Earlier this month, I decided to start playing the BioShock Collection, starting of course with the original BioShock (remastered for PS4). I grew interested in BioShock because of clips I’ve seen of the three games on PlayStation Access and the like, but it being an FPS held me back until I got it free as a PS Plus Game.
This was my first time playing a first-person shooter in a long long long long long time…so long I can’t even remember the last time I tried one (other than Portal, which I don’t count LOL). All I could remember of my attempts to playing FPS was being unable to deal with the controls because it was “backward” from how my brain thinks and that I struggled to not get seasick.
I don’t know if my brain has changed over the years (likely) or if BioShock just isn’t like those other FPS I vaguely remember, but I was able to mostly pick up the gameplay quickly and quite enjoyed it. It was downright addictive, even, and I kept losing track of time every time I played! The only thing I struggled with was remembering the weapon/plasmoid selector versus using, and not realizing until near the end of the game that I could hold down R1/L1 to actually select what I wanted versus having to keep cycling through LOL
I played on easy level because that seemed to make the most sense for me stepping into this genre. And while I skated through a few battles by the skin of my teeth, I didn’t die so yay! I was able to get the mechanics of using the different weapons and utilizing plasmoids pretty well and actually managed to get some headshots (which I hadn’t bothered with at first because I didn’t think they counted as extra). I earned 58% of the possible trophies as I missed some items even though I thought I’d explored really well.
In terms of the story, it was really good. Complicated, but followable and picking up the various voice recordings and through the conversations with the few folks still in Rapture helped fill out the world while adding to the feeling that I really was a stranger exploring this place and just figuring it out as I went. Now, I did know about a bit about the big “twist” in advance (from all the game videos), but not all of it and I’d mistakenly thought that twist came at the end of the game. So I still had plenty of surprises and “whoas” to hit after that. I got the canon/good ending, which made me happy and was a good, satisfying conclusion to the game.
For complaints, my biggest is the company’s blocking streaming all three games in the collection through the native console options, so I couldn’t stream my playthrough *grr* Beyond that, the subtitling sucks monkey nuts! I mean WTF did they even add it for? It was way too small and hard to read, so I missed some bits of the story from not being able to read them when I couldn’t hear them well. Other than that, unlike most games, this one doesn’t show you how long you played or give you any stats, which would have been nice.
Oh, I didn’t try the challenge rooms – I may eventually go back and do that, but I was too excited to start BioShock 2 to bother with it at the time.