BioShock

The Good
+ great story - would you kindly get your foot outta my ass? + great visuals - water, that most intangible of elements, looks like water + atmosphere supports the story - immersive environment makes the 50's look hip again, no thanks to Marty McFly's dad + stuff blows up great - all underwater secret cities should have full tanks of flammable propane lying everywhere in case a video game gets made there

The Bad
- way too easy - Bioshock has an invincible "god" mode - it's called default - the movie will be better - could have had more varied enemy selection, like that gigantic walking spider-thing mech from DOOM, but that wouldn't have "served" the story - once again, the best weapon in the game - the crossbow - is also the most low-tech; development time spent on hells-yes plasmids may have been better spent on crowd favorite "2x4 with rusty nail hammered through it"

The Bottom Line
Analysis: Bioshock and Compromise

Sometimes, some things are just too good for their own good.

While that seems to be a contradictory statement simply on its own, it makes sense (but not too much sense) when you consider there are many things that haven't enjoyed any success when it is fully conceivable that they should. Critical success does not necessarily mean popular success; sometimes art is made that is so advanced that the current generation can not accept it (the term avant-garde comes to mind). The public can only handle so much.

This may seem to be critical of the average layman, who can't be faulted for being who he is, a man--a laying man, at that. In that case, to put it another way (other than saying the public can only accept so much), beauty is the beginning of fear. You know that new sports car? That fancy expensive one, the one you fantasize about? If you buy that, you're going to worry about it all the time; you're going to worry about it being stolen, scratched, towed, and even targeted by malicious flying birds and their gooey excrement. You know that hot, attractive girl? The one you fantasize about all the time? Once she becomes your girlfriend ("oh yes, she will be mine") you may find yourself constantly worried that someone may steal her from you. Again: beauty is the beginning of fear, and some things are just too good for their own good.

While these two points aren't necessarily the same, the same point can be made: the public can only handle so much. So, that's where Bioshock lands, firmly on its capable and talented feet and stooping low to bend to the lowest common denominator so that even the most lay of the layest of layman will "get" this game.

Bioshock is a beautiful game that takes place in the undersea city of Rapture. Based on the philosophies of Ayn Rand, Bioshock is an exploration of Objectivism gone catastrophically wrong. In the game, a charismatic leader named Andrew Ryan founds the city of Rapture as a capitalist haven safe against influence and pressure from outside political and religious powers. Literally shut off from the entire world at the bottom of the ocean, the Objectivist experiment of Rapture fails due to internal problems; this is suggested due in part to Objectivist dogma where the scientist, artist and capitalist aren't constrained by ethics or morality.

This is quite an interesting basis for a story; furthermore, Bioshock would continue down the "interesting path" some more and spin a tale of betrayal, deceit and domination. However, the fantastic research and writing that went into making this video game comes at a price: it's too good for its own good.

When applied to video games many gamers could only shake their heads in disbelief. "How can a game be too good?" they may say. I suppose this can be someone asking how vanilla ice cream can be too vanilla-y, or how someone can have sex too often and have too many orgasms. Well, I can't complain about vanilla ice cream nor about orgasms that are too good to have, but there is something to be said about Bioshock: its story and game play are terribly unbalanced with each other. Bioshock can't make up its mind whether it wants to tell a story or let you blow things up; stuck as a compromise, Bioshock delivers an interesting story in a way only video games can tell at the cost of overpowered game play that is too easy even for the average layman.

The story is too good for video games. I admit this sounds insulting to all video gamers and layman everywhere, lying down, but when the news broke that Bioshock is getting the Hollywood treatment with "name" director Gore Verbinski attached, who made alot of money and fame making movies about a ride at Disneyworld, I suspect the excitement was mostly over the fact that the great story in Bioshock would finally get told properly - in another medium that can tell stories well.

How can a story be too good for a game? Well, the high quality of a story in a video game can be detrimental when the developers emphasize the importance of the story over everything else; what this does effectively is subvert every other aspect including game play, difficulty, and enemy selection. You know (you laymen guys), everything that makes a video game a game.

First, the game is entirely too easy. Of the three difficulty levels, the hardest level is about the same level as most other games' mild medium difficulty level; compared to a hardcore game like Ninja Gaiden, Bioshock's hardest difficulty level is on par with the former game's easiest difficulty level. Other elements add to this ease: the game pauses when selecting weapons or plasmids, basic enemies (splicers) are all the same and so similar strategies can be used against them throughout the game, weapons are upgradeable to over-powered status, after halfway through the game money becomes so easy to make that a 500$ maximum capacity is forced on the player (unlike my wallet in real life), a map and a directional arrow points to the objective so that getting lost in a level is an impossibility, and furthermore no penalty is ever exacted on the player for dying - the player is instantly resurrected at a Vita-chamber to redo a level until ultimately he succeeds.

Secondly, the game play is so unbalanced that not long after beginning you become a unstoppable powered tank. The average enemy soon doesn't have a chance against the player, and in fact by the game's end you are pretty much just as powerful as the end boss. It appears the makers spent a lot of time designing cool ways to blow things up real good that they forgot to give you a suitable opponent; while it may be argued that Big Daddies are tough mini-bosses, the truth is they don't appear often enough and once you learn the technique how to take down a Big Daddy quickly it actually becomes routine quite quickly. In fact, one of the biggest challenges in Bioshock is cycling through your weapons and plasmids regularly to use them all equally, whereas in most cases you'll stick with one familiar weapon and upgrade it to make short work of all splicers and Big Daddies.

The fact of the matter is that the game has been designed to be overly simple and easy for the simplest of laymen to ensure that absolutely anyone and everyone can make it to the end - to ensure that this story gets told, from beginning to end. In four (and a compound) words: great story, bad game play. This is the antithesis of most games that have a bad story but great game play. Video games have traditionally not had great stories because usually they have been about game play, the meat, and back bone of video games.

Consider all the audio diaries scattered through each of the levels. When put together they weave together the complicated social tapestry of Rapture, a blend of unbridled ambition and treachery and despair. An interesting part of the story... that isn't an integral part of the game. In fact, listening to these audio diaries will commonly displace you from the immersion of the game, and in fact distract you from attacking enemies. These side-stories are entirely skippable for those who wish to simply blow things up.

And that's a problem too: as a straight-forward first-person shooter, Bioshock is strangely unsatisfying for not having unbalanced game play. Bioshock looks beautiful, sounds realistic for sound effects and dramatic for voice acting and has period songs of the era, and is a high class offering that should be a great video game - but it isn't as much fun as DOOM to shoot monsters and blow stuff up.

This is where Bioshock deviates from the norm (watch out, lying-down people everywhere!). As a game, it isn't much fun or challenging, but as a story and as a work of original art, it is fascinating and nuanced and fresh. As a top tier well-hyped video game with enormous production values, it's clear that sacrifices were made to this game to make it enjoyable and accessible to everyone; to anyone who has studied art knows, art is something that is for anyone, but not everyone. Bioshock could have been something really special and extraordinary, but instead we have something that allows the basest fan boy to blow stuff up.

This isn't to say Bioshock doesn't understand its medium and the limitations thereof; on the contrary, the single most genius fact of the design of Bioshock is the use of linearity. Long a bane of video game design, Bioshock whole-heartedly embraces linearity as the basis of the shocking twist at the game's mid-section. Without explaining it completely to encourage people to play it for themselves, the linearity of the game and lack of choice is used to turn the entire convention of video game stories on its head. This same type of head-turning convention was last used to great effect in "Shadows of the Colossus" (2005), in which, without the use of speaking script, the player realizes in horrifying dismay that the colossus you are slaying aren't evil - the sad, melancholic music that plays upon killing a colossus is in stark contrast to the happy, heroic music that plays when you finally mount them.

This perspective as a gamer progressing through levels to satisfy an objective only to realize, after the fact, the real ramification of what you have done can only lie within the realm of objective-reaching video games that feature a challenge/reward system that films, TV and books can't compete. However, films - the film adaptation of Bioshock, for example - aren't limited by the conventions and devices of video games and so aren't constrained in storytelling: films don't have power-ups, crates to smash and tutorials telling you how to cycle through your weapons. Unlike a video game, films have a set, finite duration of time and will finish whether or not you can kill the end boss who has cheap-ass attacks. Movies tell stories; video games are stories unto themselves that depend upon your mad video game skillz, layman or otherwise.

It is with this sad fact that the Bioshock movie, if it ever gets made, will be much better than the original video game and become the best video game adaptation ever made. This is not so surprising since Bioshock isn't as much a video game as it is a delightful story set awkwardly as a period piece masquerading as a first-person shooter. While it’s confusing that this story wound up being told first as a video game, it shouldn't be surprising that this video game was made as a first-person shooter - it's these fps games that get bought. Getting bought means money. And money is an end in itself that ensures compromise over integrity.

While we may never know to what end Bioshock was compromised, it's clear that the result is an unbalanced game that has a better story than its gameplay. For being innovative and challenging as a work of art in the field of video games is noteworthy, but laymen should now understand why I enjoy playing Onechanbara: Bikini Samurai Squad more than this game. Chicks in bikinis using samurai swords to slice up zombies - now that makes a fun game; the movie... (Oneechanbara: The Movie (2008)) not so much.

There's hope for you yet, Bioshock.

(If you've made it this far, I'll divulge the fact that I already did a review for Bioshock for PC - after only having played it for a few hours. If you look it up here on Mobygames, you'll see - quite gratifying to me - that I wasn't that far off the mark from the mark. Once again, thank you Mobygames for making my reviews arguably the most read/voted unhelpful!)

The Good
Nice graphics, nice decorations, starts very interestingly, unique Ayn Rand concept in a game (or is it not?). Also the whole underwater, big daddy iconography is instant classic and very characteristic, good for marketing this crappy fps.

The Bad
Gameplay, gameplay, gameplay, gameplay. It reeked of awfulness!

Trying to aim an enemy is so bad that you end up shooting whatever in wherever direction. So much for the fps character of the game. No head shots here and all the "splicers" (the word for zombies in this game) have a health bar like a beat-em up game, meaning you have to exhaust it with mindless shooting without the fun of special movements and combos of the latter type of games.

There are no stealth-mechanics either. You just walk and shoot. The weapons-plasmids in this game are so unbalanced and have been used in so many forms and games in the past, that it really makes me question what so breakthrough did the reviewers of "big zines" find in them. Lets leave that matter to everyone's own opinion, I have a really insulting one.

Whoever said there are rpg elements in this game, he is lying or has never played an actual rpg. The only such element is that you can choose to advance between a bit more in health or a bit more mana, and some weapon decisions. Then Snoopy vs the Red Baron is an rpg too! NOPE! It's just a nice arcade game and this is just a bad shooter. The enemies are boring and repetitive.

The objectives and "quests" for the story to move forward are boring and dull.

Did I mention the word boring? That's the definite word for this game after playing for 2-3 hours. The only reason left to continue playing is the hype this game got.. thoughts crossed my mind like "maybe it will get better", "maybe the story becomes fascinating afterwards", "maybe the environments will become breathtaking". NO. So I quited about halfway through the game and uninstalled it.

Saw the rest of the plot in YouTube and well it's just a mediocre b-movie scenario with a twist, nothing spectacular whatsoever. If this is a deep intellectual story then Arnold Schwarzenegger movies are more deep than the fathomless abyss! The whole Ayn Rand concept is used so shallowly and Hollywoodish in a bad comic manner that it just vanishes in favour of a "different" zombie concept, so overused in cinema and games today.

The Bottom Line
If it's your first or second fps, go ahead give it a try. You'll probably like it, statistically speaking. For me having played games with great horror plots like Undying or Dark Corners of the Earth combined with superb gameplay which was actually fun and breathtaking at the same time, I can tell that the only thing this game has in spades is hype. And blind followers.

I'm closing this review saying that I've never played System Shock games, so I do not compare it with them and I don't care about the rootkit or the limited installations. I'm only interested in the fun factor, be it mind-bogging fun, scary sweaty, jumping off your seat fun, arcade fun, silliness, intellectuality or anything that can suck you in and offer you a non-boring experience. Thanx for reading my first review.

The Good
The moment that the game's undersea city, Rapture is revealed to an intense orchestral flourish, shining like a retro-styled future dream in the vibrant depths, the player is drawn into an experience. That is indeed what Bioshock is - an experience. The game has an atmosphere of terrific substance, a triumph of design.

Graphically, there is no doubt that the technology is incredible. Most especially, lighting and water effects will cause jaws to drop in awe. Early in the game, I witnessed a cascade of water and could not believe the realistic look of it. And in a game set under the waves, this is used to wonderful effect.

Yet graphics are really only a means to express the visual experience. As we found with Oblivion, no matter how pretty a game is, a poorly designed world becomes tedious and boring. Bioshock succeeds in avoiding such problems. Every location is distinct and meaningful. It is not simply a matter of individual levels, but individual districts and rooms which have a sense of...well.. place. And, further, they have a sense of the people who had inhabited them. Everywhere, the player who looks will find tiny stories being told of someone who was there before them. Many of these are quite chilling. All of them are seamlessly expressed within the game's world.

Sound effects are a big part of any game, but in the survival horror genre they serve the essential purposes of causing tension and indicating the presence of nearby enemies. Bioshock's sound is of a quality beyond reproach. Although voice tends to be well done, it is in the combination of lush environmental effects with haunting 30's and 40's style music coming from sources in the world itself that the player is truly drawn into the game.

Combat is creative and enjoyable. There are a great many combat encounters, yet one can avoid them entirely or choose to use indirect means to take down their foes.

One highly touted aspect of the game is the use of the environment in fighting. For instance, hacking a health machine will cause enemies to be poisoned when they try to use it. New dimensions certainly open up in Bioshock for those with the creativity and presence of mind to use them.

Much like its spiritual predecessor, System Shock 2, Bioshock's intense atmosphere and randomly spawning enemies succeeds in creating that essential "never really safe" feeling I love in these games. This, combined with the descent into a world of madness and terror in Rapture, creates an unforgettable experience.

The Bad
While Bioshock is the spiritual successor to the game which I consider to be one of the greatest of all time - System Shock 2 - it does not quite live up to the older product. Certainly, technology has been upgraded. And there is no doubt that the AI and the use of environment are substantially improved. However, beyond this, I find that Bioshock consistently falls short of System Shock 2.

While I do praise the sound and also the quality of the voice acting, the range of script and casting is far too limited. It seems as if I am constantly encountering the same people who are saying the same things over and over. Yes, in System Shock 2, there were similar limitations. But it does not bother me there, perhaps because of the "uncanny valley" effect. In other words, I do not have an issue with worm zombies moaning out repetitious lines because they are so inhuman. When a very human seeming splicer rants the same lines as five other splicers in the last half hour, it is so close to human that it becomes very noticeable to me.

The AI is better than in System Shock 2, but it is still pretty poor compared to what is available. In a world after F.E.A.R.'s incredible tactical combat, the bar has been raised so that it is no longer acceptable for AI to charge at me with guns. I want them to try to flank, to be aware of what weapon I am using and when I am reloading it. Certainly, I would like a bit better than what Bioshock provided.

System Shock 2 was a PC only release, while Bioshock was developed for multiple platforms at the same time. Many people suggest that this caused Bioshock to be "dumbed down" for the more casual console market. Whether this was the reasoning or not, there is little doubt that this is a far easier game and one with much less complexity.

First, the roleplaying game aspect has pretty much disappeared here. In System Shock 2, the player had to assign points to upgrade both their attributes and their skills. You were not automatically able to hack any computer, use any gun, and project psionic blasts. In order to do any of that, the player had to make choices. So you could never be a super-soldier, master hacker, and psionic wizard at the same time. That made for true gameplay choices. Meanwhile, all skill and stat points are now gone from Bioshock. Now your character automatically is capable of any hacking, plasmid usage, or weapon usage with perfect skill.

One of the key aspects of survival horror is the need to survive. These are taken separately from other action games because they impose difficult restrictions which force a careful, thoughtful style of play amidst a chaotic, dangerous environment. Generally, this is achieved through a combination of limited health and limited resources.

System Shock 2 truly put the survival in survival horror. On the first play-through, most will find the game's difficulty to be incredible. You begin to hoard every resource you can, avoid combat when possible, and rejoice at finding even one more bullet. Every action you take is a calculated risk of your chances to survive. By contrast, I found that even on Hard, I was overflowing with resources by mid-game in Bioshock. There was never any desire to avoid combat except in the very beginning. I had so much stuff that I was often unable to pick up more of it. My ammunition and money was constantly full. All of this served to decrease my sense of truly surviving.

Much was made before release about the supposed choices made in Bioshock. However, in reality, there was only one line of choices being made - whether to harvest the "Adam" (money to spend on genetic powers) fully from the zombie little girls who ran about gathering it, thus killing them, or whether to save them for a much lesser amount of Adam. Not only was this rather black and white question the only moral issue to solve, but if you chose the "good" path then you would receive repeated large gifts for doing so - thus making the Adam difference between the two paths very little. I would have been happier if being the good guy meant you had to work harder.

Combat could be a bit unsatisfying at times in Bioshock. The problem was balance. Near the end of the game, enemies became superpeople who could laugh off your plasmid abilities. Being engulfed in flames seemed to have little effect on them, for instance. Yet some weapons proved to be so overpowered that it felt like cheating to use them. So the creativity of the environmental style of combat ended up being lost in the shuffle.

The Bottom Line
I would recommend Bioshock for its atmosphere alone, but there is a lot more to love about it. There is no doubt that this game is a 5 star title. However, those expecting a real return to the brilliance of System Shock 2 should be aware that it is not to be found here - only a shadow of that glory.