Developer: 2K Boston / 2K Australia
Publisher: 2K Games
Release Date: August 21, 2007 (NA) | September 13, 2016 (Remastered)
Played Platform: PC
Buy: Original / Remastered
A lot of websites highly praised this game with high scores and is even some people’s favorite game. However, I thought otherwise.
I played this game for a few hours awhile back and decided to come back and finish it. Had to start from the beginning because I forgot the story. At first, my memory was coming back to what the story and the setting was like and it slowly hooked me in. You are a survivor in a plane crash and finds a device next to the lighthouse that leads to a city underwater. After arriving, you realize that the city is running havoc and someone named Atlas decides to help you to survive in the city.
I was expecting this game to be similar to Borderlands because of similar mechanics of upgrading your weapons or acquiring different superpowers called plasmids.
(list of some of the plasmids)
However, as I got deeper into the story, I was slowly losing interest and decided to change the difficulty to easy due to people on the Bioshock subreddit telling others to finish the game for the story. I like the fact that I could kill enemies either by guns or using plasmids like electricity or freeze them with ice. Also, able to hack machines to work for you.
However, the thing that slowly lost my interest was the constant hacking that I was doing by connecting the pipes from beginning to end. The part that frustrated me the most was when I reached a point of no return due to obstacles that are on the way or when the liquid is too quick that you had to give up and try again.
(example of the hacking game)
If you decide to spend in-game cash, you can buy autohack kit to hack without connecting the pipes; by the middle to end of the story, you start earning a lot of money, but they cap it to $500. I hoped that they could have put a variety of mini games to hack a machine and higher the cap to $999. I believe that the hacking just took the enjoyment of my experience with the game.
Additionally, I was surprised that this game was not a horror or a suspense game because throughout the game, I was constantly getting goosebumps because enemies kept appearing out of nowhere behind you with zero noise. Also, the music in this game played a huge part making the game more suspenseful than it should have been.
Lastly, Steam users were bashing on the Remastered version because it kept crashing, but I had no problem. If you happen to pick up the Remastered version, it comes with additional content such as Director’s Commentary that you need to find throughout the different levels. Also, there is a section in the main menu named additional content that you can play which I decided to skip and there is also a museum level that shows the different sketches that the 2K team went through while building the game if you are interested in.
aeromentality 