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Beautiful, scary, & fun

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 13 / 23
Date: August 21, 2007
Author: Amazon User

If you haven't heard about this game, check out the demo or the videos on other game review sites... It's a fun, cool game.

ART STYLE
Game is set in 1960, and the art style is a snazzy, art-deco style reminescent of Fallout (at least the fake "ads" in the game). The setting of the city on the bottom of the ocean is a visual treat along with the omni-present water that is leaking into most structures.

The graphics on the PC version are very nice (nVidia 8600+ recommended and ATI 1900+ recommended). You can run the game with vertical sync off to up your frame rates (but it can lower visual quality).

ACTION
The game mostly focuses on action and fun. The save system doesn't punish players for character death and encourages players to try out various strategies. The combination of plasmids ("magical" powers) and regular weapons makes for some entertaining ways of defeating enemies. If you like shooters, you'll take great pleasure setting up ambushes and responding to ambushes. This definitely is a first-person shooter, though the plasmids make this have somewhat of a feel of a role-playing game.

THEMES
The general theme is the fall of a utopia society. Rapture, the city, is literally falling apart and buckling under the weight of the ocean. You also have some moral choices to make during the course of the game.

Overall, the combination of everything is just right and its a extra fun (scary) to play at night.

Crashes every time I play it

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 5 / 5
Date: November 03, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This is a great game. Having said that you never get to the point that you can exit the game. It crashes first. I have a high end system that meets the recommended system requirments. This game is way too unstable for what it costs. It definatly needs some patching big time!! I'm sorry I bought it.

Buggy Game, Horrendous customer service

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 9
Date: April 09, 2008
Author: Amazon User

BEWARE! Although there are several good reviews about this product, I played this and got stuck in a buggy loop. I contacted the customer service and they assigned a case and completely ignored me. After 10's of e-mails, they just went silent. I even told them that I'll send them my save of the game so that they can play it /fix and it , but no hope.
There are several bugs with the games 2K manufacturers and if you're unfortunate enough to get stuck in one of them mid way through hours and hours of play you're doomed. They don't even have new and proper patches for these bugs. How can they, if they don't listen to customer issues.
It's too unfortunate that they're getting all these good reviews. The game is reasonably fun to play. But not as much as fun, when you get stuck after playings for 10's and 10's of hours and have to forfeit.

I'm never buying games from 2K games again.

5 stars for fun, 0 stars for Gestapo practices

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 9
Date: April 22, 2008
Author: Amazon User

This is a fun game, no doubt. But it does create a counterfeit-protection registry alteration the you cannot get rid of. While it's not really a root-kit, it is darn close. I don't pirate games and I don't appreciate my system being infested with gestapo software to foil a few pirates.
I would have bought this game today if it was clean. Since it isn't, the game stays with them and my money stays with me.

Minority Opinion

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: October 29, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I can only say that "it must be me" and it seems that I must be in the minority, BUT... Even though I have a cutting edge, state-of-the-art computer, I had to return the game to Amazon because I couldn't run the program past the opening cut scene. The graphics were horrible and controls was almost none existent. After reading rave reviews about superb graphics and original game play, I was very disappointed. But like I said, maybe it is just me

Installs spyware on your computer

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 9 / 14
Date: September 17, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Even the DEMO of this game installs sony's spyware on your computer, and 2K's tech support will not tell you how to remove it. I will never buy a 2K game.

Amazingly "Immersive" 3d shooter!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 10 / 17
Date: August 27, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Half Life 2 is the "high water mark" by which I judge whether other shooters are worth playing. Life is too short for cheap wine as they say, so the game needs to be really good or it's a quick recycle. Bioshock does a great job of bringing you into this alternate submarine world. From the opening, they have crafted a believable and rich world, with features like a realistically undulating landscape when you look out the underwater windows. It's a very nice touch, and consistent with the other well considered features of the game. The lighting and sound complete the illusion, and the game's moral inquiries bring a new angle to the sometimes mindless shooter genre (This game demonstrates much greater creativity than a game such as FEAR, which I found to be repetitive and comparatively unimaginative). There are genuinely scary moments, and the gameplay is deeply engaging (plunging syringes of Eve into your arm to recharge your special skills is an appropriately shocking act which the designers don't gloss over - it all fits into the player entering into this twisted but deep reality). The golden age setting is an ideal way to give the setting a unique style. If your system can handle this game maxed out, you will be in for an exilerating cinematic treat that you are part of.... highly recommended!!

More like ups than your local Jail

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 10
Date: September 20, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Here's a game I waited a long time for, after reading the previews, I pre-ordered it. Well when it arrives, I have to buy a new graphics card, as my original one can't handle. No biggie... but then the problems start... after loading the game, and it plays though the intro, no sound.. I go to the game forum, and find out, you have to run it in XP mode.. say what, I thought this game was made for Vista... oh well... start to play and let me tell you... the graphic were worth the upgrade video card.. and then, you play a little... locks up... crashes... Makes for tons of fun having to play sections over... and sometimes over again... Let's hope for a patch soon to correct the problems... or BioShock may really find it's self at the bottom of the sea !!

Who is Atlas?

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 9 / 15
Date: August 27, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Every once in a great while a computer game comes along and changes everything that preceeded it. Bioshock succeeds in raising the bar in absolutely *every single category* that can be stuffed into a first person shooter, something it's spiritual ancestor, System Shock 2, couldn't quite do, good as that game was. This game literally has it all; excellent plot (far beyond what I expected), gratuitous action, unbelievable beauty, and even though the game is linear overall in play, it gives you the ability to go through and play it several different ways. Bioshock takes the best facets of all the FPS games you love the most, adds to them a veritable feast of choices and looks, and puts on full afterburner. I cannot praise this game enough.

As plot goes, you start the game as a man by the name of Jack (seen on a namecard on a present you're holding) and riding in an ill-fated Boeing 707 over the mid-Atlantic in 1960. Suddenly your plane plummets to the ocean below and you swim to the surface to discover that you're the sole survivor of the crash. Nearby is a lighthouse and after swimming through the burning wreckage you make your way inside it, discovering an old-style bathysphere, basically a diving bell with motors. Entering the bathysphere you begin your descent through fathoms of water and glide serenely past underwater skyscrapers covered with viewing windows and neon signs. The bathysphere takes you inside the city, which has fallen into incredible disrepair. The place is leaking water like a sieve and it seems the inhabitants of this place, called Rapture, want to kill you. Your only link to the humanity you're familiar wtih is a mysterious man named Atlas, who guides you via a radio.

I kept apace of all the news releases on this game, and was a very regular visitor to the Bioshock website, scrounging even the smallest tidbits of information available. But given all of what I knew and expected about this game even I was surprised at how Bioshock surpassed my expectations.

As the game continues to unfold you come into contact with nifty pseudo-magic elements, call Plasmids. One can shoot fireballs from thier fingertips, electrify pools of water (and the enemies walking through them), set traps, and much more. The game also provides a healthy, and era thematically correct lineup of weapons. No M-16's or AK-47's, but rather the tried and true Thompson sub-machine gun. An antiquated .38 pistol is probably my favorite weapon of the bunch, given the amazing flexibility it has with regards to ammo types. In addition there's the everlasting mainstay of FPS games, the shotgun, as well as a chemical jet thrower (sort of like a flamethrower), grenade launcher, and the ubiquitous sniper weapon, in this case a crossbow.

As the story unfolds you discover that the source of the plasmids, and consequently of the denizens of Rapture's loss of sanity, was derived from a sea slug which imparts pure stem cells upon it's user. The inhabitants of the city began to use more and more of this substance, dubbed Adam, and eventually lost their minds. Eventually the sea slug responsible for secreting Adam became extinct and the only source of the stuff that's left is to be found on the dead corpses around the city. In a truly macabre plot twist the reacquisition of Adam is in the form of Little Sisters, young pre-pubescent girls who roam around the city, *manually* removing the stuff from the corpses and keeping it inside their own bodies. However if one wishes to "harvest" this Adam from Little Sisters they first must get through the walking tanks known as Big Daddy's, who are never more than 3 feet from a Little Sister. This is one of the most unique dynamics I've ever seen in an FPS and it really works.

I've read some reviews here from people who beat the game in a day. I took my sweet time, not wanting to miss a single nook or cranny of Rapture, and the whole experience took me about a week. And I'm still not sure I managed to explore the whole place....it's *that* huge! The beauty of Rapture is amazing. The water effects in particular are beautiful beyond description. Standing under a cascade will result in distorted, blurry vision. It moves realistically! The game evokes an atmosphere I have *never* experienced before, not even in it's predecessor. You feel like you're in a real, functioning underwater city, with it's own unique ecology. I almost wish I could have seen Rapture when it was still functioning normally, before the advent of Adam.

Like many others I had a great deal of difficulty getting Bioshock to run properly on my PC. Heck, for me it was almost an adventure in itself. Currently I run an Athlon 64 3200+ single core processor, with 1 gb of RAM and a GeForce 7600 GS with 512 on-board RAM. At the time the demo came out I was running an older ATI Radeon X800 (a card which I had absolutely no problems with, and I almost crashed my computer trying to upgrade. Suffice it to say that 2 days and a new video card later I was able to run Bioshock on my PC. I can run at high resolution for only a few minutes before the game becomes a slide-show, but even at lower resolutions the game is still incredibly beautiful. I'm upgrading my whole PC early next year and Bioshock will be the game that tests that rig out.

Another issue that irked me was the *large* number of crashes to desktop that I had. I do not know if this is the fault of my underpowered PC, or some programming facet in the game itself that my computer just struggled with for some reason, but when certain sound effects activate (the electric tripwires were by far the worst offender in my case) the sound would reverberate and repeat for 10 seconds in a stuttering fashion, and then I would blink to the desktop. To make matters more irritating each time I would reboot the game I had to manually change all my settings again. My brother has the XBox 360 version and his did not experience this hiccup at all, which leads me to believe it might just be my PC and not necessarily the game.

At any rate, crashes aside, I challenge anyone on Amazon to find a more beautiful and complete game than this one. It almost causes me physical pain to admit this, but Bioshock even surpasses Half-Life 2 in my book, and in my brother's too, as he admits. That's a nearly impossible feat and I've played many games that have tried to one-up HL2. *Many*. I am sad now that I have finished playing and want to start over again. I don't know if this game will have potential for a sequel or expansion pack...things were pretty well cleaned up at the end of the game, but I suppose that if someone was genius enough to come up with a plot like Bioshock does, then making a little extra couldn't be that hard.

BioShock doesnt work

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 8
Date: October 27, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I really wanted this Game and was so disappointed when I installed it and it did not work. I am a computer technician with Microsoft certifications. I have two beefy game computers (One Dell XPS and one HP with dual processors)

I installed the Game on the Dell and it Just crashed completely. I updated my Video drivers and contacted 2K Games for technical support. I also tried to run it on the HP and it ran for about 5 minutes and that computer crashed.
2K Games support contacted me back about 5 days later and close my ticket with the status as Solved, however they didn't even provide support. I complained but they never helped so I returned the Game to Amazon.
Amazon customer support was great and returned my money.

DONT BUY THIS GAME!!!

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