And with that, we have completed another Love/Hate series here on IC2S! As soon as I finished Burial at Sea – Episode II and realized that I had no more Bioshock games left to play, I was just struck with how much I love this franchise. Sure, Bioshock 2 and Infinite could never live up to the original, but that first game was such a singular experience (and its sequels are still good games in their own right). In particular, I’m glad that I gave Bioshock 2 the second chance it deserved. I have my issues with it, but it certainly deserved more than the hour I gave it back in 2010. I’m also glad that I got to try out the DLCs for the first time!

Bioshock Games Ranked

Here is how I would rank the Bioshock games and their story DLCs:

• S-tier: Bioshock
  • Duh. It’s legitimately one of the greatest games ever made.
• B-tier: Bioshock Infinite, Minerva’s Den, Bioshock 2
  • Yeah, that’s right, Bioshock is so great that it’s got an entire empty tier between it and the next best entry in the franchise. Bioshock Infinite is the sort of sequel I love to see: one that builds on the original’s story while trying out completely new ideas. For what it’s worth, I enjoy Infinite for what it is, rather than what differentiates it from the prior two games.
  • Minerva’s Den is the perfected slice of Bioshock 2. As a much more concentrated experience, it lacks most of Bioshock 2‘s weaknesses, twists the gameplay in fun ways, and has a pretty great twist.
  • Bioshock 2 is a good game, but it cannot help but feel derivative and tired.
• C-tier: Burial at Sea – Episode II
  • I really like the core gameplay of Burial at Sea – Episode II. Stealth works surprisingly well in the Bioshock Infinite engine! The story I’m much more mixed on: it’s got some cool moments, but a lot of the plot points are questionable to say the least.
• D-tier: Burial at Sea – Episode I
  • Man, the more I think about this DLC, the more sour I get about it. The DLC is not paced well, so it just feels like it ends abruptly. Furthermore, while resource scarcity can result in some intense moments, it more often is just frustrating.

Bioshock Plasmids/Vigors Ranked

• S-tier (aka, “you will never unequip these”): Electro Bolt, Telekinesis, Summon Eleanor, Gravity Well
  • Electro Bolt is just straight-up mandatory to play Bioshock with. It stuns and damages enemies, giving you the opportunity to hit them with your best weapon. That’s really all it needs to do, but it also has really powerful interactions with the environment which make it a default choice every time.
  • Telekinesis is super useful. For one thing, it uses barely any EVE to activate, so you get to have a lot more fun with it. Reaching distant objects is great, and being able to pick up and throw items at your enemies is a blast (especially when fully upgraded, which allows you to just straight-up hurl living enemies around).
  • Summon Eleanor is just plain broken, hence why it’s so high on this list. Summoning an incredibly powerful NPC basically for free who will mess up any enemy you come across? Umm, yes please.
  • Gravity Well is just a real power trip, allowing you to create this fairly large black hole which sucks anything not bolted down in and then collapses in on itself. It’s beyond the level of what normal plasmids do, and is all the more fun for just going for it.
• A-tier: Murder of Crows, Incinerate!, Winter Blast, Target Dummy
  • I loved Murder of Crows in Bioshock Infinite. Not only is it the coolest vigor conceptually, but the game has multiple equipment that directly boost its power, making it absolutely devastating. Any big combat I got into, I’d sent out a Murder of Crows and it would devastate enemies, and then the next wave of them who set off all the trapped corpses.
  • Bioshock Infinite‘s version of Hypnotize comes with a major bonus: it can now auto-hack turrets and robots. This one change alone makes Hypnotize a staple of your arsenal, especially in Burial at Sea where your ammunition is more limited.
  • Incinerate! is my preferred combat plasmid (after Electro Bolt). The damage is decent, the way it causes enemies to panic is really useful for getting some breathing room, and its occasional use as a utility tool to access frozen areas makes it a borderline mandatory plasmid.
  • Shock Jockey ranks lower than Electro Bolt for one major reason: it’s nowhere near as important to Bioshock Infinite‘s gameplay. There are very few situations where you can use Shock Jockey to interact with the environment, and there are less large enemies that you need to stun while fighting. Still very useful, but no longer god-tier.
  • Peeping Tom is incredible in its appearance in Burial at Sea – Episode II. They’ve literally just turned “detective vision” into a plasmid… and I love that idea. My problem with detective vision in games is that you always want to have it active to make sure you don’t miss anything. However, tying it to one of your central resources makes sure that you keep its use limited and judicious. They’ve really gotten the balance right, because I never unequipped it and was always happy to have it. Hell, they’ve even made it so you can turn invisible so you can sneak around, it’s great!
  • Old Man Winter takes the top spot for “freeze-themed ability” by simple virtue that it has some environmental interactions that you can use it for. Otherwise, it’s basically the same as…
  • Winter Blast is also a fine secondary combat plasmid, opening up the potential to get really easy kills on enemies by freezing them solid and then smashing them to pieces. It’s a perfectly fine strategy, so while I give Incinerate! the edge, Winter Blast definitely would be my next go-to.
  • Target Dummy deserves this spot for the sheer fact that it will draw Big Daddies away from you, allowing you to get free hits in on them. If you are strapped for resources, then Target Dummy can be a lifesaver.
• B-tier: Devil’s Kiss, Scout, Sonic Boom
  • Devil’s Kiss is basically Incinerate!, except that it’s a thrown projectile now. The main thing ranking it lower though is that, once again, it has far less environmental interact than it did in the first two Bioshock games.
  • Scout is limited at first, and the degree to which it slows down gameplay can make it an unattractive option. However, once upgraded, it can be incredibly useful and open up a more stealthy playstyle.
  • Undertow is one of the cooler vigors, which gets it some points. However, it isn’t all that useful in this game’s combat system, and it makes me long for Telekinesis.
  • Sonic Boom is cool as a physics show-off, but having your loot get blown away by it isn’t exactly the definition of “fun”…
• C-tier: Insect Swarm, Return to Sender, Bucking Bronco, Charge
  • I really want to like Insect Swarm. It’s easily the coolest plasmid in concept, but in execution… well, it’s a swarm of bees that slowly find an enemy and then kind of damage and annoy them for a little bit. It’s really underwhelming, especially compared to several better options. It can be a bit more useful once upgraded, and I found that it was a decent option when you are on defense, but this isn’t a plasmid that I’m using for any serious reasons.
  • Return to Sender is a decent idea for a plasmid, but because we already have the shield in Bioshock Infinite, I never felt the need to use this thing.
  • Bucking Bronco is alright in Bioshock Infinite, largely due to the upgrades that you can get for it and the more protracted combat making it more likely that an enemy will activate it.
  • I can see Charge being a fun vigor if you’re doing a melee-focused run, but getting into my enemies’ faces just isn’t something I was interested in.
• D-tier: Ironsides, Security Command, Hypnotize (Bioshock 1 & 2), Cyclone Trap
  • Ironsides could be good. You’re very limited on ammunition in Burial at Sea – Episode II, so I can see you getting into a situation where you replenish yourself using a vigor. It’s just not something I ever felt like I needed though, especially compared to just Hypnotizing an enemy instead.
  • Considering the amount of security systems on Rapture, I guess that being able to turn them against your enemies with Security Command is useful? There’s three obvious issues though: 1) there’s not always going to be a security system when you need it, 2) you might just break or hack these security systems anyway, and 3) it’s just not as fun to watch the game kill enemies slower than if you just went in there and did it yourself.
  • Hypnotize is a bit like Security Command, but even more narrow. This only worked on Big Daddies in the first Bioshock. These were, obviously, the best thing to hypnotize anyway, but it made it really rare for you to actually be able to use this plasmid at all. Bioshock 2 extended this to splicers, but… like, do you really gain much by making a single, very fragile splicer fight with you briefly…?
  • Cyclone Trap is… interesting. Like, not only do you have to hope that an enemy actually steps on the trap, but your reward is that they get launched into the air and take a bit of damage. The main benefit is that it stops the enemy from shooting you for a few seconds… but this is just a super underwhelming plasmid.
• F-tier: Enrage
  • Enrage is just the worst. Throw it at an enemy to cause them to attack the nearest target… even if you are that target (which you probably are). This also makes it actively detrimental if there aren’t any other enemies around. Hey, in that case, why not… just fucking Hypnotize the enemy instead? Sure, Hypnotize is a pretty underwhelming plasmid in its own right, but it’s a strict upgrade over Enrage, since it doesn’t risk backfiring on you.

What Would My Ideal Bioshock Sequel Look Like?

Oh man… I mean, I’m perfectly happy never getting another Bioshock game if we’re being perfectly honest. It feels like Bioshock Infinite set the stakes as high as they could go and any follow-up will inherently feel smaller. Plus, let’s be honest, a new Bioshock would inevitably be one of the following:

1. An Unreal Engine 5 remake of the first game. This just feels pointless to me. The original game still looks great, and higher fidelity isn’t going to make that look better enough to be worthwhile (and it also risks “cleaning” the art style up like Bioshock 2 did, which erases some of the weird charm of Rapture). I guess there’s a potential benefit that the gunplay could be tightened up, but I just don’t see this being all that exciting.
2. An open world take on the Bioshock formula. C’mon, we know that this is the direction it would go if they made a Bioshock game today. This could work: just imagine exploring an open world version of Rapture or Columbia! However, I’m burnt out on open worlds and how their inclusion affects gameplay and design. You have to wonder how far 2K would go to push in recurrent spending and various other modern gaming trends that would also corrupt the experience.

That said, if we had to get a new Bioshock game, I would prefer if the game goes back to a more “immersive sim” design philosophy (like the first two games). Plasmids (or whatever the game’s term for them would be) would have environmental interactions again to make them more useful and open up some more playstyles. I would also like if they could give more of the plasmids environmental interactions, as it makes a lot of the other plasmids feel inessential. I’d take cues from Infinite for its shooting: the speed and feedback are just about ideal, although I would add in Bioshock 2‘s “dual wielding” system.

As for the setting? Well, we’ve had an art deco Objectivist city at the bottom of the sea and a turn of the century Christian nationalist city in the sky, so it depends if you want to do a new variation on that concept, or if you want to go in a completely new direction. I can see benefits of both approaches: it’s been long enough that “just another Bioshock-style city” would still be fresh, but it could ultimately end up feeling overshadowed by Infinite‘s expansive scope. I feel like any sequels would probably need to address the meddlesome Luteces, who are a loose end that Infinite did not wrap up.

What Does the Future Hold For Bioshock?

The future is actually looking pretty interesting for Bioshock fans. As of the time of me writing this, 2K have been teasing some sort of announcement about Bioshock. I am not exactly hoping my breath for a new game (especially considering that publishers don’t directly hint at an announcement that big), but I’m curious to see what this announcement is for.

However, the bigger news is that Ken Levine has finally revealed his next game, Judas, which looks reasonably Bioshock-esque. The trailer is all over the place, and the behind-the-scenes reports I’ve heard of its development are not promising, but even if it’s a train wreck, I’m super curious to see a AAA game that looks truly original. It’s definitely a game I’ll be keeping my eye on!

Aaaaaand that’s it for another Love/Hate series down! I was actually alternating between playing the Bioshock games and the Ninja Gaiden games for a bit, so I had most of these articles written before I even released the Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series, hence why this came out so quickly after! It’ll probably take me a while for my next Love/Hate series: the previously-announced Splinter Cell series will be coming at some point, but it’s taking longer than anticipated. I have another franchise in mind as well that I want to do, so Splinter Cell may come after that one as well… we’ll see! And, in the meantime, I’ll have new articles up here about whatever crosses my mind (and believe me, this mind has some really stupid ideas it wants to write about).