To make it short, it's a great game, but it's pretty much the same game as System Shock 2, except toned down a bit to make it easier for consoles players...
That sounds bad, but it still makes it one of the best FPS released recently. 

haven't finished it yet, but i don't really think you can call it a 'spritual successor' to systemshock 2.

it's pretty much just a shooter. there's a lot of variety with different plasmids, but the effective ones are really just the direct damage ones. bees are handy as CC, because guys just tend to stand around yelling "i'm covered in bees!".

it's like they started off making it cool like SS2, then at the last minute decided to really dumb it down and turned it into a shooter.

that's not to say this isn't a great game though. graphics are top notch, with a consistent theme throughout and really well thought out level design.

movement, thankfully is very responsive. this is one place where i'm glad they deviated from SS2. i didn't like the floaty movement in SS2, but in bioshock it's nothing like that. you still move pretty slow compared to HL2 or Q4, and there's no sprint (or walk?? o.0) but it fits with the game.

i don't know if it was the publisher that wanted the game dumbed down, or if they did it because of the xbox (damned consoles! >_<) but to me, it really brings the game down a notch.
not having an inventory is just plain stupid, and having to go to a gene bank just to check what gene tonics i have equiped (and what tonics i have stored) is also stupid. weapons don't degrade (which would have made a LOT more sense in bioshock than it did in SS2) so you can pretty much use your stronger weapons with impunity.
the ammo conservation and item scanvenging is gone from SS2. I'm routinely full on money, and there are vending machines all over the place. i seem to ALWAYS be full on flame thrower ammo, same with freezing ammo (i save eletric gel for daddies).
personally, i find the electric gel overpowered. it makes big daddies a joke as it stuns them for a half second or so and it's a constant stream and it does a fuckton of damage. couple that with lightning plasmid and electric buckshot and you pretty much perma stun a big daddy from 100% to 0%. not only that, but daddies are also affected by freezing plasmid, so even if you're out of electric buck or gel, you can still effectively CC them making fighting 2 at the same time entirely doable.

on the plus side, the story is really good with interesting twists and such. voice acting is just as good as SS2, and models for main characters are awesome-- much better than SS2 (animation in particular is very fluid and natural).

anyway, probably more to be said, but i'm hungry. :) 

says everything that needs to be said on the subject:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/zeropunctuation/1394-Zero-Punctuation-BioShock 

I opened this thread to post that link. Beaten.

(Note that that awesome review *does* contain a couple of minor spoilers though.)

I pretty much agree with it entirely. Fun game. A great game even, when you look at overall quality, theme, look, aesthetics, etc.

Dumbed down for console and/or the general stupid/lazy masses? Yep. But still good.

My two biggest gripes: 1) Lots of inviso-walls. 2) You can't rebind certain default keys on the PC. I had to jam my typical config over to one side of the keyboard and was still kinda messed up... 

You can't rebind certain default keys on the PC

Actually I found a way to circumvent the problem:
In your ...Bioshock\Builds\Release folder > DefUser.ini, navigate to the "triggerSwapHold = new deault" section, somewhere on top of the document and manually edit key/mouse binds to suit your needs...

You can also hack the game FOV to your convenience and for more widescreen pleasure, using Racer_S tool!
More info and dl link here:

http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11685 

haven't finished it yet, but i don't really think you can call it a 'spritual successor' to systemshock 2.

You're the sole survivor of a major catastrophe, and you have (note: not by your own choice) to negotiate the hazardous halls of a devastated city/spaceship, the denizens of which have turned into inhuman monstrosities. You have a small radio so your one human contact can actually speak to you, and you keep finding logs of what life was like just before things turned sour, and what led to the downfall. You can use cyber modules/tonics to augment your body. The story and atmosphere are in a major role both.

Granted, Bioshock is more shooty, much more simple, but I don't really think you can not call it a "spiritual successor" to System Shock 2. There are even obvious references to SS2, the first ones being the name and the wrench. 

It looks gorgeous even though I hate art deco.

The big daddies are awesome and if you kill them you're a monster.

Kill all the little sluts.

The last 1/3rd after you kill Ryan is boring and not as high quality as what came before. Escort missions always suck, "becoming a big daddy" obviously only involves a post processing shader, living quarters/areas in games always suck.

The gameplay is cool, but also weird because the plasmids let you play the game in wildly different manners, but you always end up sticking to one strategy and then complain that the gameplay is samey. I see lots of people go "well I just put all my tonics into melee skills and then I just wrenched Fontaine, the gameplay sucked." and then other people "I maxed my engineering skills and hacked everything. I never even fired my own gun, the gameplay sucked."

The electric gel gun is overpowered against big daddies, but I never found any fucking batteries to make ammo for it.

Cohen was cool.

Way too many invisible phys walls.

Level design was a lot of times very cluttered, hard to see your 'walkable areas' if you understand. Especially so in that nature area I forgot the name of. Some of the later levels like Fort Frolic and the Orphanage had some seriously confusing layouts as well.

Fuck that beehive/winery level.

Splicers are boring as fuck.

Didn't see the 'Would you kindly' bit coming, but I pretty much expected Atlas was a bad thing.

Overall I got a positive impression of the game.
7.2834 / 10