting on their high horses about console gamers/games.

Pisses all over LBP by far.

@LHH

have you played LBP yet then?

\o/ no PS3/360 fanboy warz, instead BioShock/anti-EG fanboy warz!

I played the 360 version when it was released. The game was good. 8/10 good.

It is by no means a classic. It's pretty much a standard shooter with some tacked on stuff to add a sense that it's something more than that.

Nah, I'm just trolling.

I do have a PS3 though so shall get it at some point, like when my car stops bloody breaking down.

lol@Bitkari
Good call man!

@Xerx3s
If they remade SS2 without the respawing bad guys if would be amazing! The spawning annoyed the crap out me then and sure as hell would do now (For me it really always makes a game feel dated and badly designed)

10/10 implies perfection.
Bioshock is not perfect, but it's closer than most.
Not enough variety in enemies and what they say.
The final boss was silly, IMO and the ending felt tacked on.
And even though the game was underwater, it was too bloody dark!
But Big Daddy is fantastic and Sander Cohen is one of the greatest characters in gaming history, even if his role is an obvious take on 'Theatre of Blood'.
Also, the attention to detail in recreating an Art-Deco utopia is stunning.
There's nothing pretentious about Bioshock at all. You just need to be more than a frag-bot to truly appreciate it.

10/10 is extremely generous.

It's a solid 8/10 game.

@LHH

ah fair enough, trolling is ok ;)

just get it delivered. no need for a car then ;)

ffs, this game was never more than an 8

Bioshock was the best SP experience on the 360 last year.
If you have a only the ps3 this is a must buy !

I really enjoyed Bioshock, but the amouint of gravitas given to its proclaimed themes does seem a little overblown now that I've played it, dabbled a bit in Ayn Rand and had a lot of time to reflect on it.

Thanks for posting the link to Bioshock: A defence, however - I certainly hadn't forgotten how... misplaced.... I thought it was at the time, and it remains one of the most amusing blog-a-like articles I think I've ever read anywhere. To suggest that the makers of the game are asking us to question... oh.... never mind....

Solid game, that didn't quite deliver on the promise from my point of view becauise of the complete lack of an interaction with the crumbled society other than shooting at it or listening to its tape recordings or being passively lectured to by it. The central theme of choice is also a smidgen undermined, in my eyes, by the awarding of extra gamerscore points, in the 360 version, if you make a 'choice' the developer feels is more worthy.

If you haven't played it, you should play it, though.

"No difference between versions"?

I'm taking it they've now got this running at 720p instead of being upscaled, got it to use the high detail textures like the 360 version rather than the middling ones it was using in the demo and fixed the odd texture effects with fog & water?

/Disappointed this is yet another substandard port

I've never understood the hate for this game. Well, apart from the final act as it were, but even without that it's hours and hours of absolute gaming bliss.

Definitely a 10 for me.

"If you judge it on pure gameplay terms, it's 8/10 or so. But if you can look past that, the experience, art direction and the story, (which is way smarter then the story of 98% of other games - especially in this genre), then it is what Dan recognizes it to be: a 10/10."

I agree with the above.

It's one of the few games I have completed on my 360 and thoroughly enjoyed. For the story, the sucker punch, the incredible environments, the atmosphere and the flexibility in the gameplay. Nobody has said Bioshock is the greatest shooter ever. That's not how I played it.

PS3 owners, now is your chance to immerse yourself. From the time you hear "Beyond the Sea", you're in for a ride. Enjoy!

I liked unpacking all the sounds from the PC version and listening to them all.
There's hundreds and hundreds of hilarious things various splicers say that you totally miss in the game. The posh splicers racist rants and the lonely splicers are particularly funny.

Is this the PS3's first 10 then?

Edit: Answering my own question it seems to be the second after GTAIV.

To all the people moaning about the vita chamber and the ease at which they got through the game, you all need to man up, turn the vita chambers off and push up the difficulty. Makes an already brilliant game even better.

How about some reviews of games that haven't been covered before? Sim City Creator for the Wii and DS would be nice, as would a FIFA review for the Wii.

"And oh dear... yet more PC gamers getting on their high horses about console gamers/games. "

Yeah. No idea where that comes from.

/reads LBP or every other console game thread


Oh. ;-)

Bioshock is an amazing game. So what's with the hate!

Sorry you can't compare Bioshock with Halo 3. Halo 3 sucked big time in my opinion and was so over hyped while Bioshock was an amazing game.

Nice review!

Good review, and fair score. Never fails to amaze me the vehemence with which people react to scores i.e. opinions that are different to theirs (SHOCK HORROR).

First time I played Bioshock on the 360 I didn't like it. Got bored, annoyed, put it down and whinged at everyone about it being overrated. Would have given it 6/10.

Six months later I picked it up again and absolutely loved it. Easily 9/10 if not more.

That's opinions for you.

Classic game of last year with COD4. Don't see any new reason to play it again though on my PS3 other than these new challenege rooms but they don't seem to be reviewed anywhere and besides i've already put aside a fortune for LBP, FarCry2, Dead Space and Fallout 3.
Then we have Mirrors Edge, Motorstorm and Resistance 2. Not enough hours in a day for all this ffs!

Personally, I don't 'get' this game. Story is very poor (it tries to be clever but fails so horribly that it's worse than a pulp story like e.g. Uncharted), graphics are nothing special and sometimes plain ugly, art direction is bad (IMO), enemies are all the same and horribly animated, etc., etc. I did like the sound but that's about it.

I missed a meeting somewhere.

When does "not thinking something is fantastic" = "hate" ? It's always been around to some degree - but now just seems a handy device to avoid any sort of discussion at all.

The Saints Row 2 discussion (referring to GTAIV) and this have appeared as though the mildest criticism of games has become the equivalent of drawing cartoons of Mohummad drinking beer.

I swear before long some fucker is going to make himself a suicide vest and throw himself at an EG journalist .... "you gave the game an 8 you bastard !!!" eternal xbox live subs and 72 boxes of kleenex await ...

Still for right-handers only though unless they patched in southpaw options.

Dear publisher why do you alienate >10% of your market for the sake of a off-the-shelf small piece of code to allow the thumb sticks to be swapped?

It's a great game. Not quite a ten for me, but definitely worth experiencing.

Part of me wishes that it has been scored less than the 360 version just to see the resulting shitstorm. Thousands of 360 fantards gloating, and thousands of PS3 fantards accusing EG of bias against Sony.

Left handers are mutants and in a more healthy society would be burnt at a stake before a crowd of black cats

Loved it, I played it on PC anyway (better controls, better graphics if you have a decent machine).

I preferred it hands-down to Halo 3. But then, I didn't like Halo 3 very much. I prefer a good immersive single-player environment to multiplayer action.

Yeah, it definitely tails off after the 'big reveal' part. Yes, it basically rips off most of System Shock 2 in a different environment. Yes, the moral choice thing was weak. Yes, the hacking was dumb after the 3rd time. But it's still one of the best games in a long time.

Why did Bioshock get a 10/10 when LBP is so orgial and unique and it gets a 9...

@pyrat6

Were you poking fun at the US? Just say no, because it's extremely easy to do that and you failed. To add insult to injury, I'm not even from the US. To pour acid into said injury, I was being sarcastic.

@Beano - Erm, the scores are "all over the place" because different people are reviewing these games and even if it was the same person, everyone likes different things. How exactly would EG "tighten up" the reviews... by getting reviewers to award scores based on what you or other sites give the games? :?

I really don't see what you're complaining about... EG has its own reviewers and their reviews are completely independent of everyone else's. Sometimes they agree with others, sometimes they don't, that's what opinions are. It's the same with every other site I've been on whether it's IGN, GameSpot or CVG, EG is absolutely no different but at least they do justify the scores with the review text. Some websites I've visited and magazine reviews I've read *cough*OXM*cough* *cough*OPSM*cough* don't even do that!

According to the review the PS3 version looks the same as the 360 a year later. Thats enough to give it a lower score imo. You can get 360 and PC versions for half price now.

I loved the fact that gamers hated all the brave innovation.

I hated the fact that gamers loved the dodgy plot.

It's a stellar game. Reading this review made me remember just how good it was. If Bioshock is not worth 10/10, then I don't know what is!

A few references to acclaimed works don't make something special and the story was so split from the world the player's in it never worked anyway.
In the end you just shoot the same 4-skin-model-zombies instead of experiencing a flawed model of society/economy.

I'm really impressed at the job Bioshock's PR department did.

@muscleblade - Are you implying that the game should get a lower score because the graphics are the same? What about the gameplay, isn't that... you know... more important? ;)

You might be able to get the game for half price on the 360 and PC but that's no good for PS3 owners is it? When Virtua Fighter 5 and Unreal Tournament 3 came out on the 360 late last year some months after the PS3 version, they too were full-priced when the PS3 versions could be bought cheaper. Should those games have received lower scores too?

The PS3 version of BioShock is selling at most online retailers for £30, the Xbox 360 version cost £40 if I remember when it came out. As far as PS3-only owners are concerned BioShock is a brand new game, I don't think it really matters to them that the game came out a year earlier on another platform anymore that it should if Crysis comes out on the PS3 and 360 next year, long after the PC version. Games should be judged on their own merits and BioShock is easily worth £30 IMO.