I enjoyed BioShock, and am continuing to enjoy System Shock 2. There's a sense of urgency in System Shock 2, perhaps because enemies were a constant threat. System Shock 2 did the same thing, but it had the guts to give you an objective but not tell you how or where you needed to go to do it. There was no escaping the fact that no matter how much freedom and looking around you did, the only way to progress was by following a linear objective. Many times, a hidden area tell a mini-story, either in the way the environment's props are scattered, or through some form of direct storytelling.īioShock was praised for a story that made a statement about standard game contrivances of blindly following orders, but people fail to realize you only had one option (combat aside) in the first place. Vending machines, eating food for health, different ammo types are all present in BioShock yet they come in too great supplyīoth games feature one-off moments of enjoyable discovery. There are magic abilities, but they are a required tool in BioShock, not a possible option that can be avoided entirely The hacking is present, but was made into a minigame that can always be won at any difficulty (i.e., only your time is a factor, and there are no 'dead ends' which would render the hacking attempt impossible soon after you began). The major difference is that I personally feel that BioShock catered too much to a crowd of gamers not used to hard games that require quicksaving every 20-30 seconds. BioShock feels like a more accessible re-interpretation of System Shock 2's core game mechanics. I haven't yet finished System Shock 2, but here are my limited thoughts on a direct game comparison.

System shock 2 alternate ending