I was mixed on Bioshock when I played it back in 2007; this and Gears Of War were the first 2 games I bought with my Xbox 360 as they were the two games that you couldn't escape hearing about in regards to that console. But I found Bioshock a bit frustrating; for some reason I almost felt like I was playing it wrong or something... it just wasn't clicking for me like it seemed to be for everyone else. I think I even gave up during the final stretch of the game as I have no memory of the final boss fight during my initial playthrough.

Coming back 17 years later it smacked me hard over the head like a wrench - this thing aged insanely well. The guns feel great and chunky, and the plasmids encourage you to try different things constantly. It's so so easy to see how this knocked the socks off everyone back then, this is an amazing game for so many reasons.

The plot and all it's mysteries and twists got me engaged all over again, but there's two things I want to mention quickly here that blew me away.

1. The SOUND - my God... playing this with headphones is enough to make you think you're a Rapture citizen gone mad yourself. The noises of each room and location, the vending machines, the insane babbling and screaming, the haunting music playing from old speakers; hearing "How Much Is That Doggy In The Window" playing on a jukebox while a woman cries in another room and a man violently talks to himself in another, and you hear the pounding THUD of the Big Daddies walking around and making that low whale-call type groan they make... it's almost too overwhelming. When chaos erupts and there's several people shouting and bullets flying and shit is on fire and exploding and drones are buzzing around shooting people... pure madness, especially like I mentioned above with headphones on. The game sounds absolutely bonkers all the time.

2. Rapture as a setting has been talked about to death but every room, every hallway, has a purpose here, and it's been planned and structured and detailed to an almost painful level. It all makes sense as a city and doesn't feel video game level-y, if you scrubbed it clean of all the garbage and dead bodies and ruin that it's now in, you can picture it being this perfect idyllic city for capitalistic rich bastards to frolic around in. But my main thing I really noticed here this time is the complete lack of any outdoor area - for obvious reasons, but the fact that it's all big rooms, hallways, confined spaces, really sets it apart from almost every other shooter. There's always a roof over your head and just thinking about that makes you feel claustrophobic even if you aren't.

5 stars for this sucker, this playthrough made me see what everyone else has been saying for years, and I think age has helped it in a weird way. You don't often think of Bioshock when people mention the best horror games, because despite not really being scared at all while playing this, it's also easily one of the scariest games out there. And that's saying something

This might be the one game that I own that I've started and stopped the most times over the years. I became so familiar with the first 2-3 hours of this game because I had played it so many times before switching to something else and not going back to it. I finally decided to sit down and properly play it and I'm happy to say that it was worth the experience.

As someone who values narrative over anything else and will often poke around online to find games with great narratives, it's no surprise that Bioshock came up fairly often. I've known for a while that there was some sort of "big twist" in the game that has become infamous, but I didn't know what exactly it was or when it would happen. As I played the game I sorta got the gist of what I thought it would be, but I was still fairly surprised by what happened.

The narrative here is the game's biggest strength, and I was really impressed by the quality of the writing. The fact that there are minimal in-game cutscenes and that most of the dialogue + exposition happen over radio is a cool choice that I think paid off here. It allowed the game's environmental and sound design to do the heavy lifting, particularly the environmental design.

Bioshock may have the best use of environmental storytelling that I've ever seen in a video game. Rapture is a fuckin cool setting, no doubt about it, and I learned so much about this world simply by exploring it. The audio diaries were a neat way to expand on the world, although I did find that the audio could be a bit hard to discern if there were enemies around who wouldn't stop talking. The different locations all felt unique and eerie in their own ways, and I never felt like I got bored with any of them and wanted to explore every inch of them.

The combat felt fine enough, nothing too special. Being able to swap between the powers and weapons was fun, and the sheer number of powers made for some fun combinations as my playthrough went on. The actual gun fights could feel a bit janky at times, but it's something I can forgive since I wasn't playing Bioshock for the gameplay.

I'm really glad I was able to finally cross this one off the backlog. As someone who has come to more deeply appreciate gaming as art in the last few years, Bioshock always felt like a must-play but I was never able to commit the time and energy for it. This was a blast to play, and I really did love the story that was told and count it among the best I've played. I've heard more mixed things about Bioshock 2, but I'm ready to experience it for myself firsthand.

I've only ever played BioShock Infinite, but now I see why the whole series gets praise. It's a typical FPS, but with superpowers, and really fun ones. This game also terrified me the whole way through, thanks to the perfect setup of music and atmosphere of a technologically advanced underwater city. The shooting was really solid, the powers were really fun, and the game itself was challenging. The overall story was actually really well-written and definitely threw me for a twist. The game also looks gorgeous, at least the Remastered version does, wow.

I definitely recommend this game if you've never played it before, it should be considered one of the essentials of video gaming, in all honesty.