BioShock

The Good
Do you like the term - intellectual shooter? I don't, since it’s used mostly to identify oneself as an intellectual gamer instead of celebrating the game itself. However, I think it’s impossible to find any other two words describing BioShock so fully and extensively. I mean it in the most neutral sense of the phrase, because it is a well-known fact that you can’t take good without the bad. And it can’t be more so as in case of BioShock.

Irrational Games’ lastborn child, a successor to the critically acclaimed, yet ultimately unknown System Shock series, BioShock has brought the company just two things they were short of – wealth and fame. Now if there was just a single developer company that didn’t get enough of that, I would have bet on Irrational anytime of day. During its eight years course it hasn’t released a single average game. Let me remind you of the the unique concept of Freedom Force, flawless game mechanics and stunning level design of SWAT4, brilliant storytelling and engaging multiplayer of Tribes: Vengeance. All of those games (including, of course, System Shock 2 – the masterpiece of sci-fi horror) clearly showed that Irrational Games is an extraordinary team worthy of any amount of hype, overreaction and 10/10 reviews making the unsuspecting X360 owners rush into the street in order to buy a title from one of the most prominent developer of the recent decade.

However that should not cloud one’s judgment in light of the most obvious of BioShock faults, which we’re going to look over shortly.

Now to the premise. BioShock casts you in the role of a simple man living a simple life, who accidentally discovers a huge underwater city which the brightest minds of the post-war (WWII) world have made their home. Rapture. The world of unlimited possibilities for anyone who is willing to work and create. It opens its gates for anyone except for a single man - a parasite, a man who’s unable to do anything with his life, carrying his pathetic existence through the false notions of compassion, mercy and morality. Those who live in Rapture reject these people and all the governments supporting them, which is pretty much the whole "civilized" world. “It was not impossible to build Rapture at the bottom of the ocean, it was impossible to build it anywhere else”, says Andrew Ryan, the architect and the mastermind behind the city.

But you arrive too late to ripe the fruits of one man’s vision. As with all the ideas and utopias there is always one thing people forget to account for – it’s the faulty nature of the man himself. In case of Rapture, greed and lust for power turned out to be the harbingers of city’s downfall. You can’t build a society based on rationale and objectivism, because (watch out! Another Star Trek quote is coming!) human-beings are extremely irrational creatures and logic is just the beginning of wisdom. Despite seeming overwhelmingly complex the main idea of the game’s story is actually very simple and profound. It’s about how faulty the man is. No matter how much we strive into the sky towards perfection we should not forget about the chains on our legs, chains of human nature. The only thing that can beat the story of this game is the presentation of it..

The postfactum nature of BioShock’s storytelling provides the most impressive strength of the game. You’re not experiencing the story through the series of cut scenes or dialogs. Actually there’s no even a story to experience. Of course there is a series of events taking place inside the gameworld with varying objections and motivations but it is secondary to the history of the place. It’s not that important who you are and what you’re doing, what is important are the characters of Rapture and the details of their sad demise. The game achieves that sort of unusual narrative through the series of audio logs scattered throughout the gameworld combined with the detailed vision of what a certain environment has become. Irrational doesn’t connect the dots for you as it is done in many games via cutscenes or long dialogs. It offers you point A and point B and let your imagination do the rest, with results being much more striking and impressive.

That level of immersion is possible only in a video game, which in its own turn creates a much needed excuse for ideas of BioShock to take form of a video game. It creates an illusion of time overlapping – you hear the choices people made, the feelings they’ve experienced and at the same time you see the consequences of those choices and feelings right before your eyes. An amazing example of the interactive storytelling!

Ron Gilbert, the creator of Monkey Island series has once said that a game is a shitty place to tell a story. Yes, Mr. Gilbert it is, but instead of trying to tell it with the common devices used in movies and books, (yes, Square, you too) BioShock chooses another method unimaginable in the limits of those two media.

Certainly, a knowing man would notice that all of that (retrospective narrative, audio logs, post-factum presentation) was already presented by both System Shocks, Doom 3 and lots of other games which thought this to be a neat way to cut expenses on cutscenes, motion-cap and character modeling. But very few of them offered such an amazing treatment of this technique as BioShock did and neither has put it to so much use. The counterarguments to the tenets of objectivism, coined by Ayn Rand, are perfect fit for the BioShock’s way of narrating, with the characters speaking not of the current events or explaining a lot unnecessary info but expressing their thoughts and views in words instead. This in its own turn creates one of the most fleshed out set of videogame characters of recent years.

The best one being nobody else but the creator of Rapture himself – Andrew Ryan. Much as his prototype – Ayn Rand – Andrew has emigrated from the Soviet Union when he had found himself unable to cope with all the changes happening to his country. Yet he didn’t find any rest in USA either. Everywhere he was despised for his talent, money and radical views. He didn’t want the parasites, people without ambition or talent, to impose their will upon him. Much in fashion of Dostoevsky’s characters Ryan saw himself as an extraordinary being far above the issues of morality and decency. But unlike Raskolnikov, Ryan doesn’t doubt his beliefs and is not tormented by them. He is the man of great faith and strong convictions. He firmly believes in everything he does and doesn't care what others think of it. So even in time of his death he remains as strong in his faith as he ever was.

To be frank, the scene of Andrew Ryan's death requires some more space of this review. This is undoubtedly the piece of drama that will stay in your mind forever. Without spoilering much I can only say, that during witnessing it, I haven't thought for a second about how great/talented/skilled the guys at Irrational are. All of my thoughts were with that man before me, who even in his death doesn't lose a single inch of his faith and views. Very strong and convincing scene, indeed. It would make every movie director jealous.

In the spotlight is also a well-known duo. Big Daddy and Little Sister are perfect metaphor to unconditional love that requires no objective or rational explanation. You will love those interplays, they bring warmth and create a very important contrast to the cold and menacing environments of the city. Of course it’s a cheap argument to put a cute little girl on one plate of the scales and Ayn Rand with her philosophy on the other. The contrast works well, however.Partly, because it is a contrast which you, the player, must inevitably break, not by your choice, but by the necessity.

Other characters do not disappoint either. Each of them is a representation of a specific part of the new, corrupted Rapture. Art, Science and Industry. Fueled by plasmids (which are essentially a plot device and a key gameplay feature) they strive for perfection in those areas. A mad plastic surgeon with his mind completely whacked, an artist finishing his last masterpiece of dead bodies and a smuggler with non-existent values. Each character has lots of background to him depending on how thorough you are in examining your environments, finding clues and actually thinking. Because, as I mentioned earlier, Irrational doesn't care if you're following a story or not. This is excellent, since it always keeps you on your toes and your mind is always working, trying to figure out the real motivations of the characters. No wonder there are so many plot-analysis written after the game's release.

Visually, Bioshock is nothing but stunning. The game's visuals are a beautiful example as to what exactly constitutes great graphics in a game. Obviously, not technical superiority or the hardware the game is capable of taking advantage of. The true brilliance of graphics lies on sole shoulders of an artist. Artistically, BioShock is a very ambitious project. It has been compared to Fallout on numerous occasions with similarities in its 30's ads stylistic approach. Some people attached "art-deco" label shortly after. But the truth is that BioShock is something you haven't ever seen before. It seamlessly combines incombinable. The screaming ads of smiling people reminiscent of mid-20th century America is merged with technological wonders which feels more at home in Wells and Verne novels, than in the works of Asimov and Clarke, and all that is spiced up with the extreme attention to details. Texturing, modeling, special effects - everything in here is working in a single unit to bring the atmosphere of the decayed city of wonders as to close to reality as possible. I've already known that level designers of Irrational are miracle workers with their amazing job on SWAT4 realistic levels, but this time, when they were not constrained by limitations of our real world, they outdid themselves. Sometimes, I even felt like crying staring looking over beautiful locations, so different and yet following the same stylistic guidelines.

That does sound like a perfect game, doesn't it? Well, I don't want to break it for you, but it isn't. The irony is that if BioShock didn't have all those extraordinary things I've mentioned up to this point I might have had no problem with it whatsoever. But the game's unique and unusual subject, superior artistic design and overall professional quality brings me to blaming BioShock for a thing I wouldn't consider to blame any other game for. Namely, it's genre choice.

The Bad
Why on Earth this game decided to be a First Person Shooter?

As I said I had no problems with any game's choice of genre up to this point. You see in games like No One Lives Forever, System Shock I & II, Outlaws, Dark Forces, Strife, Half-Life - all the additional features (non-shooting) are used to enhance them. Thus, it results in a perfect blend. We take a shooter canvas and put some nice touches on it that elevates it above it's contemporaries. It worked on numerous times, and should have worked with BioShock as well.

Especially, if we take into consideration, that the "shooter canvas" of it is much more superior to any other FPS. You have lots of abilities to choose from, different plasmids in various combinations can easily provide a lot of unexpected results. It's fun to experiment with those techniques, trying to find an instant-kill solution. Which, of course, is impossible to find, prompting you to keep chaging your approach in every situation. I didn't miss any of the System Shock exclusive features, like inventory, research or character stats, and was completely satisfied with the way revival chamber were realized in BioShock. So, what's wrong? We have an excellent story/subject and great gameplay which easily result in a game like one has never seen before, don’t we?

The problem is that those do not go together at all. I think the reason of that lies in BioShock's subject which requires everything to work for it. It wasn't a problem in NOLF - where subject required you to be a spy, you did what spies usually do (at least in 60's movies), in Outlaws - subject required you to take revenge on your dead wife and daughter. And what does BioShock subject (counterarguments to objectivism) requires you to do? Nice question.

Kill hordes of zombie-like Splicers is the answer. Now tell me, how does that reinforce the game's point? What is the reason to all the time I spent in-between admiring locations and listening to the logs? There's none. BioShock with its serious subject would have looked much better in the canvas of adventure or an RPG (as showed by Bioware/Black Isle) or maybe tried to get there by some other means. The core of the BioShock's gameplay should have been "a choice" instead of "a shooting". The choice players face in the current game is laughable, because it doesn't provide any effect on the story, (it shows another cut-scene in the end, true, but how does it help to change the message of the game?) and benefits from saving the girls are obvious from the start.

Once again, I will say that have the subject of the game been simpler and less dominant; it wouldn't have made the action seem much more appropriate. But as it is, each part of the game must work towards a single goal -- conveying an idea. Obviously, "shooting zombies", which is somewhere around 70% of the game doesn't help that cause much.

I completely understand the reasons behind BioShock's choice of genre. First, people were expecting a successor to System Shock, secondly, one cannot expect BioShock the Adventure to break as many sells as BioShock the FPS did. Which is a shame, since in the end, it did outgrow both System Shocks, and perhaps became the best top-sold game of the last decade. It certainly deserved upon much better treatment.

The Bottom Line
This is my first review that features a newly created rating system. It came up as I wasn't satisfied with the criteria usually used for game ratings. I called it TAPEA, with each letter standing for a certain aspect of Developer Company as reflected by the game.

Talent: 5/5

One should not doubt the talent of Irrational. Once again they proved that they were touched by God himself. I can't imagine an untalented person coming up with those outstanding locations and brilliant ideas. Rapture, Big Daddies, Art-Deco, Plasmids, Little Sisters, Underwater setting – they're constantly feeding you high-class ideas, which could’ve only born in the minds of extremely talented individuals.

Ambition: 4/5

In BioShock the developer offered something rarely seen in a video game. A mature subject venturing beyond love/hatred/revenge clichés. Unfortunately they didn't dare to carry this ambition through. I mean creating a gameplay that would have been on par with the game's subject, hence a drop in one point.

Pteity (Pushing The Envelope - ity): 3/5

BioShock does go when nobody has gone before. It changes your mind on the subject of how games can communicate stories and ideas. Unfortunately, all of those elements have been already seen in other games, even if executed on a much lower scale and with much lesser effect. The story repeats itself in game play department as well - it does provide some unique ideas, but nothing warranting a legion of clones.

Effort: 5/5

The colossal attention to detail and the game's impressive length (around 12 hours) show many sleepless nights and cups of coffee drunk in the Irrational Games headquarters.

Adequacy: 5/5

The overall coherency of different departments is the evidence of how much the developer cared about how things are fitting together, the style and theme are always maintained regardless of the situation. I won't drop any point here since even the game's questionable FPS attitude towards gameplay is reasonably justified within the limits of the gameworld. Completely adequate and nothing feels out of place.

In the end we receive 4.4/5 which is an average score of those five equally important criteria.

As for the closing part I'll just repeat the one-liner "Who is John Galt?" It's a quote from "Atlas Shrugged", book by Ayn Rand, which BioShock names as its primary source of inspiration. It's a synonym to hopelessness and inability to change anything. The same feelings I am left with after completing BioShock. I understand that you can't have best of both worlds at the same time. You can't be commercially successful and yet break new grounds, at least not on a scale, shareholders' meeting would appreciate.

Perhaps, you need people like Andrew Ryan or Dagny Taggart (a character from the book) to do it, people not constrained by the concerns of others or by the questions of appropriateness and decency. Men who uses only common sense and objective truth as their Bible. And, you know, I am sure that the phrase "BioShock could have been so much more" would have been written somewhere in that book.

Maybe Ayn Rand was actually right?

Nah. :)

The Good
“System Shock 3” is all we heard a couple of months ago while all the critics were still wanking off to their favorite videos of Bioshock’s Big Daddies beating the snot out of every living thing. Reviewers seemed to be handing out more 10’s to this game than a desperately lonely man at a strip joint. Five-dollar words like innovation, unique, and unpredictable were repeatedly burned into our corneas to the point where we now can’t control our urge to shout them out every time another “immersive FPS” hits the market.

Upon starting up the game, I instinctively sided with the cynics, having been put through my fair share of let downs and disappointments with the FPS genre. Upon first starting the game I felt no reason to start drooling over it. It appeared to be another FPS game attempting to mask a thin plotline with a deep and thought-provoking setting. Yet as I went on, I realized how truly epic both the plot and gameplay were, until I was literally struggling to pick out something to find wrong with the game. Eventually I was faced with the reality of the situation: this game, shockingly, was exceeding my expectations.

Bioshock’s trump card, I believe, is its storyline. At the beginning of the game, you somehow manage to survive a plane crash in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Upon rising to the surface of the water, you see an eery lighthouse just sitting there, beckoning you to go in. Ignoring the screams of your fellow passengers, you go inside and take a jolly little ride on the bathysphere there to the train-wreck of a city that is Rapture. Rapture was a city built at the bottom of the ocean by Andrew Ryan for the purpose of avoiding government, socialist, and religious regulations, which he felt were hindering mankind’s greatness. However, the city is in ruins, torn apart from the inside by rioting. Someone or something has turned the citizens of Rapture against themselves.

Bioshock has an absolutely incredible sense of immersion. If you enjoy having your sense of belief suspended, prepare to have Bioshock steal it and launch it into orbit, never to return. Everything about the Bioshock universe is brilliant, from the atmosphere to the story, to the sheer depth and intuitiveness of the new scenario it presents to players.

You can tell Bioshock was built around the story because everything the designers to is intended to make it feel like a story. First of all, the very presentation of Rapture is breath-taking. From the first seconds of the game as you look up at the mysterious lighthouse, you can already sense something is amiss. The developers build on this, and throughout the game it only gets more atmospheric. The leaking walls serve to display both the atrophying architecture as well as the decaying splendor of this supposed utopia. The developers also use almost theatrical techniques to shock and surprise you, to the point that at some points in the game you can only stand in awe.

This only develops as you slowly learn the story of Rapture. In this case, Bioshock takes from both the Half-Life series with its “no cut-scenes” approach and Doom 3with its “audio log” approach, relying more heavily on the latter for exposition while the former for more present-action plot development. The audio log system works terrifically to develop the story of Rapture because most of the audio logs aren’t in order, allowing you to piece together to story as you progress through the game.

As well, most of the audio logs are done by a key set of 6 or 7 characters. This gives you the impression that even though they are not by your side, these characters are still part of the action and still affecting everything you do. By listening to these audio logs you get an amazing idea of the personalities of these people and how they reacted as Rapture descended into chaos. The fact that they mention other characters from other audio logs only serves to reinforce this notion.

I originally expected Bioshock to take on a sci-fi suspense angle, but I was shocked to see that in reality in leans far into horror. And when I say horror, I do not just mean the “monsters jump out of closets” type like we saw in Doom 3. I mean deeply fucked-up psychological horror. The game takes on a twilight-zone kind of feel, showing how the effects of isolation and removal from society drove the citizens of Rapture power-hungry and mad. This is accented by the mounting feeling of being trapped forever in the watery coffin that is Rapture.

The combat system is largely the same as any other FPS game out there. The game, in addition to giving you various weapons, gives you plasmids. These stem-cell like formulas alter your genetic material granting you access to God-like powers such as shooting lightning out of your hand, or shooting fire out of your hand, or shooting ice out of your hand, and, well, you get my point now. It really doesn’t get past these few and a couple of others. These are more useful for interacting with the environment than anything, as electric can temporarily short circuit turrets and cameras, fire will melt blocking ice and set oil on fire, etc.

However, you will largely be killing your foes with a rather generic set of guns ranging from a 30’s era machine gun to a pump shotgun. The plasmids help to vary things up a bit, but I found myself using them when I simply had run out of bullets for the rest of my guns. Occasionally large gunfights will get pretty exciting, but this is usually when Big Daddy’s or gun turrets get involved as well and also because gun shots are VERY LOUD for this very purpose.

Where combat truly shines is, yes, the Big Daddy fights. This is truly where you get to exercise your creative freedom in taking down this gargantuan beast largely because there are so many ways to do it. You can take him down with enough machine gun bullets and persistence, but it is much easier to use the environment against him. Lure him into some oil, electrocute him, lead him into a nest of enemies, hack a turret and use it against him, have him run over some trap wire, get him to ram into some barrels, lead him over your trip mines. Any combination of these provides for a brilliant fight, and what makes it better is that it is completely improvised, giving you a warm feeling of satisfaction knowing that the game wasn’t holding your hand through it. It’s this feeling that makes fighting the Big Daddies worth it, as well as the Adam which allows you to buy plasmids, health, and other upgrades.

The game is obviously pretty, though this is mostly due to the atmosphere and style rather than the graphics. If you sat there and stared at Bioshock and appreciated like a fine painting, you would in fact see the tremendous amount of detail in almost every part of Bioshock’s environment. However, let’s face it; we aren’t going to be looking at some pretty cabinets when we’ve got turrets shoving bullets in our back and balls of fire raining down upon us. Even so, most games these days are just as pretty so I really don’t known what to set as the standard anymore. Like I said, it’s pretty because of the atmosphere. When you stand in a quiet desolate dentist’s office in Rapture and you can’t hear anything but the streams of water leaking from the ceiling, that’s when you truly see the beauty in Bioshock. However, the game, like every other FPS out there, is still played mostly with the lights off, offering you less chances than you may think to sample the beauty of the game.

The Bad
The biggest let down was easily the false sense of choice and freedom the game gave me as I was starting it. I remember all of the trailers spouting out that you had all this freedom and how unpredictable the game would be depending upon your own choices. Well, being the cold, cynical man I am I immediately realized what a load of horse crap this all was. What took me by surprise, however, was to how far they actually embellished the truth. The game gives you actually no choice whatsoever, which might upset a few people, who, I don’t know, maybe were hoping for something actually promised a billion times by every Bioshock trailer out there.

The big thing is that when you kill a Big Daddy, you get to do naughty things with little girls, and by naughty things I mean harvest their Adam. While the whole thing sounds like something you’d hear on To Catch a Predator, its supposedly a huge focal point of the game because you can either save her for a little Adam or kill her for a whole bloody truckload of it. The entire “morality” choices of the game narrow down to this. It’s not that there are other choices and that they don’t make any impact, but this is IT. Either kill or save, and that determines whether you get the holy good guy ending or the piss bad ending. Either you’re a saint or your Hitler based on whether you decide to either save or kill these little girls, and there is no middle ground. They tout all this freedom and choice, but like Fable there is no “uh, maybe both” choice. Either your voice cures cancer or God kills kittens at the very sound of it.

That’s really all there is. There is really no customization of your character because he can use any plasmid a million times without consequence, and can use any gun at any time. There are these things called tonics which give you cool bonuses like getting more health from snacks, but there are a limited number of these which are actually useful and by the end of the game you have enough slots open to use all of the good ones anyway. There are no side quests or optional objectives to do. Hell, every objective is mandatory anyway. I thought that somewhere along the line I would be given a choice to help out the citizens or Rapture or kill them, but instead I ended up taking orders from a man on a radio for hours on end.

And while we’re still bitching let’s talk about game difficulty. More specifically, let’s talk about where the Hell it went. Last time I checked in FPS games, when you died you lost the game. Instead they’ve introduced this “vita-chamber” non-sense which brings you back to life every time you die. This takes away a lot of the danger of the game, and honestly I fell like it was the worst part. With these chambers you’re more willing to take stupid risks because all of the consequence has been taken away. This also made it a lot less satisfying finding creative ways to kill Big Daddies since if you were stupid and simply starting plugging away at him you could go back five minutes later to do it again.

This part also made the game somewhat frustrating because in order to kill some bad guys all you had to do was whittle away their health while taking numerous trips to the vita-chamber. This process of attack, die, walk back, repeat is incredibly frustrating and holds up the game a lot, especially when there are infinite enemies in the game. Yes, supposedly the citizens of Rapture are “living, breathing” people who walk from place to place, but instead of making the game believable, it made it annoying as fuck.


The Bottom Line
I suppose, however, I am being a bit unfair. I’m not one of those untalented hacks who tries to pass of unwonted criticism as a proper review, and truly I found Bioshock to be one of the best games I’ve played in recent months. I’m actually really excited over how this turned out because it’s been a long time since a game has made me forget about both lunch and dinner without me even realizing it. Like Rapture, Bioshock has a lot of cracks in it, and they are somewhat obvious. However, don’t listen to the tiny voice in the back of your head pointing to these flaws. Smother it out with a large dosage of Bioshock. This game is amazing and certainly worth whatever children you may need to sell to get your hands on it.

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.