Bioshock (PC DVD) (Video Game)

Great game. Ignore all the people emo-raging about Bioshock and the "difficulty" installing it. Its very easy to install and works well on my mid range 5 year old pc as well as on my new mid range pc. Bioshock is unique. It has superb graphics, an absorbing story line and excellent AI. I found that playing Bioshock in the dark with headphones on made the experience that bit more frightening and gripping. The copy protection is a bit irritating but i was willing to go through it to play the game.

BioShockingly awful This is one of the worst fps games I have ever played, I was expecting a lot more with this one. I do very much enjoy fps games as it is my favourite genre, Bioshock is deceived to be one of the best fps games ever created, which is of course based on own opinions but I feel that it is too over rated. The graphics are amazing I'll give it that, but the gameplay is very repetative, the story is something quite origional but not strong enough to keep me gripped. Overall boring game but good graphics.

Great game, but be careful The game itself is awesome. Very atmospheric, quite long for a next gen release, very immersive and just tonnes of fun. It's the first game i've bought for my PC and thouroughly enjoyed in quite a while. Crysis was too "wow look at me...i'm shiney", Hellgate london was a waste of time and a huge letdown, unreal 3 was another let down and the same goes for alot of games recently. There is masses of fun to be had with plasmids (Genetic upgrades which give you various powers) and using them in combination with weapons which can be upgraded just increases that fun (think Painkiller). Freezing a Splicer and then smashing it to peices with a wrench takes a while to get old then you do it with the more difficult and annoying splicers and a rush of satisfaction goes through you as you kill a particulary annoying splicer that just wouldn't die. The story isn't the most original and fantastic thing you'll ever play through but it is still packed with dark humour and is voice acted quite well. There is tonnes to explore in each level and lots of upgrades to find/buy from hacking boosters to health upgrades. Now, to the down side. Firstly, for this game to be worth buying for the PC you need to be able to play it on the full settings. I play it on an XP system specialy built for gamming and i have to stay at a resolution of 1024x768 and switch of "Force global illumination" to play it smoothly, i can't comment about running it on vista with full DX10 settings. My spec is: Intel core 2 Duo E6750 2.67ghz Nvidia 8800GT OC 512mb edition 2gig OCZ Reaper 1066mhz ram If you want to check if you can run it and how well you can run it before you buy it just google "PC requirements lab", install the plugin and it will test your PC and give you a detailed analysis of your system and tell if you can run it on High/low and what is stopping you from running it on high/low if you can't. Secondly; If, in theory, you are lucky enough to be able to run this in all it's glory theres no garuntee you will actually be able to. There are a mass of flaws and bugs in the game even after a Patch/Update (v1.01) that will cause random crashes and the sound not to work. I personally have problems with the sound and did have an issue with the game crashing whilst it was saving at the end of loading the "Neptunes Bounty" level. I havn't managed to fix the sound but the loading bug was a problem with bioshock corrupting save's if you overwrite an old one. To fix it i made a new save just before i loaded the level, exited the game, loaded the save i had just created and then preceeded to the next level. Others are not so lucky, especially people running windows vista from what i have seen while trawling the net looking for bug fixes and answers. From the contact people have had with 2K games it looks like they have given up and are providing a shocking level of customer service. As already mentioned, this game has some security which can cause some problems. The security is called "SecureRom" which is anti-piracy software which is well known for causing various problems and conflicts with software AND hardware. If you are unsure about buying this game for the PC and you own an Xbox 360 i would suggest you go buy it for your 360.

A truly excellent roleplaying game...although.... Oh I am so annoyed at this game! I had to give the overall rating of the game 3 stars simply due to the technical issues which I am sure you have read many other times in other reviews about Bioshock. It is a major pain and if it were not for that then it would have definately have the full 5. But all that aside this is truly an awesome game. The role-playing/FPS/horror look that it went for certainly paid off giving us a very stylish and well drawn game. The setting is superb, caught somewhere between hell and 'the olden days' offering us some great scenery and a fantastic musical score. The storyline is very well thought up, and provides a good amount of twists to keep you interested and at times, genuinely taken aback. The weapons are well done and the plasmids (modifications made to your own body to give you 'powers' like telekenises and freezing things) are a joy to use. Its a very cool game. The enemies are well thought up and genuinely creepy, and the big baddies and bosses have genuine depth that makes it much more than your average 'kill everything' game. The morality and ethics of the game give a good spin and force you to think about what you are doing and how you would like to proceed. All in all I would HIGHLY recommend this game, but it might be better played on the XBox to avoid getting bogged down under technical problems :)

Finish the game before you release it 2K If I buy a TV I expect to be able to watch it once it's installed. If I buy a cooker I expect to be able to cook food with it once it's installed. If I buy a game I expect to be able to play it once I've installed it, yes there might be additional software that I have to install (like the latest version of DirectX for example), but once done I expect to be able to jump right into it. What I do not expect is having to scour the internet for 2 hours trying to find fixes for bugs that should have been resolved at the testing stage. I know people will say "yes but there are loads of different types of PC's and they can't iron out all the bugs", but I say to them that I do not own a unusual graphics card or a relatively unknown processor. The components of my machine are common ones and I would call a black screen when trying to launch the game a pretty major bug. All in all the game is quite good but I will not rate this game high when it hasn't even been finished yet.