** possible spoilers **
I see your points undead, and I agree with them in many ways.
Luckily, we can't be right or wrong about this. It's all entirely subjective, and obviously we get different levels of enjoyment out of different things.
Personally, I was VERY intrigued by Bioshock during the first few hours of play. I was completely absorbed by the whole introduction and the first couple of levels. I felt this game was going to blow my mind, but to me it just fell far short of that. I will admit that the setting is quite unique, and not only that, it's fantastically engaging and disturbing.
But the problem is that I don't think the gameplay itself supports this setting all that well, nor do I agree with a lot of the design decisions made. Some of my primary criticisms are (don't read if you can't handle serious criticism of Bioshock
):
Vita Chamber implementation
They were too abundant and they were forced upon you, since you couldn't disable them in any way. It's true that you could simply quick-load whenever you died, and indeed that's exactly what I did, but I was constantly aware that I simply couldn't die no matter what I did. I don't like having to meta-game to avoid this kind of problem, and the tension is severely reduced as a result.
Ammo/Health/EVE/Money carry limit
Let's rule out realism being the reason, because I can obviously carry a LOT of weapons including rocket launchers, flame throwers, etc. So this is a balance design decision. The main problem is that you eliminate the incentive to scavenge the levels for extra stuff and to hack vending machines, because you can only ever carry 9 kits and a similarly low amount of ammo. This is an essential change from System Shock, and a change which directly punishes the careful and deliberate player, by catering to the cowboy shooter guy. The resources are SO abundant in the game, that you will NEVER feel you're running short except for the first couple of levels. Before every single fight of importance, you will find more than you need and you can easily stock up on everything.
General difficulty level
I completed the game on medium, because that's the difficulty that generally suits me the best I find. But in Bioshock I found that every single enemy could be killed with more or less the exact same plasmid/weapon combo from start to finish and they were EASILY killed. Yes, the first 1-2 big daddy fights were challenging, but it doesn't take long to figure out safe strategies for them either. This is a significant problem, because with 70 plasmids to play with you're facing a game where you only need a couple of them to succeed. Never ever give the player a million toys without giving him a need for them. The whole premise of what the gameplay was supposed to be about - namely creative ways of killing splicers - is more or less totally destroyed by having them be a joke to kill.
Severe lack of replayability
First of all, the oh-so-advertised moral choice in the game is a JOKE. First of all, you get nearly exactly the same amount of ADAM (overall) for freeing the girls as you do for killing them. Secondly, you get extra plasmids AND you get extra random goodies. On top of that, you get a somewhat more meaningful ending sequence. So, do you want to be EVIL and stupid, or do you want to be GOOD and smart? Complete cop-out and it contains nothing even remotely close to a grey area, which means it brings... yes... NOTHING to the game. This pathetically black/white vision of morality is getting very old and it has been handled much better in other games.
Oh, this was about replayability. Yes, the reason I brought that up is that I, to my great dismay, found out that taking the "evil" route has... wait for it... 0.001% influence on the experience as a whole. Apart from less resources overall as I mentioned (great incentive to go that route for a replay), you get a few different words from Tenenbaum about how nasty you are and you get a different totally insane ending sequence about you bent on taking over the world or something. Other than that, there is no difference (I hear) which nullifies this aspect as a reason for replaying the game.
But it's worse.
By omitting character generation and RPG elements, you remove the possibility to experiment with different character builds. But as if that wasn't enough, you get every single plasmid, weapon, weapon upgrade, ammo type, handed to you during your very first run-through. If you research on your first playthrough, you can also easily get all the relevant plasmids gained from there. Meaning you will have seen all there is to see on the very first run-through.
So the single reason to play it again, would be to hunt for some potentially missed audio logs, which is pretty pathetic compared with the replayability of System Shock 2.
Lack of UI feedback
Why in the world can't I see what passive plasmids I have? Why can't I have a screen from which I can plan ahead and decide what to go for? Why must I find a station to actually figure that out? That's incredibly weak design.
How can it be that when I "invent" stuff, I can't see what I'm already carrying, so I don't accidentally invent more than I need. I can't tell you how many hack tools I bought that I didn't need, but it was quite a few.
Where's my inventory? Come to think of it, why can't I carry any of those goodies I find lying around, like pep-bars etc.? Oh, it would be too complex for the console crowd. I see. Bullshit, they're not that stupid.
Weak design that does nothing to enhance the game.
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Ok, I could go on, but I think you see my point.
I know this all sounds immensely negative and like I enjoy putting it down or something. Fact of the matter is that I DID enjoy the game as a cinematic experience on par with an above average sci-fi movie with a fantastic premise and visual aesthetic - and a horrible ending.
But as a game, it falls FAR short of the previous Shocks and I'm quite disappointed after having waited 8 years for something in this genre.
That's probably the main reason I'm bothering to lash out like this, because it's a genre I hold dear to my heart. After 25 years of gaming, I still find System Shock one of the strongest contenders for best game of all time. Definitely in my personal Top-5, and I've played literally thousands of games.