BioShock

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.

The Good
Drug users might appreciate the graphics - during combat BioShock often seems more of a psychedelic arcade game what with the quick pace and all the chaotic effects thrown in.

The Bad
First of all, this game was supposed to be a spiritual successor to the epic FPS/RPG System Shock 2. Unfortunately something went terribly wrong in the process and we ended up with a incoherent shooter where nothing really works. Oddly hailed by essentially all reviewers as revolutionary, BioShock does not really bring anything new to the genre. Sadder still, it's mostly a setback, at least as far as PC games are concerned.

The complex gameplay from SS2 was drowned to the point where one begins to wonder which SS2 they were making a sequel of: System Shock 2 or Serious Sam 2? Gone are the stats that differentiated one player from another: you can now do everything right from the beginning. Gone is the limited inventory. Now you can carry around everything you pick up. Well, not quite. You can only carry nine med-kits and nine eve-hypos. Apparently despite totting around a flame thrower with several huge canisters of ammo, a grenade launcher, a shotgun, a machine gun and god knows what else, if you picked up one more med-kit when you already have nine you'd collapse to the ground from your burden. Gone is the weapon degradation. You pick up a revolver in the beginning and it works perfectly even after firing a thousand rounds and being dragged alone through water, fire and god knows what else. The grenade launcher looks like it's made of cloth... luckily it's special indestructible cloth. Gone are limited resources, now you'll regularly reach the artificial limits on the ammo you carry with you, which in a way is good because unlike in SS2 you'll be forced to empty entire machine gun magazines to clear the average room.

Psi powers are replaced by some sort of Oblivion-like magic spells. Compared to psi powers there are far fewer of these spells, they aren't as nearly as inventive or intricate, and the spell mana is never in short supply. You can hypnotize a big daddy to help you or throw stuff around with them, but other than that they're just like weapons except that at certain points the game will present puzzles to you that involve these spells. Unfortunately the puzzles are laughably simple, as in melt some ice blocking your way with the incinerate spell. Very revolutionary.

Much was made of the choices that you could make in BioShock. Except one non-choice that affects only which end-game cinematic you receive, the choices involve which gun you'll shoot an enemy with. I remember Levine saying that this is going to be a game that's impossible to write a walkthrough for. Now that the cat's out of the bag we finally see what he meant: it would be extremely tedious and counterproductive to write a walkthrough for a completely liner shooter like BioShock. Shockingly, Levine said a lot of things yonder at TTLG which now look like complete lies because he knew TTLG'S SS2 fans would promote his product for free.

Much is now made of the physics that BioShock presents, however even though they used the well-tested Havok engine they evidently couldn't figure how to set it up properly. Dead bodies twitch uncontrollably, boxes fly towards the ceiling when I walk over them, and so on. And the physics is pretty much limited to throwing things around. You can throw as many grenades around as you want - you'll never break glass. Wouldn't it be cool the glass cracked if you shot it too much and water invaded the place (of course at that depth that would be insta-death). But that would be innovative. The game also has many invisible walls, which always signal lazy design.

The combat is very chaotic. There are a ton of enemies, they move around very quickly, never standing still, and everyone seems to tot around a whole armory. Unfortunately it's extremely repetitive as well, as the game only has two kinds of enemies. There are splicers, which are humans gone crazy. There minimal visual variation between them and they seem to posses no intelligence whatsoever. One kind of them can climb ceilings, which is fun the first ten times you see it. And there are "big daddies" - walking diving suits that protect invincible "little sisters". A limitation of Havok means you can't gib enemies. No matter how many grenades you chuck at a dead big daddy he'll just ragdoll. Wonderful progress!

The interface did not escape the dumbing down - gone is the right-click into interact mode from SS2 where you could do everything. And even worse when you access anything the game pauses. In SS2 moments when you had to access the inventory or hack a system or whatever were always very tense because the game kept running while you were doing this. In BioShock you can run up to a hostile rocket-launching turret and spend all the time you need hacking it since the world is temporarily suspended for your benefit. Gosh, if only real life had that feature. Fonts are now big, and game text is short and to the point. I guess modern casual gamers can't be trusted with too complex a prose. There's even a freaking "quest pointer" ala Oblivion. Except it's taken to the next level. Not only does it show you which direction to go to, it even points exactly which doors to traverse! Maybe in BioShock 2 the game will walk automagically and you'll only have to shoot enemies as you coast along.

Like in SS2, the game does not end if you die. You respawn in a Vita Chamber. Except that this time the machines are far more frequent, do not require activation, cost nothing, and restore half of your health and mana. In SS2 it was often very inconvenient to die, and especially on hard/impossible it was preferable to load a saved game, but in BioShock it makes you effectively immortal. One has to wonder why bother with the respawning at all? Just have the player be in god-mode like the little sisters.

The artwork and story did nothing for me. I'd already read Rand's work a long time ago so seeing it butchered in a below-mediocre game was distinctly unimpressive. Thanks to the chaotic gameplay it's very hard to follow what exactly is going on at all, and listening to audio logs is a pain since there's almost always shooting going on.

The survival-horror element from SS2 is gone, for the above reasons. BioShock has a strong cartoony-arcadey thing going, kind of like Serious Sam.

What else? Well, there's the DRM. It works for some people, it doesn't for others. All I know is that my DVDRW has been failing a lot since I've installed SecuROM (which also comes with the demo?!)

The Bottom Line
BioShock is a terribly over-hyped shooter. What I wrote above just barely scratches the surface of what's wrong with it. IMO it's inferior to FEAR and the like. About as fun as Quake 4, I'd say. At first I thought I was just getting too old for this sort of stuff, so I fired up some older games I used to love (System Shock 2, Silent Hill 3, Psychonauts), but no, they're as good as they were then. I've finally realized that it's not me at all - BioShock is just a really bad game.

The Good
First off, I want to say this: BioShock is a solid game, a decent game. It didn't grab me by any part of my anatomy and make me fall in love with it, but it didn't make me want to spit blood, either. It's a... solid game... which is about the highest compliment I can pay it.

It can certainly be fun at times. My favorite thing has to be the telekinesis plasmid. Tossing explosive barrels around is fun. Tossing heavy bags of fertiliser at an enemy's head is fun. Less effective, but good for a sadistic chuckle: Throwing a dead cat at an enemy's head. And throwing a dead enemy at a live enemy is fun. I really like the telekinesis plasmid.

Garbage cans! They're good to throw.

Forgetting telekinesis for a moment, I also enjoyed watching the fights between Big Daddies and splicers. You know the splicers are going to lose, which just makes the whole thing more entertaining.

Though it became repetitive, I did enjoy hacking gun turrets and security bots, then sitting back and watching them do their job.

Other good points:
* Good graphics (though I personally found them rather hard to look at after a while, with their overly high contrast and slew of filters).
* Pretty decent voice acting (except for a major character who pops up later in the game... no spoilers... if you've played it, you should know who I'm referring to).
* High attention to detail, with plenty of nice touches. Something I thought was really cool was the weapon upgrades, which actually change the look of your steampunkish guns by adding extra cogs and tubes, etc.
* An interesting, different setting.
* The story is decent enough (though very similar to System Shock 1 & 2).
* Good ragdolls (except for the incessant jitter problems).

The Bad
The main problem is how repetitive this game is. There are only a few different types of enemies, and they are all 'splicers' (super-fast homicidal maniacs). Most blast you with pistols or tommy-guns. Others leap wildly and try to slash your face off. A third, rarer type crawl along the ceiling and throw spinning blades at you. Later on, you encounter a couple who are a bit more interesting (the guy who phases in and out of corporeal form and shoots fireballs) but by the half-way point of the game, you will have seen every one of the five(?) enemy variations... over and over again. You will have also heard all their dialog to the point of boredom. I have read many reviews, comments and pieces of hyperbole about how these are 'tragic characters' you can 'empathise with.' Well... no... they're fast, repetitive zombies. Just because they're dressed to go to the ball and have a few lines of speech about their dead spouse or moulting scalp does not make me feel sorry for them, particularly when repetition reinforces the fact that they are all clones of each other and they are all 'crazy' in exactly the same way (i.e. they see you and instantly want to murder your ass).

The two other denizens of Rapture who you will meet regularly are the famous Big Daddy and Little Sister. Sadly, repeated dialogue and behavior also make them seem very artificial, despite the interplay between the two. Unlike the splicers, the Big Daddies don't attack you unless provoked. However, you have to kill them to get to the Little Sisters, to get the 'Adam,' which is the local currency and will allow you to 'buy' additional plasmids and power-ups. Therefore, it's up to you to choose when you want to fight a Big Daddy. Unfortunately, this makes the Big Daddy fights feel like more of a chore than anything. It's sort of like, "Well, I'm going to be leaving the level soon. Guess I'd better kill a couple of Big Daddies before I go sigh." At least, that was how I was feeling after a few fights. These 'boss battles' really lose all their tension because, although the Big Daddies are tough, it absolutely doesn't matter if you die, as you will just get sent to a nearby respawn chamber, then you can come back and continue fighting with only a few seconds' delay. If the Big Daddies could, say, go plug themselves into an unhackable wall socket and recover their energy while you were temporarily dead, this might even the odds. Then you'd have to kill 'em in one go, which would definitely bring the tension back. But no.
Anyway, I like the Big Daddies. They are pretty cute, and can be fun to fight, sometimes. Maybe the first few times. But like everything else in BioShock, they become dull.

The game throws a constant stream of splicers at you, from start to finish. They respawn like mad. Clear an area and approximately a minute later (or less), another splicer will spawn. Combat becomes very boring, especially as (on normal difficulty), it takes a lot of shots from most weapons to take down even a single attacker.

The idea of the game is to make each encounter different by giving the player a wide range of plasmids (or, as another reviewer called them; 'spells') and guns (with plenty of different ammo types). Unfortunately, as with the enemies, by the half-way point of the game, you will have collected all the available guns and all the plasmid types (the only remaining thing will be more powerful versions of existing plasmids). Also, by this point, I had fought so many splicers that I'd become thoroughly bored with the battles.

Most encounters will involve you switching back and forth between your plasmids and guns, as the guns on their own are usually too weak. In fact, all the weapons feel too weak, even when upgraded (the crossbow being the one exception). Switching between plasmids and guns is technically simple but in practice, it feels over-fiddly. The problem is that this game, despite its pretensions of being something greater, is just a shooter; but it's a shooter that's over-complicated and lacks one of the most basic requirements of the genre; the simple, satisfying fun factor. You cannot just blow enemies away in BioShock, although it will probably get to a point where you will long to. Each encounter is a drawn-out battle where you will switch between plasmids and guns as you first distract, then slightly maim, then confuse, then finally kill your opponent. What is intended as an innovative approach to combat becomes stale through repetition. Sure, there are some really interesting plasmids (turn people against each other; make them targets for security bots; make them attack a fake version of yourself) but some are better than others, some prove to be near useless and there are a few basic strategies you will find yourself using time and time again.

There are other problems, too. Throughout the game, you are swamped with items to pick up and vending machines to buy items from. As if there wasn't enough ammo lying around already, and enough money to buy ammo, you can also pick up seemingly useless items such as 'brass tubes' and screws. Then, you throw all these pieces of junk into another wall-mounted machine, which will magically turn them into... more ammo. Why is this a problem? Because there is simply too much. It is yet another aspect of the game that becomes repetitive; endlessly picking up things, endlessly using vending machines. And when a vending machine is never less than a couple of rooms away, it removes much of the challenge and excitement of being low on ammo and having to survive. In fact, when I was about 3/4 of the way through the game, I decided to make things more interesting by imposing a rule on myself: I would stop using vending machines and 'invent-o-matics' - From now on, I would only take what I could find lying around. It came as no surprise that this instantly made the game more fun, and took away some of the repetitiveness as I no longer had to hack those damn vending machines.

Hacking...
Hacking is something that sounds like it should be exciting and carry some level of difficulty. But it's not. Every time you hack a vending machine, bot, camera, gun turret or lock you do the exact same thing: Play a game of Pipe Dream. Now, I quite like Pipe Dream but you'll play it a few hundred times in BioShock. And as if it wasn't easy enough already, you have the option of using all kinds of 'gene tonics' (aka. power-ups) to boost your hacking skills and make the game ridiculously easy. It sort of boggles the mind that Rapture is full of security devices that can all be easily overcome by sticking a few bits of pipe together.

The big problem with this game, apart from its crashing lack of variety is that its design is fearful. What do I mean? Well, there is a sort of schizophrenic battle going on here between trying to make the game complex and flexible and advanced... and then the flipside of the coin: trying desperately hard to make it accessible, and not too difficult or daunting for novices, and making sure that absolutely no-one is going to be the slightest bit confused by anything. Yes, it's the 'dumbing down' that this game has inflicted on itself.

The most obvious example of this is what I'm going to call 'the golden arrow of idiocy.' You know a game is treating you like an idiot when you are given an objective, which is then not only written in your diary (with optional extra hints) and marked on your map but also pointed out by a giant golden arrow which hangs in the air and which you can follow along mindlessly like an obedient puppy dog. The doors you have to open are even marked in gold! At least, that's what I'm told. I turned off the arrow as soon as I saw it. Thankfully, there was an option to do so, though maybe there won't be in BioShock 2. Honestly, I can't believe that the designers were so worried about people getting lost that they put a giant golden arrow in this game! It works for GTA, sure, but it has no place here.

Oh yeah, and the respawn chambers. On the one hand, I can actually see the point of them, as the load times are so horrendous that reloading every time you died would be a real hassle. But come on! Where is the tension in a game that has basically no penalty for dying? Death doesn't cost anything, doesn't lose you anything... You re-appear with a decent chunk of health and psi-power ('Eve') in a chamber which is usually about 20 seconds' walk from the spot where you died. In fact, dying can often be a benefit! Low on health? Only got one medi-kit left? Well, you may as well save it for later. It'd be more efficient to quickly die, because then you'll get some free health! It does honestly come down to that mental process sometimes. "Oh, I'm about to die. No point in wasting a medi-kit. ZAP! There we go... respawn chamber."

I am whining like a miserable baby here. The trouble is, there's just so much to complain about.

What else?

Well, what's so great about the story? It has strong similarities to System Shock 1 / 2 (Great story the first time around, but feeling a bit recycled now), and apart from that, there isn't much going on here. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that there are two goals in the game - "Save my kids" and then, a bit later, "Kill the bad guy." I kept thinking as I was wandering about: "WHY am I doing this? Why am I following these orders from some guy talking to me on the radio?" Now, those who have played the game will know that there's a twist in the story that answers this very question. Fans will say it's a great twist! Personally, I think it's an excuse, trying to explain away the standard following of objectives that goes on and the standard lack of player choice.

I'm going to wrap this up soon. Just a few more points:
* The game isn't scary at all, though I think it's trying to be. It copies so many elements from System Shock 2. However, SS2 was incredibly scary; one of the things that made it stand out. BioShock, once you get used to it after the first hour or so, and aside from a couple of isolated moments, totally fails on this count.
* Nearly everything from SS2 is back, whether it was good or bad. BioShock's 'research camera' is not very practical and only slightly less silly than ingesting(?) random chemicals in SS2.
* Patches may have fixed this by now, but I experienced a few random crashes. When this happens, it will delete your config file and replace it with a default one, meaning you lose all your settings, including your key mappings. This is very annoying. It also makes no real sense and seems to be a strange trend in recent games (Prey was the same). I know you can locate the 'default' file and edit that, but you shouldn't have to. You should at least be given the choice of starting the game with your settings after a crash.

The Bottom Line
Looking back at this review, I think it sounds as though I was deeply hurt by this game. That's not the case, although I did become quite bored by it, and I trudged on and completed it only for the sake of achieving that goal. But like I said at the start of the review, it's a solid game. It's alright. It's decent. It just could've used more variety (particularly in the enemy types) and some different design decisions.

If you haven't played any of the System Shock, Deus Ex or Thief games, then you may think BioShock is fantastic. If you have played those games, you may still think it's fantastic (because people have different opinions; which is great, by the way!). Or like me, you may feel it's a game that tries hard to continue the great tradition of those immersive, amazing action/RPGs... but falls short.