I got Bioshock for Christmas last year and recently I became determined to actually play through it and complete the game. I got a bunch of cool magic spells, stat buffs, and badass weapons. I even did some of the extra stuff too, like inventing a bunch of ammo, doing all the camera research, and finding all the Little Sisters(I harvested some D:).

The storyline developed pretty well and kept me motivated to continue playing the game. I enjoyed the big play twist at the climax of the game and from that point on, the puzzle pieces of how Rapture, the Big Daddies, Little Sisters, and Jack were create(or raised) started to fit together cohesively.

I thought the storyline was great, but I have two gripes with the game. The first issue I have with Bioshock is that two of the areas of rapture involved me going around that area to collect certain items to build something. Granted, they need something besides killing a bunch of enemies and grinding for better abilities to keep the gameplay fresh. I personally don’t have much of a taste for scavenger hunt missions in games. I think I have done them too many times by this point in life. I didn’t mind the first one in Arcadia because I felt it did a great job of introducing the mechanic of gathering items to create power items and tonics.

The second time was used to gather items to build a bomb to blow up Rapture’s core(I think). By that time, I was so jacked up on Adam, I don’t see why I couldn’t have blown up the core with what I already had in my arsenal.

This brings me to my second gripe: difficulty. I picked normal for the difficulty but I think I should have picked hard instead. The game seemed really challenging at the beginning because I had nothing. Big Daddy battles kept me on my toes and I would die a lot in those early fights. However, once I was able to invent items like exploding shotgun shells, Big Daddies would drop at my feet within a minute. Then I would get a crap load of Adam from his companion Little Sister, and get plasmid spells that made me unstoppable. To be honest, I defeated most of the splicers by just stunning them with electricity and then hitting them over the head with a wrench. If they were resistant to that, I burnt them to a crisp.

It became too easy to get cash for first aid kits and too easy to get items to build powerful ammunition. Not only that, some of the tonic’s I used to buff my abilities made combat and hacking way too easy.

By the time I faced the game’s final(and only) boss, he was no match for me. His shit got seriously ruined. I want to think that if I played the game in hard mode, that the resources I could collect would be far more limited and make the game more challenging to get through. Maybe I could rescue all the Little Sisters and not harvest any so I can get the other ending. Right now, I want to take a break from Pipe Dreams hacking and beat shit with wrenches to play one of the many games I haven’t beaten yet.