This game is not what it should have been...
First off, let me list my specs so that everyone is aware of what my build has. Intel i9 10900 Nvidia RTX 2060 super 64GB RAM (of course storage space isn't an issue) Secondly, let me mention that I often start FPS games I've never played before on lower difficulties and crank the difficulty for subsequent playthroughs. This was my first playthrough. I was playing on the lowest difficulty which is normal. Now, I love Doom. I am quite a fan of that series, and this game resembles the older Doom titles in some aspects. That said, it plays more like a dungeon crawler FPS than Doom as everything is randomly generated. The core gameplay loop is entertaining enough, but there are some issues that make the game somewhat annoying at least for me. 1.) Health is handled very poorly in this game. Your HP starts at 100 and evenly divided up into chunks of 25. Every enemy in the game will take out one of those chunks every time you get hit. That means that even the smallest, tiniest, crappiest enemy can take you out in four hits. 2.) Weapon range. This has to be what has kind of killed the game a bit for me. You start out with garbage weapons and then after you get out of range it doesn't register your attacks. It will show a message that says "too far" every time you shoot your weapon. LITERALLY WHY? I recently played the OG Doom from the 90s and was shooting guys across the room. This feels incredibly regressive for a shooter made in 2020, but maybe I'm just being too picky. This isn't a big deal against the lackey enemy types, but it becomes insanely frustrating when you're dealing with bosses that can basically 360, no-scope you at will. 3.) Graphical tearing and intense saturation. Firstly, the saturation is really intense and can be hard on the eyes for some. Luckily, you can adjust that, but be warned. Secondly, I had frequent screen tearing where I would have entire patches of pixels across my monitor turn white during gameplay. Overall 2/5 meh...
As others have probably mentioned, Bioshock 2 Remastered is incredibly buggy. I'd heard many rumblings of the technical issues but had never played it on PC. I have the remasters of both 1 & 2 on Steam and wanted to get them here as well. I have barely ever had any technical issues regarding Bioshock Remastered. For most of my experience, it has run smooth as butter with maybe a few stuttering issues here and there. Sadly, this is not so for the remaster of Bioshock 2. I had some spare time this week so I dived in. Played through the vast majority of Bioshock 2 Remastered. Things worked mostly fine up until Siren Alley where the game began crashing an insane amount through most of the rest of my playthrough. I tried every bug fix I could think of to get the game to run smoothly and just couldn't get it working (forcing DirectX9 actually made it run worse for me interestingly enough). Forced myself to do a side by side playthrough of Bioshock 2 Classic to compare. Here are my findings. Bioshock 2 Classic overall is much better optimized by PC playing. There are far more video and graphic options which make it more suitable for modern PCs. The only glaring issues are some audio sync issues here and there, background textures can be blurry before coming into focus, and the control prompts (which are all in a game pad format in the menus and all in PC format in-game). Not that big of a deal for me, but it may bother some. (FYI, turning off DirectX10 and reverting to DirectX9 may improve graphical detail for some and also prevent crashing). To summarize, this feels more like a bundle of two games than one (it basically is). I'd buy this for Bioshock 2 Classic rather than Bioshock 2 Remastered. I am a huge Bioshock fan, but sadly I must admit that Bioshock 2 has not aged as well technically as the first game has. That being said, it's still a great game and it still runs fairly well. Enjoy.
