Difficulty:

Very Easy

Time Spent:

20 to 40 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Disappointing"

Ok, I'm late to this party, but there was so much hype about this game when it came out I deliberately ignored it. But that many fans can't be wrong, can they...?

Yes they can.

This is an adventure game, set in the under-water kingdom of Rapture - a 19th Century Dystopia created by a flawed visionary called Ryan. You play a stranded intruder, dragged into a disturbing war the megalomanics vying for control, and their drug-powered "Splicer" armies, whilst trying to escape back to the surface. But the path to freedom is an arduous an complex one...

First off, let me just say that I hate games that have respawning enemies, just for the sake of keeping you busy. And this game has that in spades. Every time you go back to a room, it will have respawned a few splicers for you to tediously hack down. So I disliked it from the start.

And despite the ability to swap and change "plasmids" (read: magic powers) and weapons, you end up continually falling back on some favourite hand cannons unless forced, by lack of ammo or invulnerable enemies, to change. So that's not really a feature, either.

Ok - the beautiful surroundings are something to behold - the atmosphere is perfectly in keeping with the dark storyline, and the flourishes like the golden sheen around key collectables is perfect.

And the storytelling, via the in-game action and missions, and the collectable tape-recordings which flesh out the complex inter-relationships between the characters, is very well done. It is refreshing to have a game with such complex interplay and pacing in the narrative. The heart-wrenching relationships between Little Sisters and Big Daddies are artfully told.

But at the end of the day, the fighting is boring. You have to hack and slash so many splicers it becomes a tedious chore. Yawn, another spider splicer? Boom. And another nitro splicer? Bang.

And the exploring is so disorientating I found myself continually backtracking and trying to figure out where I had and had not visited. But you are forced to keep hunting for ammo and "Eve" (magic serum) so you cannot ignore the complex maps and just complete the objectives, you have to keep trawling through locations in the hope of a few bullets.

When all was said and done, completing it felt like a chore completed rather than the triumph it should have.

So in the end this is a very pretty but unfulfilling meat-grinder of a puzzle game, which pleases the eye but ends up frustrating the mind and soul.