Submission + - Bioshock: did the reviewers mess up? (custompc.co.uk)
mr_sifter writes: "With a whopping average review score of 96% it's clear that the press can't heap enough praise on Bioshock — yet some are beginning to wonder just how it managed to get such high scores. In this column one gamer argues that far from being a masterpiece, Bioshock is derivative stuff, and its high review scores represent a serious lapse by the games press.
"The underwater city of Rapture is a thing of beauty, but most of the locations you actually see in the game are repetitive and dull. It's all dripping corridors and small, dark rooms, with only the occasional port hole to provide a view of some kelp and corpses to lighten things up. The enemies, aside from the Big Daddies are uninspiring. Mostly you've got a horde of maudlin zombie types, called Splicers, and gun turrets; pretty much the same sort of stuff anybody who played through System Shock 2 has killed enough of to last a lifetime.... the boring enemy design is further weakened by poor AI: the splicers' basic tactic is just to run at you, weaving around and cackling. You may recognise this behaviour from, ooh, most PC games of the past fifteen years, and also schoolchildren at playtime.
"Then there are the game's primitive controls; Bioshock completely lacks modern innovations such as the ability to lean around corners or aim down the gun sights, and your character moves at a fixed pace — a pace more suited to viewing paintings in a gallery rather than evading gun turrets or, heaven forbid, fighting.""