BioShock

The Good
I confess that I bought an X-box 360 for this game. After 2 years of hearing how wonderful it was, I broke down and tried it. I hooked up the unit to my HD TV and experienced something remarkable.

2k studios spent a great deal of effort designing this game. They designed an entire city, sculpted and shaped in the Art Nuevo of the preceding decades. Then they smashed it with blunt objects of war and destruction. The details are astounding, portraying a beautiful gleaming city in the process of an ugly death. Everywhere you look, you see what it was and what it is. Rubble and debris. Surprisingly creepy…

Using the Unreal 2.5 engine, The graphics are detailed, revealing textures and dimensions that add to the feeling of being in a real environment. The sound is equally well done, with subtle music cues. You won’t forget the first time you hear someone sing a gospel in a weary, lost voice. The random pieces of dialogue you hear from the NPCs wandering around only contribute to the sense of madness that has possessed Rapture.

Gameplay is an elaborate gun and run mix up, enhanced by weapon choice, weapon improvement and general collection of supplies. I really like how you can use different approaches to killing your enemies.

One of the biggest points of the game is the story. It’s told through old tapes, ghosts, NPC narrations, and settings in the environment. Its not your run of the mill tacked on adventure. Its critical to the game and how it is played. I was taken by surprise when I saw the rooms that the little sisters were kept in. It was reminiscent of the brutal experimentations that were done by behaviorist in the early 20th century. B.F. Skinner is even mentioned in passing.

Voice acting was pretty good, if not slightly over the top. The accents were heavy and seemed to be coming from a b-movie cast.

It was very cool, how you had a few methods for turning enemies in to allies against their will. It was even cooler, how you could rack up achievement points for Xbox live.

The Bad
For a game based on self-determination, this game is pretty linear. You can find a lot of cool stuff by wandering off the path, but to progress, you have to pretty much follow the directions put before you. The game even alludes to it about 2/3 of the way. You end up normally using 2-3 plasmids for most of the game and the same goes for the weapons.

And its short and a little on the easy side. Replay value is not its strongest point.

The Bottom Line
This game is proof that games can be art and have a meaning to them. And yes, it was worth buying the Xbox 360.

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.

The Good
Bioshock is probably one of the most disturbingly beautiful games I've ever played. While the aesthetic is clearly designed to make the player uncomfortable, it's clear that the game's designers took great care to construct a believable world. The environments are believable and look lived in, water effects are above par, and the dynamic light and shadows really add to the sense of dread that makes a really good suspense/horror game possible.

The other half of making the world believable is giving it a compelling story. Rapture has no shortage of interesting characters, and the audio diaries that litter its halls add a wonderfully woven back story to an already intriguing world. Bioshock is a shining example of how to properly tell a story in a first-person shooter.

The game's controls are solid, its weapons varied, and a veritable host of power-up combinations make for an experience that never gets dull. Plasmids, or genetic enhancements, provide a new implementation of on old mechanic, namely spellcasting, but supported by an impressive customization system and a drool-worthy physics engine.

The Bad
While Bioshock leaves very little to be found wanting, it's not without its problems, minor as they may be.

While Bioshock's layout is generally good at helping the player suspend disbelief, there are times when the age-old "invisible wall" problem comes into play. Certain ledges, staircases, etc that look as if they should be accessible are instead impassible borders. The game does avoid this for the most part, but it cropped up enough that I felt it bears mentioning at least.

I also had some issues with the controller mapping, particularly certain buttons performing double duty. For example, the x button is used to hack machinery, and in many cases you need to do this quick, before a turret or security bot is reactivated. This isn't a problem, except that x ALSO is the hotkeyed button for using an EVE hypo, so if you hit it too early you can end up wasting a valuable resource. The same thing happened to me occasionally with using the b button to cancel out of menus and accidentally using health packs.

All in all though, most of my issues with the game were minimal and didn't take away at all from the overall experience.

The Bottom Line
Imagine being totally immersed in a world where everyone around you has gone horribly insane and you are the only sane person left. Not a new concept, but entirely re imagined and relocated to Rapture, the underwater utopia gone wrong.

Bioshock is chock full of truly frightening moments, and not the standard spring-loaded cat stuff, but real glimpses into chaos and insanity. There's nothing about the game that isn't entirely creepy, but at the same time appealing.