BioShock – Fontaine
Frustrating Boss Fights That Almost Spoiled a Great Game
The first BioShock is a modern masterpiece. The game excels in its quieter, survival horror-focused moments, in which carefully exploring the underwater city of Rapture is both eerie and inviting. This feeling is present for the majority of the game, that is until you reach what you think is the end, and then the game decides to throw another two hours of content at you that feels more like a first-person shooter, and not a good one at that. The final boss is the cherry on top of this annoying slog towards the credits, being about as generic as it gets where video game bosses are concerned.
The fight with Adam-imbued Frank Fontaine is a seriously frustrating one, in that it rests on all of the weakest parts of BioShock’s troublesome control scheme. There’s no way to effectively dodge, given that there was little need to up to this point, so Frank’s charging attacks get old quickly. Remember how plasmids could be combined with weapons in cool and interesting ways? Well not here. Instead, you have to rely on the biggest and loudest weapons which make up your now bloated inventory, mindlessly shooting rocket after rocket into a roided out hunk of mediocrity. The real hair-pulling begins when the alarms are triggered and 20 or so of those flying bots (you know the ones) come out to play. It’s essentially a bullet-hell encounter without any level of control, and for that, Frank Fontaine will go down as being very annoying indeed.
