Bioshock (PC) Review
BioShock is the spiritual sequel to the System Shock games, which you may be able to deduce by noting a similarity in their names. There are a lot more similarities than that in the games, but we'll get to it in due time.
BioShock is a first person shooter (FPS) which combines elements of roleplaying games into the FPS structure. With the various in-game currencies (Money and Adam) and the weapon upgrade stations the main character's abilities are highly tailorable and get stronger as the game goes, even beyond just acquiring bigger guns.
Right off the bat, I'm just going to say this: BioShock is beautiful. I can't speak for how it looks with the graphics turned down, but with them cranked up the lighting was gorgeous and the art deco styling of the submerged city of Rapture were rendered lovingly in their full glory. If you have a system which is contemporary to this review and pretty beefy for its time, just stop reading the review and get BioShock. Your eyes are in for a feast that's worthwhile even if the rest of the game was trash. Fortunately the rest of the game is anything but junk.
The controls handle fluidly and intuitively, and the only real trouble I ran into was with ammunition management. Movement is responsive, aiming is as good as it gets in a FPS. Each weapon has a very different feel, and the wide variety of Plasmids bring great versatility to the tactics available.
Oh I didn't mention the Plasmids? They're essentially the magic of the game. You can shoot fire, freeze enemies in ice, or if you really want to do something unique you can shoot bees from your hand. New Plasmids can be found in the game world, earned by doing research on enemies, or bought from upgrade stations in exchange for Adam.
Adam is important stuff, much of the game is based around it. The enemies you fight, the so-called Splicers, have access to Plasmids as well. The iconic Little Sisters and Big Daddies harvest Adam. One of your goals is, of course, to accumulate lots of Adam so you can use it to 'splice' new Plasmids into yourself. There's a lot of Adam around in the game, but there's not enough of it to turn the player into an expert at everything. You'll have to make choices, and the game is balanced enough that you can employ a wide-range of different choices and still find success. There are stations around the submerged city of Rapture that allow you to change your Plasmid layout on the fly, so if it turns out that shooting fire out of your hand just isn't your thing, you can swap something else in instead.
There's a variety of guns, each with several different kinds of ammo. Managing the ammo is the only thing I had trouble with while playing, and often the half-second or so of lag (and sometimes swearing) was enough time to let the enemy get in a hit or two on me while changing from regular bullets to armor piercing. For weapons you have a simple revolver, a tommy gun, a shotgun, a crossbow, a chemical sprayer, and of course the wrench to hit people with. The basic guns are pretty self-explanatory, letting you fire munitions tailored for anti-personnel or anti-armored target work. The crossbow has one bolt which strings up electrified tripwires, enabling elaborate traps. The chemical sprayer can spray fiery napalm, freezing liquid nitrogen, or even lightning, letting it mimic the effects of some Plasmids. Ammo is relatively plentiful, even if the enemy doesn't drop much, there are still good supplies laying around and if desperation sets in there is always a vending machine somewhere nearby to purchase from.
Enemies come in a disappointingly small variety, considering that Adam lets splicers change almost anything about themselves. I really had been hoping to see some really strange looking enemies in the game, but most opponents were boringly too-human, even if horribly grotesque human. The general darkness of the game also worked against it here, cloaking the enemy models in detail obscuring shadow all too often. The Big Daddies are a sight to behold, especially the first time one appears; the tenth or so Big Daddy isn't so fresh and wonderful, the luster wearing off quickly. Little Sisters aren't really enemies, but the game early on gives you a choice: kill them for more Adam now, or save them from having to produce Adam for less immediate gains. The animation for all the characters is well done, but the animation used when healing the Little Sisters is particularly nice to watch with great lighting effects coming into play as the effect spreads.
The sorts of tasks given out are pretty standard things for a FPS: go here, kill those guys, get that thing, click that button, and so on. The dialogue and narration linking the tasks together is top-notch and of games like this only the venerable System Shock 2 strings together a more compelling narrative. The story progresses through various means. Obvious is in-person dialogue either spoken to your character, though there's little of that past the intro, or just chatter from enemies setting the mood and tone. Various people, including the game's two big characters, Andrew Ryan, who runs Rapture, and Atlas, who's leading the popular uprising against Ryan, contact the player over his radio. This is generally how the player gets whatever task the current mission is. The back story leading up to the player's involvement in Rapture is laid out through tape recordings that can be found scattered all over the game. These recordings are often insightful, cool, or just generally amusing, and they serve to gradually reveal the madness that's set in on the city.
I'm going to skimp on discussing the story's plot except to note that it seems somewhat weak to me, but having said that, it's well told and compelling. The big plot twist comes somewhat out of left field, I think, but once it's happened it helps make sense of some of the things that the player's been through.
Now for a quick scoring summary for those of you keeping track of the numbers:
Gameplay: 10
Really great gameplay. Polished controls and a wide variety of weapons and powers to pick and choose from, which help keep things fresh. The difficulty curve seems a little steep, because even performing research to get damage bonuses enemies seemed to exist solely to soak up unacceptable amounts of ammunition from my guns.
I also haven't mentioned hacking before now, but it's a handy tool to turn robots, or defenses against your enemies. It also lets you open safes and such. Sadly hacking has a sometimes annoying minigame associated with it. Losing the minigame costs the player health, so there's always a risk to trying to hack things. Fortunately if you're loaded with cash, most things let you spend cash to skip the hacking minigame.
Graphics: 10
It's not that things in BioShock are beautifully rendered, though they are. It's not that the setting is unique, which it is. The retro-styling of Rapture won me over, and would have gotten the game a 10 from me anyway. Fortunately the game is great looking and a real joy to watch.
Sound: 8
The sound is very well done. The music is appropriate, the voice acting is well done, and the sound effects are generally great.
Replay: 2
I think BioShock is a game I'll revisit in a year or so to relive the experience. Being able to swap my Plasmids around during a single game is a blessing in that it doesn't tie me down to a single playstyle, but it's a curse in that I get to fiddle with multiple builds during the course of a single game. The choice of killing or saving the Little Sisters also doesn't provide much incentive to replay the game immediately because ultimately it really only changes the far too short endings.
Other: N/A
I'm not sure what I was expecting from BioShock, but what was delivered was not it. It's still quite an awesome game, but I don't think it lives up to all the promises that were made. For instance, enemies were supposed to have motivations for what they do other than simply shooting the player a lot. This is true for the Big Daddies and Little Sisters, at least until you shoot at them, but the Splicers throughout the game are, except for a few rare incidents, pretty much just out to get the player. The level layouts also don't feel right to me, a little too contrived and a little bit too unlike actually being in buildings maybe. Once I shed myself of these notions and accepted the game for what it was, the experience turned out to pleasantly surprise me.
Overall: 9
BioShock would get a 10 from me, except that I simply don't feel compelled to replay it. It's not long-enough to make a replay daunting, it's just that there doesn't seem to be enough meat there for a second trip through. Having said that, it's an incredible experience that I can recommend to any fan of first person shooters, and virtually every fan of videogames out there.
BioShock is a first person shooter (FPS) which combines elements of roleplaying games into the FPS structure. With the various in-game currencies (Money and Adam) and the weapon upgrade stations the main character's abilities are highly tailorable and get stronger as the game goes, even beyond just acquiring bigger guns.
Right off the bat, I'm just going to say this: BioShock is beautiful. I can't speak for how it looks with the graphics turned down, but with them cranked up the lighting was gorgeous and the art deco styling of the submerged city of Rapture were rendered lovingly in their full glory. If you have a system which is contemporary to this review and pretty beefy for its time, just stop reading the review and get BioShock. Your eyes are in for a feast that's worthwhile even if the rest of the game was trash. Fortunately the rest of the game is anything but junk.
The controls handle fluidly and intuitively, and the only real trouble I ran into was with ammunition management. Movement is responsive, aiming is as good as it gets in a FPS. Each weapon has a very different feel, and the wide variety of Plasmids bring great versatility to the tactics available.
Oh I didn't mention the Plasmids? They're essentially the magic of the game. You can shoot fire, freeze enemies in ice, or if you really want to do something unique you can shoot bees from your hand. New Plasmids can be found in the game world, earned by doing research on enemies, or bought from upgrade stations in exchange for Adam.
Adam is important stuff, much of the game is based around it. The enemies you fight, the so-called Splicers, have access to Plasmids as well. The iconic Little Sisters and Big Daddies harvest Adam. One of your goals is, of course, to accumulate lots of Adam so you can use it to 'splice' new Plasmids into yourself. There's a lot of Adam around in the game, but there's not enough of it to turn the player into an expert at everything. You'll have to make choices, and the game is balanced enough that you can employ a wide-range of different choices and still find success. There are stations around the submerged city of Rapture that allow you to change your Plasmid layout on the fly, so if it turns out that shooting fire out of your hand just isn't your thing, you can swap something else in instead.
There's a variety of guns, each with several different kinds of ammo. Managing the ammo is the only thing I had trouble with while playing, and often the half-second or so of lag (and sometimes swearing) was enough time to let the enemy get in a hit or two on me while changing from regular bullets to armor piercing. For weapons you have a simple revolver, a tommy gun, a shotgun, a crossbow, a chemical sprayer, and of course the wrench to hit people with. The basic guns are pretty self-explanatory, letting you fire munitions tailored for anti-personnel or anti-armored target work. The crossbow has one bolt which strings up electrified tripwires, enabling elaborate traps. The chemical sprayer can spray fiery napalm, freezing liquid nitrogen, or even lightning, letting it mimic the effects of some Plasmids. Ammo is relatively plentiful, even if the enemy doesn't drop much, there are still good supplies laying around and if desperation sets in there is always a vending machine somewhere nearby to purchase from.
Enemies come in a disappointingly small variety, considering that Adam lets splicers change almost anything about themselves. I really had been hoping to see some really strange looking enemies in the game, but most opponents were boringly too-human, even if horribly grotesque human. The general darkness of the game also worked against it here, cloaking the enemy models in detail obscuring shadow all too often. The Big Daddies are a sight to behold, especially the first time one appears; the tenth or so Big Daddy isn't so fresh and wonderful, the luster wearing off quickly. Little Sisters aren't really enemies, but the game early on gives you a choice: kill them for more Adam now, or save them from having to produce Adam for less immediate gains. The animation for all the characters is well done, but the animation used when healing the Little Sisters is particularly nice to watch with great lighting effects coming into play as the effect spreads.
The sorts of tasks given out are pretty standard things for a FPS: go here, kill those guys, get that thing, click that button, and so on. The dialogue and narration linking the tasks together is top-notch and of games like this only the venerable System Shock 2 strings together a more compelling narrative. The story progresses through various means. Obvious is in-person dialogue either spoken to your character, though there's little of that past the intro, or just chatter from enemies setting the mood and tone. Various people, including the game's two big characters, Andrew Ryan, who runs Rapture, and Atlas, who's leading the popular uprising against Ryan, contact the player over his radio. This is generally how the player gets whatever task the current mission is. The back story leading up to the player's involvement in Rapture is laid out through tape recordings that can be found scattered all over the game. These recordings are often insightful, cool, or just generally amusing, and they serve to gradually reveal the madness that's set in on the city.
I'm going to skimp on discussing the story's plot except to note that it seems somewhat weak to me, but having said that, it's well told and compelling. The big plot twist comes somewhat out of left field, I think, but once it's happened it helps make sense of some of the things that the player's been through.
Now for a quick scoring summary for those of you keeping track of the numbers:
Gameplay: 10
Really great gameplay. Polished controls and a wide variety of weapons and powers to pick and choose from, which help keep things fresh. The difficulty curve seems a little steep, because even performing research to get damage bonuses enemies seemed to exist solely to soak up unacceptable amounts of ammunition from my guns.
I also haven't mentioned hacking before now, but it's a handy tool to turn robots, or defenses against your enemies. It also lets you open safes and such. Sadly hacking has a sometimes annoying minigame associated with it. Losing the minigame costs the player health, so there's always a risk to trying to hack things. Fortunately if you're loaded with cash, most things let you spend cash to skip the hacking minigame.
Graphics: 10
It's not that things in BioShock are beautifully rendered, though they are. It's not that the setting is unique, which it is. The retro-styling of Rapture won me over, and would have gotten the game a 10 from me anyway. Fortunately the game is great looking and a real joy to watch.
Sound: 8
The sound is very well done. The music is appropriate, the voice acting is well done, and the sound effects are generally great.
Replay: 2
I think BioShock is a game I'll revisit in a year or so to relive the experience. Being able to swap my Plasmids around during a single game is a blessing in that it doesn't tie me down to a single playstyle, but it's a curse in that I get to fiddle with multiple builds during the course of a single game. The choice of killing or saving the Little Sisters also doesn't provide much incentive to replay the game immediately because ultimately it really only changes the far too short endings.
Other: N/A
I'm not sure what I was expecting from BioShock, but what was delivered was not it. It's still quite an awesome game, but I don't think it lives up to all the promises that were made. For instance, enemies were supposed to have motivations for what they do other than simply shooting the player a lot. This is true for the Big Daddies and Little Sisters, at least until you shoot at them, but the Splicers throughout the game are, except for a few rare incidents, pretty much just out to get the player. The level layouts also don't feel right to me, a little too contrived and a little bit too unlike actually being in buildings maybe. Once I shed myself of these notions and accepted the game for what it was, the experience turned out to pleasantly surprise me.
Overall: 9
BioShock would get a 10 from me, except that I simply don't feel compelled to replay it. It's not long-enough to make a replay daunting, it's just that there doesn't seem to be enough meat there for a second trip through. Having said that, it's an incredible experience that I can recommend to any fan of first person shooters, and virtually every fan of videogames out there.