Finished: Bioshock

I picked up the boxed set of Bioshock 1 and 2 a couple of months ago and was so excited to play thought the first one. I got about 4/5ths through it before Halo 4 came out and didn't get back to it until now.

One of my pet peeves about adventure games like this is that when the difficulty ramps up so high and you repeatedly die over and over, you start to forget what you're doing and why you're doing it.

I'm playing Bioshock on the normal difficulty and I'm about finished with the game, when all of the sudden they completely flip the game over on it's head and tie your hands to your own feet. I was happily dealing with harder parts of the game with a couple of deaths here and there when I was acting stupid, but after you reach a major milestone in this game, the enemies are three times as hard to kill and it just becomes an exercise trying to get a little farther than the last time you died in order to make any progress. And, since there isn't a penalty for dying at all, it doesn't make any seance why the game got so hard, so quickly.

What was a game that was interesting and beautiful with great voice acting, level design and flow is now a boot camp in the desert with barely any water. This great game of chess is now just a snowball fight and the other kids have rocks in their snow balls. All of the sudden my weapons are doing very little damage to the generic enemies, alarms are triggering around every corner, causing sentry bots and general chaos to rain upon me and I haven't even gotten to the the part in the game when I'm supposed to be chasing down the last enemy. I'm struggling just to make it to him. That's all good and well in some games, but it makes no sense in Bioshock's context.

Hopefully this experience won't ruin the end of the game for me, like I fear. Bioshock is a well crafted game that is involving and magical. I got to this part in the game really wanting my scripted revenge on the evildoer. I played right into Bioshock's story and it felt good doing it. Now, I just want it to be over with so I can't start the next game and forget all about, what I would consider to be, Bioshock's one mistake: an ending sequence too big for it's own britches.

Update: after finally getting to the last boss in Bioshock and dying once I had to wonder what the idea of kicking the gamer out to the title screen was for. The whole time your playing this game there at no penalties for dying. Was I supposed to stop and start a new game?

85% great game, 10% repetitive dying is pointless and 5% what?

Hey, I think I just invented a new type of review score.