BioShock

The Good
Released in 2007, Bioshock, is the spiritual successor to the, System Shock, franchise. The series that helped re-define what a FPS could be. With such a storied past and all the critical accolades, can Bioshock live up to the hype?

I would like to note that, despite the fact that I finished Bioshock, about a year ago, I for some reason, had trouble articulating my thoughts on the game. Thus making a review an unlikely prospect. This being the first time that I have ever found myself in such a precarious position.

Anyhow, after a second play, taking the other path, I feel I am at last prepared for this review.

Bioshock begins when your plane crashes somewhere in the Atlantic ocean. Being the only survivor, you swim towards a beacon, before the suction pulls you under. Enter the bathysphere, and you are treated to a flyby of Rapture, or what is left of it anyway.(It reminds me of the flyby of Los Angeles in Bladerunner-MM-)

Built by megalomaniac Andrew Ryan, Rapture, is now decaying at the bottom of the sea after a genetic civil war. Ryan also is one of the few people still alive in Rapture, and interacts with you. One memorable scene involves meeting Ryan for the first time in person, and he is playing golf while his city burns.

You see first hand the brutality of the splicers, gain your first plasmid, and see a Big Daddy doing what they do best. At this point the game is very suspenseful, and invokes a sense of dread, much like it’s predecessors.

One of the first areas the medical pavilion, is very disturbing. Your encounter with Sander Cohen also stands out in my mind in overall creepy factor.

Bioshock even reuses the audio logs like in System Shock, and more recently in Doom 3. They are a nice touch and help flesh out the world of Bioshock, and it’s more that a little creepy to think that most of these people are dead, or in some cases will die by your hand. On one audio log in particular you actually hear the last moments of one the major characters.

Bioshock for all intents and purposes is a FPS. And while it has some RPG elements, it is by and large a FPS. Combat is simple and fairly effective. Using your plasmids in tandem with your firearms offers a sort of one-two punch. (Kinda like in Undying.-MM-) And there are a great deal of fire arms at your disposal. A pistol, shotgun, crossbow, and flamethrower among others.

There are also many plasmids. Some attack, like Electro Bolt, Some aid you such as Hypnotize Big Daddy. And there are also some that are passive, like cloak, and speedy hacker. All plasmids are purchased with Adam. And the only way to get Adam, is to get a Little Sister, which in turn are protected by Big Daddies.

A Little Sister is a genetic construct, little girls made to gather Adam, which they draw from dead splicers.(Some of Bioshocks’ creepiest moments are when watching a Little Sister draw Adam, and say, “I’m a good girl!”) To get the Adam they carry, you must take the Big Daddy. These hulking brutes were human…once. They have heavy fire power and resistance to damage, but can die. Once destroyed you can either Harvest the Little Sister, or Rescue her. Harvesting gains you more Adam, but rescuing them is the only way to accesses, some of the better plasmids, much as Hypnotize Big Daddy. Harvesting Vs. Rescuing also determines what alignment you have good or evil. And changes the ending.

The story moves along at a brisk pace, and there are few times where you stray from the main objective. There are however lots of secrets to uncover, and achievements to earn. Like collecting all the plasmids, or audiologs. Bioshock is also fairly lengthy for a FPS. Clocking in at about 25 hours, in your first play.

The graphics is Bioshock are amazing. One review on Moby claims, that you would have to be on drugs to appreciate the graphics. I don’t know what that means. Because the visuals are a sight to behold. Between the art deco design of Rapture, and the eerie look of the splicers, and the amazing lighting effects I don’t see how you could NOT like the graphics. You must play it on 1080p, if you have the means. The unreal engine never looked better.

The music is very good. From the original score to the real world songs form the 40’s and 50’s.

The sound effects are all good. From the gunshots to the plasmids, it all sounds great. But this pales in comparison to the voice work. The psychotic mumblings of the splicers is genius, and often disturbing. You see the splicers brains are so rattled that they say things from there past lives, such as, “Get the fuck out my office!” , “Jesus loves me.”( Christians are creepy.-MM-) and, “Go ahead leave me for that bitch!”

And all the main characters have good voices, and the dialog is well written which I feel is more important.

The Bad
Combat is way to frequent. There are only supposed to be a handful of people left in Rapture, yet by the games end you will have killed hundreds of them. The only positive side is that there is a good variety of splicers. Nitro, Leatherhead, etc.

Sometimes you will need to backtrack, say to use a vending machine, you go back to rooms that you just exited, and all the splicers are back.

This then leads to always needing ammo and health packs. And while it is rare that a splicer will be able to kill you, it is still very annoying. You are really better off avoiding any backtracking.

There are only two different paths, good or evil. And two endings, good or evil. There is not even a neutral path! Deus Ex had four different endings, yet Bioshock could only manage two, WTF?

Furthermore there are very few points in which you can change the outcome of an objective. There is really only one part in which you get to choose to kill a character or not kill them in the entire game.

The Bottom Line
At the end of the day Bioshock is worthy successor to the legendary System Shock series. In some ways it is actually surpasses those games. If you are a fan of FPS and have a PC or Xbox 360 you simply have to play this game. Seriously it’s required by law, or at least it should be. And well read gamers will certainly enjoy it even more.

The Good
Areas are nicely designed and especially looking out of a window is cool.

Enemies have very fascinating dialogue lines.

Able to hack machines.

The Bad
Confusing inventory and interface.

Visuals get really messy.

Controls are awkward.

Standing still to listen to taped messages is kind of lame.

You have very little health.

The Bottom Line
Story

Bioshock reminds me a lot of Half-Life in some ways: both games heavily emphasize a story told as you play, some gameplay elements are also similar and both titles start off with gameplay instead of cut-scene. After hitting “New game” you witness your airliner crashing into the ocean and are then forced to swim to a lighthouse. As you look for shelter, you come upon a pod that, once entered, sinks into the deep and brings you to the remains of an underwater utopia called “Rapture”. I would go into a bit more detail about what happens after, but that’s where our first problem arises: I simply can’t follow it. This might have been letdown, but it seems like climbing up the lighthouse and lighting it or maybe just staying put would have been a better choice, as a rescue team would probably be very interested in the huge fire in the middle of the ocean. I suppose you could say the goal is to save Rapture, but we have no personal connection with the location or the characters within it, so why should we care?

The game seeks to flesh out the story some more through ways that Half-Life also used, but things tend to get a little too busy. There are environmental hints, but at the same time there are characters speaking to you directly, enemies taunting you, people ordering you around through the radio, commercials been played through the intercom and if you aren’t getting enough of a headache already, then you can also find recorded tapes. I like to see games that don’t throw you to death with cut-scenes, but this is still obnoxious in a different way and even harder to follow. I gave up on it pretty soon and just played through the game in a trance instead. The recorded messages are especially annoying because everything just keeps going while you are trying to listen, that includes enemies and other characters talking.

Gameplay

Bioshock has some very obvious tells that reveal that this is a new IP, but it also has some capable people working on it. The game mixes RPG elements with a first-person shooter, this means you can upgrade your weapons and also choose between a number of upgrades to change the way you play. It sounds good on paper, but in practice the menu used for picking these upgrades is very clunky and confusing. I ran into a number of improvements as I played, but every time I found and installed one, the previous options I picked were gone. Eventually I found out the game has sub-categories for these things, but that still didn’t make it any more clear. You can also use Plasmids, which are special augmentations that you can inject into yourself and use as some sort of spell. There is a great deal of these and they certainly make for more diverse tactics, but switching between shooting stance and plasmid stance is annoying as all hell and some don’t even seem to work (such as enrage which should make enemies fight each other).

Levels are also designed in a way that I don’t like. The progression is linear, but there are branched paths that result in neat goodies. I do like that the game points out the way you need to go with an arrow on the HUD, but it’s still irritating to have to comb a dozen random rooms every time you get somewhere new. Levels mostly consist of dynamic goals that change as you accumulate information or get your path blocked, which I do actually like, but as stated before it was hard to figure out why stuff happens in this game. Most of the time you will be harassed by the former residents of Rapture and defense systems as you try to make it through the level, admittedly there is a lot of freedom and you can make it past enemies in many different ways. However, the actions fails to engage because the story is too hard to follow, making the gameplay a very dull affair overall.

Presentation

During that opening sequence in which we see the whole of Rapture while been transported in a pod I became really excited to see more of the city. However, when gameplay finally took over it was rather shallow and standard. I can imagine Rapture used to have a lot of color to it, but they went with such dark lighting and so much of it is destroyed that little is left of it. This results in a very inconsistent presentation where some parts look really scary, but are accompanied by cheerful music or advertisements on the intercom. To make the situation work either the area would have had to be intact or maybe they could have made the machines and speaker distorted, so that they would sound disturbing. As it stands now these areas just feel very mediocre: the design is too dark to be fun, but the sound is too cheerful to be scary.

Trying to get this game to run was also very difficult, something that I feel should not be the case for a game from 2009. On Windows 7 the game simply wouldn’t run, not at all in fact. If I launched the game in Steam it crashed instantly. It took me a while to figure out that I had to run the game in compatibility mode, because I assumed it had something to do with my drivers and I ran some updates instead. There’s our first problem: Windows 7 was launched in 2009 as well, so there is no excuse to not support it. Even if the game came first, there should have been an update to make it compatible long ago. It gets better though! The game would run in Windows Vista, but with NO SOUND. To get the sound working I had to run it in Windows XP (service pack 2). Let me get this straight… To get this game from 3 years ago working, you have to run it with an Operating System from 8 years ago? FUCK LOGIC.

Replay value and extras

Normally I would handle these two aspects separately, but for the first time I can group them together, just because there is not much to say. The game can hardly be considered very good for another playthrough, simply because it’s already a drag on the first run. Normally the fast-paced nature of linear first-person shooters is enough to keep it at least entertaining, but Bioshock dabbles in so much backtracking and other slow elements that it loses this advantage. You also tend to fall into a routine, which renders the option to try out different plasmids and tactics worthless, especially when you keep in mind that buying new plasmids and upgrades costs valuable Adam.

On the subject of Adam, that is also the main thing you’ll be going after. The game has a running moral-choice system in which you occasionally run into creatures known as “Little Sisters”. The idea is that you have to fight their guardian, a hulking machine known as a “Big Daddy”, and then either kill or cure the child. Killing them grants you a lot of Adam, which you can use to buy (passive) upgrades or new plasmid powers, and curing them grants you random presents and a lot less Adam. This choice also changes the ending you get. It works to a certain extent, but fighting the Big Daddies becomes, just like the rest of the game, a chore. The things are so powerful that they seem to me like a way to balance for the stupid amounts of money and ammo the game gives you every chance it gets. Besides that you can also gather the various upgrades and recorded messages if you really want a 100%, but frankly I don’t see the appeal and some levels won’t let you backtrack (by means of shut doors).

Verdict

The main problem I have with this game is the story, which may sound odd for an FPS, but hear me out. Even Call of Duty has a little story that adds context to what you are doing, without that little B-movie plot about Russians invading, the game would just be four hours of psychotic violence. Without the context there is no meaning to what you do and this will almost always result in the game failing to engage you. Bioshock however has so much plot that the player can’t keep up with it, there might be a context, but the player won’t experience it that way, thus giving the same result as having none at all. This affects every aspect of the game: the gameplay is boring because we don’t know what we’re doing, the presentation is dull because it always seems inconsistent in tone and there is no reason to replay it because who wants to go for a second round of random murdering?

Most of the people who seem to like this game are former fans of the “System Shock” franchise, so if you are part of that group and still haven’t tried it, then go ahead. If you’re dying for a new IP in the shooter market then Bioshock is again a pretty good choice. Veterans of the genre however will find Bioshock to be too slow and too story-heavy to entertain, so for everybody else I recommend skipping out on this game.

The Good
Well Bioshock is supposed to be a spiritual successor to the classic System Shock series which was basically an rpg game blended with first person shooter mechanics.

After playing this game it seemed more like a successor to Doom 3. I wouldn't buy the whole revolutionary hype magazines are giving it; it brings nothing new to the table at least on PC standards.

First the good.
The biggest saving points to this game has to be the Story, its unique art direction including level design, voice acting and music score. Basically "presentation" the first ingredient has somewhat succeeded. I have a mixed opinion on the graphics as the water effects are good, but the character modeling is just plain horrid. The level design and artwork are pretty good too; sets the whole steam punk theme although I find the games lighting a little too extreme.

The Bad
While things look good, unfortunately this game doesn't play very well. The AI is just plain horrible. While it appears to be smart at first, it just becomes predictable and annoying. Sure they put themselves off when their burning or recharging their health, that's a really good thing but its gets really annoying when they just keep running around. Why? The characters move at a really fast speed making it more frustrating than anything, therefore making you wish this was not a FPS. The Big Daddies with the drills are fun to fight (if there are no splicers around), But the ones with guns keep shooting at you and their shots drain a good load of your health.

Bioshock really sets a good atmosphere. I was really enjoying the level design & ambiance. Unfortunately this gets ruined since your bombarded with enemies. Hell I can't even listen to the audio logs because the enemies keep respawning or there's some loud gunfight nearby.

Later on the splicers become even more powerful, and while battling them you tend to end up in confusion as the game has too many weapons and ammo types. While I liked the idea of ammo types in System Shock or Rainbow Six, it fails hard in this game as this is a face paced shooter where you're battling splicers and machinery in the same damn location. What good is the chemical thrower when you have a plasmid which does the same? Half the plasmids are boring and do nothing much to enhance the game.

To add to the intense colorful lighting and bloom, the screen blurs when you're shot, so don't play this game when your sleepy.

And most importantly, the game was advertised to be extremely non linear but it's as linear as the old Doom or Wolfenstein games. Don't get me wrong, I really love linear games (Half-Life 2) but I was really expecting a steam punk version of System Shock here. The game comes with a choice to harvest the little sisters or save them. Whatever you choose will not affect the gameplay except for the ending and the tone of the doctor's voice in the latter half. Oh and there's an arrow which tells you exactly where to go.

The Bottom Line
Bioshock may seem like a lame attempt to milk some money out of the System Shock name. They may have dumbed the game down for console standards and accessibility (that's my guess) . While it is worth playing, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who is looking for something revolutionary.

Simply put Bioshock is made of 2 ingredients where one fails to make the dish enjoyable.