I’ve never understood how people have always claimed Bioshock was 2007 GOTY and it changed games. The game is watered down System Shock literally and figuratively especially when you compare the mechanics.

The setup getting to Rapture, Big Daddies, Andrew Ryan twist and initial survival horror feeling were cool but gameplay has always felt clunky and off.

Plasmids were nothing special, going back to Jak and Daxter for example, you had the ecos that gave you different abilities. As much as people hate it Infinite had better gameplay and great ideas. Thought it also had issues with story and overstaying its welcome.

Now a lot of people fail to see how the first Bioshocks popularity managed to regress games. It popularized the pickup and listening to recordings to understand backstory of events and people, it does this decently. The issue came when everyone started using this as a cop out for proper good storytelling. Remember the”we don’t rely on traditional storytelling we rely on a lot of environmental storytelling “ theme that games still have with random recordings scattered around an open world.

Another thing is Bioshock is not an immersive sim, I don’t know where people got that idea from. I’m guessing it’s bc Ken Levine snd it has Shock in the name. The game doesnt contain any of the ImSim element.