NOTE: I did not finish this game. However, I played about half of it, so I think I've played enough to form an opinion.

Bioshock starts out incredibly strong: An interesting world, Solid gunplay, Unique abilities, and great atmosphere. Solid stuff. However, the problems become apparent fairly early on. Namely, upon one's first death. There is no punishment for dying. Sorry, there is a punishment: The inconvenience of walking back from a spawn point to wherever you died. However, the enemy is still as damaged as before, and all progress is saved. This means first aid kits are pretty much just for convenience, and any encounter can be trivialized.

I just want to stress that this is already a massive potential turnoff for me. Games at their core are about making meaningful choices, and choices can't be meaningful if there's no consequences. Now, games can be easy and have meaningful choices. The good Kirby games are fun because of all the copy abilities, and the fun comes from trying all of them. Same with Pokemon (Both of these series do have punishments for losing, but I digress). While Bioshock does have many fun uses of progression, many choices are entirely arbitrary and, as cliche as it is to say, the illusion of free choice. The best example of this is the hacking system.

The idea is simple: You can hack robots and several kinds of shops/stations for different benefits. The robots are a solid mechanic, because the player has to make the risk of getting close before hacking. There's also safes that are super hard to hack, which have much more risk in doing so. However, hacking first aid dispensors, ammo stations, and crafting stations for discounts is entirely arbitrary, because there's no reason to not hack any of them. The worst case scenario is that you trigger security which summons drones, but this is extremely easy to avoid. You may get hurt by a short circuit, but once again, this is usually very easily avoidable. The point is, you should absolutely hack every station you see, meaning you'll have to play the same minigame over and over again.

Even a few cool progression abilities feel pretty underdeveloped. There's an ability very similar to the Gravity Gun from Half-Life 2, but it's utilization is even more basic than it was in HL2, and it mostly just boils down to tossing trash cans at enemies. However, most of the abilities are at least alright, and add to that whole meaningful decision thing I was talking about.

I do have to give the game credit though, fighting the Big Daddies is pretty fun. There's much more tension because in the time it takes to walk back to a Big Daddy, the sisters could've already escaped, meaning you really want to take them out in one go. Planning all of that out is pretty fun, although it still doesn't entirely escape that difficulty problem I discussed.

Anyway, I may come back to this game, but I haven't had fun the last few times I've started it up. The story is kind of interesting, but nothing special, really (Although I heard there's a big twist near the end, so maybe that's really cool). Either way, 4/10, close to a 5.