The RPS gang (well, two of them) have published their, quite critical, reviews (to accusations of collusion because they all live in the same house or town or something).

That's the problem with BioShock, to a lesser degree. It only sunk in when I was chatting to Dave McCarthy about it. He didn't really like BioShock and claimed he played through with just the pistol. Which made me blink - because I was constantly scavenging for ammo, working out what I should be using, being forced into unusual tactics due to a temporary shortage and planning routes to go and manufacture the right rounds, right to the final levels.

Talking further revealed the difference in play-through. It was the research. He'd researched everything as much as he could, pretty much as soon as he'd got the camera. I'd barely touched the thing, only doing a little when I first met a new monster and a little more if one of the baddies was proving too resilient (the Leadheads, primarily). Since most research gives a damage boost, he needed less ammo to kill people, which fed back into him using less ammo, so filled his ammo reservoirs and he could stick with his handy pistol. Meanwhile, I was enjoying myself scavenging and thinking because I had to. Dave's surfeit of resources presumably only made the Vita Chamber deaths - and the loss of resources before going back - even more negligible.

Of course, this is a fault in BioShock. But it's not a fault which you will necessarily hit, and it's a fault that's far more easy to avoid than the equivalent unbalancing in Oblivion. Just don't go crazy with the camera.

The fact that this is quite clearly a game, with stats and points of interest marked out on your PDA map, removes any mystery the Zone might have held.
(...)
Worse, perhaps, there's no sense that any real kind of struggle for control of the zone is going on, just a series of contrived, disconnected, arbitrary skirmishes - like those of a multiplayer game.
(...)
And you can forget moving around at night: the sheer number of hostiles mean you might as well go and stand in a corner. You'll have plenty of opportunity to do that too, as the new 'blowout' feature in which you have to hide from emissions in the Zone leaves you idly standing about in open-sided barns for minutes at a time, with nothing to do.
(...)
There isn't even the distraction of extreme horror that we faced previously. Shadow of Chernobyl excelled with a series of underground nightmares, delivering some of the most terrifying situations and events in any game. Clear Sky's equivalent sequences are little more than a whimper, and will terrify no one.
(...)
Perhaps the worst thing, however, was that GSC seem to have broken the delicate balance of atmosphere that made the original game so intense and grim. While there were some absurd bugs in Shadow, such as the looping speech, here some of the immersion-shattering events are intentional. There's far more English language speech, and many of the characters are insanely chirpy, to the point of being comedic and wacky. The ganja-culture barman playing reggae, and the 'funny' loudspeaker announcements stand out as particularly bad ideas. The Zone was about existential horror, bleak nihilism, and occasional speech bugs. It should have stayed that way.

Kieron Gillen also wrote (http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=88881) BioShock: A Defence.