Ok, I am no where smart enough to realize all the things going on in regards to objectivism that the staff at Gamespy did, and oddly enough the target market for gaming (I assume is 13 to 25 year old males) consists of a large portion who wouldn't get it. Maybe this is needed as gamers get older, but it doesn't mean we get smarter ;) Anyway the story was very good except for the inconsistencies in it, for instance the way Little Sisters are immune until you have to protect one (adding one line of dialog to cover this issue, feels like that scene from Thank You For Smoking where they have to justify smoking in space). These issues appear consistently in the game and are done for the sake of gameplay, but for a game which is supposed to be for the thinking man it really shouldn't have happened.
The look of the game is amazing, it is stylized perfectly with a consistent theme across the game but with each level having it's own unique feeling. The look of the enemies is also brilliant, I mean where can you fight a giant in 1940's deep sea suit with a drill for a hand.
The gameplay is fairly straight forward for anyone who has ever played a FPS, with few new elements. The combination of abilities, skills, weapons and mods all harken directly from Deus Ex (yes, and it copied it from System Shock) but with games that brought this before they were far slower and more thinking. BioShock has no issue to send 10 maniacs of different types at you at once. What this means is all those abilities to use different ammo or abilities come down to what ever you have loaded at that point, wasting what could've been a great system. The one difference to this is late in the game you lose control over your powers and randomly switch between them (even getting ones you never had before, breaking the story again), but this allows you to see what each power does and maybe change your mind about something late in the game. More of the game should be like this, especially the point where you become a Big Daddy, which basically means the difference is a stupid round screen rather than a square one and louder foot steps. 2k take a hint from Halo or Riddick, where near the end you get a big fun point (Halo has the warthog drive and Riddick the robot romp. Riddick's is better since it is the robot who has kicked your ass all round that prison). The gameplay has two points worth noting, firstly the camera which acts like a weapon (ammo = film) but each successful shot of an enemy, turret, drone etc... increases damage you deal to that type of enemy, or makes them less effective or gives you a new ability. It basically rewards you for taking time to do more than kill, or slowly attack your prey and get that good shot before the battle. The second gameplay element is not a good one, it's the vitachambers. These respawn you when you die, with actually more health than before and no penalty. Basically it removes the main stick from running headlong into battles and dying, in other words the complete opposite of the camera. In fact the AI is about as smart as a dog, since you can easily get them to follow you to the vitachamber so it becomes spawn -> shoot -> die -> spawn -> shoot -> die spawn -> shoot -> die, etc...
The AI is in fact smarter than a dog, but being built on the UT2k3 engine I would expect it into be better. Basically they attack stupidly (no squad control or use of cover), then when hurt enough run off to a medic station. If 2k seriously had one guy full time on water effect's why didn't they have one person full time on AI?!?
Anyway it is a much better game than Quake 4 or most of the crap that is coming out of the game studios, but it doesn't raise any bars.