I haven't gotten to try Multiplayer on PSN. I rented it on Thursday from Blockbuster (they broke the street date for some reason. Oh well, I didn't know it wasn't out yet) and it's due back tomorrow, so I'll have to turn it in the day people will actually be able to play it.
The game felt... lackluster. And yes, the game is
very, very Bioshock with a dash of Half-Life 2 thrown in.
It's not just the powers that scream Bioshock, it's kinda the entire aura and presentation of the game. Especially the entire opening sequence before you get to the first fight.
The plot is
absolutely terrible. The entire basis of EVERYTHING is that you missed one thing that they made painfully obvious. My best guess is that they wrote the plot linearly, actually starting at the beginning of the game and working their way onward, because that's the only explanation I can think of for why the ending seems like they sat around, looked at everything they had built up with, and then realized there were too many loose ends to pull together into one cohesive summary so they wrapped it up with duct tape and called it a day.
I kinda felt that the powers were useless on my second playthrough on hard, or whatever they named the top difficulty. Impulse is fun. Pull is practically combat-worthless because the throw power is so low; I didn't even know you could pull riot shields off of enemies until my friend told me because I was having no trouble killing those guys with just a burst from the Valkyrie to their hand or foot. Because the Deadlock/time bubble slowed your bullets down, as well, it was just like throwing a no-mans-land zone on enemies that you didn't want to bug you but you didn't want to deal with either.
The insta-kill was a little too expensive and you get the Reversion power a bit too late in the game for it to be super useful, although I did enjoy using it because the AI is terrible and the enemies would simply not shoot at it as it went about destroying entire room-fulls.
The Seeker was
really fun when you first pick it up. The last time you pick it up, it's
really boring if you want to empty the clip because it loses its novelty after ~10 shots. It's a neat trick but it's not actiony enough to generate too much fun.
I felt the game was worth my rent (especially considering the campaign is only 8-10 hours and I couldn't try the multiplayer) but I can't recommend buying it for the single player alone. It wants to be Bioshock but it's
not in the same ranks as Bioshock.
P.S. As someone who loves to delve into story and settings, coming off as a D&D nerd for years, and even as someone who actually sat and read every in-game book in WoW which sucks up hours upon hours of gametime, I stopped listening to the recordings in-game and reading the notes halfway through my first play-through. They're boring as hell and don't give anything back.
, the game that is, I'll be seeing the movie within the next week or so...
