Should have played this much sooner
I was semi aware of BioShock since shortly after it came out, but only picked it up during the Steam summer camp sale in 2011. I had found out a few things about it and it reminded me of a few of the things I liked from the Deus Ex series so I had added BioShock and BioShock 2 to my Steam wish list, then they went on sale. I figured I’d just get the first one and then if I liked it I’d grab the second next time it went on sale. After playing BioShock, I’m wishing I would have bought BioShock 2 at the same time.
BioShock looks great, has an interesting story, and keeps not ending when you expect it to. It has a dark theme set in an underwater steampunk styled city. At first you feel like a guy just trying to escape back to the surface, but as the story twists and turns your motivations change. At multiple points you’re about to do something which you expect to end the game (the first time I thought I would escape on a submarine), but then someone interferes and the game continues on. A surprise where you get to keep playing the game more than you’d expected is almost always a good surprise!
The biocustomization is actually nonpermanent and almost implemented as alternate weapons (and passive boosts) where you can only have a limited number active at any given time. The story falls apart a little when DNA-rewriting plasmids can be swapped in and out, but it’s good for gameplay so I didn’t have trouble accepting it. It’s also really fun to shoot lightning or fire from your hand!
The checkpoint system works differently than most. Instead of going back in time and trying again from the last checkpoint, you move in space only and are resurrected in the nearest vita chamber. I guess if you wanted to beat down an enemy using only your wrench this would be good because whatever you managed to do before you died you don’t need to do over again, but I found I didn’t like this method and preferred to quicksave frequently and quickload if I died. There is an option to disable vita chambers so you have to load the latest save (note the autosaves are very infrequent) but I didn’t actually do that. I guess I just like the idea of rewriting my own history if I mess up and die, so couldn’t really get into the vita chamber thing.
My CPU was overheating a lot while I played BioShock due to a dust-blocked fan so I found out that if the game crashes, it forgets all your settings. Since my problem was a hardware problem it of course affected other games as well, but BioShock was the only one where I had to fix the resolution and re-customize the controls after every crash. Assuming the game doesn’t crash on adequately-cooled hardware this shouldn’t be noticeable to most people, but I definitely didn’t like it.
Another downside to playing on Windows is that even though I bought BioShock through Steam and the console versions have achievements, there are no Steam achievements. I’m not sure I’d give up mouse and keyboard controls for console controllers just to get achievements, but I would have appreciated if the achievements could have been set up for Steam.
The combat was more direct than I was expecting, with very little opportunity to use stealth. There was the option to lay traps sometimes, but mostly it was easier to run in guns blazing. I think a stealth option could have fit into the game but the way the enemies come at you (sometimes what you thought was a corpse quickly stands up and starts attacking you) the direct approach was probably more satisfying anyway.
There are three different endings (though two are similar) based on the one moral choice you get to make in the game: how to treat the “little sisters” who basically were once children but transformed into creepy resource-gathering creatures. They actually say some entertaining things, as do the splicers who are the main enemies of the game. I decided to be nice to them which got me the “good” ending. The different endings didn’t entice me to play through a second time though; I really have no interest in being mean to little girls.
The underwater city is the kind of environment I found myself wanting to explore. I frequently visited the areas other than my next objective first just to find out what there was to see. BioShock does such a great job of creating a eerie, hostile, depressing, yet intriguing environment that I just kept wanting to get back into that world for more, and now I’ll have to get BioShock 2 for even more!
