Return to BioShock (Hard Difficulty)

Although I had developed a strong sense of apathy towards my Xbox 360 following my completion of Prince of Persia (2008) in January, only playing a little Dead Space and Guitar Hero: World Tour in the interim, I've recently jumped back on the bandwagon by getting really into BioShock for about a week, which was just enough time to finish out the game on its hardest difficulty setting.

While my positive feelings towards this game certainly diminished after I ran into a rather unfortunate glitch halfway through a previous attempt at the Medium difficulty setting, a glitch which effectively forced me to have to start the game over, therefore opting to just put that off until a later date, I have now come back around on the game and still consider it to be one of the best I have.

That said, much like Dead Space on a harder difficulty setting, this game was quite hard at first, but once you had the ability to start upgrading your character and to better manage your resources, the game got fairly easy. Sure, BioShock might not be as scary as Dead Space, but it is certainly more clearly a labor of love, having an extreme amount of detail poured into the game by its creators, a rarity in the world of shooters, to be sure.

Anyway, now that I've played the game through 2.5 times, have seen both of the endings, and have gotten all but two Achievements (will I play it through again just to get these?), I do think my initial assessment that the latter boards are a bit less inspired than the first handful holds up fairly well, but the last board tends to make up for this some by ending strongly. Easily my favorite board in the game is the fourth, which is almost sort of a story within the story where your character essentially becomes captive to a lunatic music director who won't let you leave until you kill all his personal enemies, taking pictures of each for this twisted quadtych he has in this large atrium. This board just oozes style and is often as creepy as anything else in the game, so despite being the board in which I caught my previous glitch, I still love it immensely!

Incredible game. And considering it's only $30 now and a sequel is in the works for later this year, anyone that's even slightly interested in an intelligent shooter loosely based on Atlas Shrugged shouldn't hesitate to pick it up!