4.5/5 ★ – Artagah's review of BioShock™.

While not quite as revolutionary and mind blowing as this game felt on release, it still really holds up! The atmosphere is basically unmatched, the narrative and especially the dialogue writing is top notch, the voxophones are such a clever way to tell a story as you continue playing, the idea of magical powers and guns at the same time hasn't been done this well anywhere else before, and the interactive nature of the elemental powers with the environment was mind blowing at the time, even though it was mostly limited to lightning shocking water, and fire melting ice. The pacing and the length is also just right, and it's impossible not to mention the soundtrack, it does a lot of the heavy lifting immersing you in the game's time period. Something that's not mentioned a ton, but the characters are so very memorable and well developed too. I really enjoyed finding out more and more as the game went on about Ryan, Atlas, Suchong, Tennenbaum, Fontaine and even some of the side characters. When it comes to downsides, all I have is a few mechanical nitpicks. I feel like you get used to the first few plasmids you get and you never use the later ones which felt more experimental and less universally useful. The cameras and the stupid security bots were the end of me and the timer on those was absolutely ridiculous and way too punishing. On top of that, the security bot sound design was horrendous and got annoying fast. The hacking mini game kinda broke the pacing after a while since it came up A LOT and was borderline impossible on higher difficulties. Due to those 2 reasons I bought most of my hacks or used hacking bypass items. Some of the guns felt super underpowered, ESPECIALLY compared to the 1-2 punch combo of shock + wrench which killed basically everybody besides big daddies. Special ammo was incredibly useful, but I wish your carrying capacity for it was higher on some guns. Overall the small nitpicks I had didn't substantially hinder the experience and I thoroughly enjoyed my time in this moody spooky immersive underwater New York 😁