I can see why people loved this when it first came out but it has not aged well. I wish I played it back then completely fresh, maybe I would've enjoyed it more.

Story-wise it's fine. The whole experience feels very lonely, you never meet many of the characters face to face, it's all through audio logs and through calls/voice overs. I feel like the world building would've got me better if the world felt more lived in, but maybe that's the point of a collapsed dystopia. I did know some of the twists just because it's been out for so long now, probably would've enjoyed them more if it was all new to me.

Combat is great, good balance of good gun play and the plasmid/powers, although the whole time I was in combat I wish I had been playing Bioshock Infinite more as it had way more interesting powers and combat options. This is obviously the first game in the series, it has to set the basis that the sequels can expand upon but most of the plasmids are useless. I beat the whole game using Ice, Fire and the Insect Swarm, everything else felt underpowered or pointless especially when managing resources.

My biggest gripe is the sound design. So many times you can't hear the story-critial dialogue and wouldn't even know someone was talking if the subtitles weren't on. The spacial awareness was so off too, when enemies are in the room above or further away they sound like they're behind you, it's completely backwards. Again, maybe it's a relic of the time with most modern games having great surround sound and spacial awareness with their audio but it ruined a lot of moments for me.

I'm glad I played it just to finally cross it off my backlog but I don't think many people would rate it highly if they didn't view it through nostalgia goggles.