Bioshock é um daqueles casos em que por várias vezes tentei passar um jogo e acabei por deixá-lo a meio mas, em sua defesa, nunca foi propriamente por culpa do jogo em si e sim da atenção que eu realmente lhe estava a dar.

Nos últimos dias voltei a dar-lhe uma hipótese e bem, no final dei por mim a dizer a mim próprio "would you kindly passar os jogos até ao fim a partir de agora?". É que Bioshock é simplesmente fantástico e tudo neste novo universo que comecei agora a explorar mais a sério é super cativante.

O ambiente sinistro e a sensação de perigo em todos os cantos são uma constante aqui, pelo que pode por vezes ser uma experiência frustrante em dificuldades mais elevadas, mas que recompensa imenso pela história que é apresentada. A forma como esta vai dando pistas e se vai revelando é do melhor que já vi num jogo e foram vários os momentos em que fiquei perplexo a ver o que se estava a passar na tela da Switch.

Visualmente e no que toca ao som não há nada a apontar pela negativa, mesmo na versão da consola da Nintendo e revelou ser um port incrivelmente sólido para a mesma.

Bioshock é sem dúvida nenhuma um dos melhores titulos a que ja joguei, principalmente na parte da narrativa, e muito provavelmente já me vou atirar à sua sequela e a Infinite para mergulhar ainda mais neste universo.

What I liked:
-The music and the soundtrack
-Some of the voice-acting
-The early game's art deco aesthetic (before it gets dull and monotonous)
-The idea of the plasmids and their theoretical gameplay appliances (and not their actual execution, which boils down to what made Skyrim's magic suck ass)
-The plasmid hand animations
-The underwater view of Rapture

What I did not like:
-Most of the voice-acting, especially that of clearly non-English speakers, who are clearly voiced by fluent English speakers and forced to put on exaggerated and ridiculous accents that make the voice acting almost laughable
-How the game dangles this gorgeous view of an underwater city while railroading you to undifferentiated hallways that are functionally the same and offer zero interesting visuals past the one-hour mark
-Bioshock's insistence on telling the bulk of its story through audio logs, which feature the aforementioned laughable voice-acting, but also make little to no narrative sense (why are so many people recording their thoughts out loud?? especially in what is obviously not their native tongue?? oh it's just for exposition? gotcha.)
-the way none of the guns or plasmids feel good, even for 2007 standards
-the way plasmids stop having useful gameplay applications past the one-hour mark
-the way the big daddies attack
-the stupid "gotcha!" plot twists
-the way most of what you're doing is just going from one end of the map to obtain an object, to another end of the map to obtain the second part of said object (because obviously)
-the map screen, which is genuinely one of the worst implementations of a map I have ever seen in a game maybe ever, even A Link to the Past got 3D maps right and that was in the '90s
-the implied queerness of Sander Cohen, which is so ridiculously unexplored that the inclusion of multiple mentions of his romantic interest in other men makes me think the writers were just too scared to make it overt
-this quote from one of the developers
"We also tried to hint at, without getting pornographic, Cohen’s conflict with his own sexuality. But people read that much dirtier than we intended. Go figure!"

This seems very overrated... I don't get it
I'm guessing it's one of those games people love due to the nostalgia of playing it when it came out. Not discrediting how ahead of its time it is for 2007, it is refreshing for a game to have this aesthetic when every shooter in the 2000s looked so ugly with the brown filter. The art direction is really good and probably the strongest aspect for me.
However, as good as the atmosphere is I can't get over how the story is told through hundreds of voice memos you find that are hard to pay attention to while you're shooting. It makes it really hard to connect and be invested in it. People praise bioshock's story so much and then... that's it?
The gameplay is clunky and for me it wasn't that much fun. Maybe I'm spoiled by today's standards but it just didn't click, even with all the different plasmids it's still very basic and it just got very repetitive.
And lastly, what made me quit is that technically it's a mess. I tried installing all the patches, tweaking the settings and everything but it's a mess. I managed to stop it crashing randomly mid gameplay but it still crashes constantly just by opening the map or saving the game. And you do have to save constantly cause you never know when it might crash again and make you lose progress. It just got too frustrating and I felt like I was making too much of an effort for an experience that wasn't that rewarding.

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

The sound is absolutely fucked up on PC, panning all over the place, cutting itself off and not propagating properly. So many tiny elements are bugged that you can't tell if they were always there but firing up the original makes it clear that this has problems.

The new graphics are faithful but a bit over the top at points. Some textures that are clearly just upscales which clashes with the completely new ones. Missing global lighting from the original PC release which is a shame. The 2007 release is a bit of a mare to get running but just follow this guide and you should be solid (DX9 mode recommended).

Not an awful way to experience it if you have no other option but if you're on PC then you absolutely do.

"Why are you so resistant to the traditional methods of separating a man from his soul?"

the thing about Bioshock is that everyone talks about it like it's this immaculate masterpiece of game design and narrative that'll blow your mind and when you actually sit down to play, it really fucking is.

Bioshock, to my mind, is to the fps genre what Resident Evil 4 is to third person action. a title so polished and well thought out that it unarguably inspires everything that comes after by its mere existence.

a gameplay so elegant in it simplicity it feels like a breeze to play through almost two decades later. mixing up plasmids with firepower remains a blast and rapture still is one of the most well realized locations in gaming history, with new secrets to uncover in almost every corner.

although it's plot twist often steals the spotlight, the whole narrative is incredibly well written and well acted. the characters perfectly emulate that sort of 60's speech pattern you seen in movies, and the whole visual artstyle immerses you in the time period. it's so surreal to me that there are people incapable of seeing the political commentary in games like these. a whole story about how rampant capitalism inevitably produces rampant poverty and gives rise to fascism. there's an entire building in rapture called OPTIMIZED EUGENICS!!!

Bioshock gives control to the players and asks them if they have what it takes to break the cycle, to act contrary to our own best interest, to care about the human life even when its more valuable to end it. a staggering achievement in interactive fiction and the way we interact with it.

Classics are classics for a reason.

I've played the original Bioshock back in 2012. It was one of the games that reignited my love for video games after a couple of disheartening years. When I was a kid, I basically only played Nintendo, which was an amazing way of growing up but when I reached my teens I kind of lost my interest in videogames. I thought I had seen it all.
Then we managed to upgrade our family PC to a gaming rig for the first time ever and it was as if a whole new world was unfolding before my eyes. I played, among other things, Limbo, Braid, Bastion, Batman Arkham City, the Mass Effect trilogy and, of course, Bioshock.

Let me get this out of the way: I didn't get it.
I fumbled with the keyboard controls. I was never paying attention during the cinematics. I couldn't understand the oldschool lingo, especially when it played in audiologs at the same time as I was fighting for my life against a horde of splicers. It was so different from everything I had played until then. It presented such a novel way to tell a story. God, I didn't get it all. And I loved every little bit of my ignorance.

Twelve years later and with a lot more experience under my belt, Bioshock doesn't surprise me anymore. The gaming industry changed. I've changed. Nonetheless, despite featuring some visible expression lines and greying hair, it's clear that Bioshock aged pretty well, both as a solid immersive sim/shooter and as an interesting storyteller.
I feel lucky for getting to play it back then. It was an eye opener; one of the pieces that made me look at interactive medium with new eyes, and to which I own a whole lot of my appreciation for games today.

Admirably bold triumph of the high-concept kind of "story mode". Sure, it's not the first time this happens, but it's a welcoming encyclopedia of grand environmental storytelling and a cocktail of nostalgia meets the fantastically ghastly and adventurous violence juxtaposed on RPG amalgamation for bouncy trigger-happy / wrench-whacky / chaotically-spellbound venturing. This feeling of methodical exploration took wonders for my amnesiac memory as the game pushed me on the path of bloodthirsty scavengers and armored puppets of ungodliness like a newcoming spectator searching for a way out of Rapture. Having said that, not every singular element slaps as smoothly as i remembered- Some of the conceptual grandeur and ambiance immersion lags because of how heavily schizophrenic is the start/stop gameplay itself. The Vita-Chambers come to mind- Not only an accidental source of monotony by forcing you to re-route yourself back to the place where you died at, but also a gateway to exploit the game's economy by sheer patience- All it takes is waltzing right where you died at and overpower your enemies affordably instead of spending cash out of a dozen of medkits mid-combat. It placed a harsh decrease on my inmersion as well, having to face a similar lot of weariness by the incredilous amount of pirating (and granted, this is an entirely player's choice, but it's such a tiresome avalanche of pipe puzzles you must endure to avoid combats) take a slight detour to the entirely non-cinematic hayride people tend to praise to kingdom come. Affordable gunplay married to a grand, one-of-a-kind neurotic storytelling, it's such a galvanizing fairytale arranged with an audacious style: Retrofitted to outlandish wonder and asphyxiating dread, fuelled with mysticism almost belonging to survival horror until you get your hands on godlike powers to cartoonishly kill-or-be-killed adventuring. For all the tonally opposed Frankenstein of mechanics, oddball logistics (what's the deal with turrets of mass destruction on a city underwater?) and spectacle before philosophy, i take a grand kick out of this game for being a innovative jump of profound themes at the time. FIFA and Call of Duty was becoming the norm and this took the spotlight to remind ourselves how it's like to embark a guntotting odyssey of good versus evil, with ourselves as the moral compass while whacking a wrench at the face of the humanely wicked.

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.

It's a great Lovecraftian steampunk game with nice environmental design, attention to detail, great places to veer off and explore. Definitely gives Xbox 360-era energy, and I love it for that.

The big daddy enemy name I thought was a little lame.

The story was alright. heady, imaginative, and unique. I bet if I played this game as a kid, it would have had way more of impact on me.

the combat can be a little iffy. I was playing on the hardest difficulty and the big daddy's were a pain, but then I learned later on that bolts are op as shit. Especially since you can collect the bolts.

the hacking can be a little obtuse after doing them so frequently. I often use automated hack units, not because the hacks are too hard or anything, mostly just to save time.

85/100

I just dont see what the hype is about. The enemy variety is shit, the gunplay is shit, most of the plasmids feel weak AF, enemies become bullet sponges in the later half of the game. Didnt get attached to any of the characters so I didnt enjoy the story either (also hate when games tell stories through audio logs but thats just a personal preference ig). This game made me procrastinate playing games and made me do chores instead. I just cant get myself to finish it. Gave it a 2 because atleast the setting is interesting. Thats my hot take \o/