I completed Bioshock yesterday and it was pretty awesome. Looks amazing, plays well and has a great story. There are a few things it fails to deliver on though, at least on the xbox version.

I played through the game on the normal difficulty and it was moderately challenging without ever becoming a chore. In fact I think it’s one of the best balanced games out there. It never punishes you overly for being bad at the game, but it’s certainly much more rewarding for doing well.

I was quite immersed in the game, though there seemed to be a lot of people for an abandoned city. Saying that however, they were necessary to keep me on my toes and it’d be like complaining that the animals spoke in a Disney movie. Games must be approached with a certain level of disbelief and Bioshock never pushed the realms of possibility too far.

Credit for my immersion must go to the excellent story writers and artists who have created a believable world, as well as the developers and programmers for making the game fun to play and never letting the controls get in the way of the story. That said, my biggest problem with the game was that I never used the guns as it wasn’t quite balanced for console gaming, quite a big problem for a FPS.

I imagine that this game would be an entirely different experience with a mouse and keyboard as it’s just slightly too fiddly to aim with the cross hair given. Die-hard PC gamers berate console shooters, such as Halo, for being too easy with their generous auto-aim function. As a console gamer and having played many hours of Halo I rarely feel as if the game is shooting people in the head for me. Bioshock would have benefitted immensely for a slight degree of lock-on when aiming at a splicer.

The problem was not enough to detract from the fun as the more powerful opponents, the Big Daddy’s, provide a more than ample target and with Resident Evil style ammo scarcity throughout the first half of the game, collecting power-ups for the wrench was equally rewarding.

The weapons themselves were finely balanced to provide a challenge, with limited capacity and long reload times, often forcing the player to switch plasmids and weapons to take down an enemy. The other half of the weapons, the plasmids, provide a unique and refreshing secondary weapon and skill set for a FPS and although I played through using the bare minimum (I never fired a swarm of bees) it should allow players a certain amount of replay value, especially when they release more in the form of downloadable content.

The pacing never forced me to backtrack greatly, a staple of console shooters (well, Halo) to pad out the length and the story moved forward as goals were completed. The moral choices offered, whilst not amounting to what was promised, still made the first decision to harvest or save a little sister more than just good/bad or powerful/weak. Indeed a few times throughout the game the little sister’s actions were remarkably creepy, forcing the player to think about what they were doing. The story was well above the average FPS with a twist that becomes so obvious on a second play round you wonder how you missed it the first time and the achievements are finely balanced between gameplay and exploration.

I’m not going to finished with an out of ten score for this review but just say that it is a great game that is well worth a couple of play-throughs and a stand out title for the xbox360.

Metacritic score – 96