BioShock

So you remember about 5 years ago when you heard all those lovely things about a little game called Bioshock? Yeah, well turns out that wasn’t just a coincidence. Even though this game came out in 2007, Bioshock is still a testament to game development for the single player experience and you would be CRAZY to pass up this opportunity to see just what comes close to being one of the best games I have ever played. Okay let me take the excitement back down a notch. It is true that Bioshock is one of the greatest gaming experiences I have had in a long time, but it is still a game with flaws, and unfortunately I have to tell you about them. Otherwise I would just say this game is fantastic and that would be the end of the review right there.

Most game developers realize that fighting the same enemies over and over again over the course of an entire game can get a bit boring, tedious, insert your own adjective here. That went out with the SNES days, we evolved and moved on. Sometimes though this trait still plagues a game in this day and age. You can probably see where I am going with this. You can literally count the number of different types of enemies in Bioshock on your fingers. (Well maybe you would have to use your thumbs too.) You have Splicers, Big Daddies, and boss battles. The Splicers are broken up into different types, of which there are 5. The Big Daddies are also broken up into 4 types but that is really only 2 and then upgraded versions of that 2. And then you have the only real area of difference, the boss battles. These occurrences are somewhat diverse from the rest of the experience but not enough to matter. So basically what I am saying is you only see the same enemy encounters over and over and over and over and over again. Tedious. (BUT WAIT, there is a good reason for this, I will touch on that later!)

So when you have a game that is technically classified as a shooter, you would hope the shooting is a highpoint in the experience. Not here, unfortunately. This is not bad for lack of effort, the developers put a good amount of time trying to make the gunplay interesting. There different types of ammo for each weapon designed to help you strategize which type to use on which enemy. Also included is a two stage weapon upgrade system for each weapon. The game even has a surprising deep system to upgrade your melee attack through Plasmids (more on that later!) The game even has iron sights! At the end of the day though, they just don’t feel good. I want to say that it is the aiming accuracy, it is just off, and that is going to ruin any shooting experience. I basically stayed with the shotgun then crossbow because most of the enemies just run right up to you as soon as they see you so a one-hit-kill to the face with that works as a pretty good strategy for the whole game no matter how off the aiming is.

Plasmids. What are Plasmids you may ask? While without going into the rich back story of the game’s explanation (seriously!), they are basically your character development you might find in your classic role-playing game. You acquire them throughout your adventure by various means and equip them to your character and enjoy stat boosts and magic. Yes magic. You have your weapon mapped to your right hand and your magic mapped to your right. Sadly, you can’t wield them both at the same time (see Bioshock 2.) The downside is, along with the bad aiming for the weapons, your magic suffers the same fate. You have this small circle crosshair and in the heat of battle it is hard to keep it aimed accurately enough to matter. But that’s not to say its all bad, you can use your electric strike to disable surveilence cameras and turrets, your fire to melt areas of ice which never gets old, and your frost magic to freeze enemies and shatter them into millions of tiny pieces! The only reason I put the Plasmids on the bummer category is because it isn’t especially fun to use the magic.

Keeping in mind the gimped gunplay and magic, you might imagine how hard some of the boss battles can get. Well let me rephrase that, the boss battles aren’t the hard part, it’s the Little Sisters. Once again not to ruin the fantastic story, there are Little Sisters in every area of this world and you have to “rescue” them (rescue is a reference to a morality choice.) This wouldn’t be super crazy insane hard if it wasn’t for the protection of a Big Daddy. You can only deal with a Little Sister after you deal with her Big Daddy. These Big Daddies are, incase you missed it, insanely hard. When you watch them from a distance they look easy. They are freakishly huge things in old school diving suits that clamber slowly along with their Little Sister. But if you get too close to their companion or if you fire close to her or, heaven forbid, hit them directly, its on! They move stupid fast for their size and they will make short work of you. But you have to kill them to get to the Little Sister. Now I can appreciate the dynamic of the Big Daddy. No doubt you have heard of them because they are infamous at this point. And to be honest I like what the game devs did with this, the only problem I get is when you factor in the lousy gunplay. The Big Daddies take A LOT of shots to take down, even with the grenade launcher, so you can imagine how rough it can be when you have to keep trying to avoid their all-but-one-hit-kill strikes and hit them at the same time. It will take many attempts to fell your first few. It kind of gets easier when you get some of the more strategic ammo types like the proximity mines and the crossbow tripwires but not really.

Okay so with all this negative talk about the game, are you ready to hear why it is so great? The setting and story. Though not the first to attempt a “retro-tech” setting, Bioshock successfully sells its 60’s sci-fi setting in the best example I have ever seen. The atmosphere in this game is so rich it basically drips right out of your television. They put so much detail and skill and effort and time into making this the shining cornerstone of the game and it shows. The music, the sound, the look in general, I just can’t put it in words to do it justice. Bioshock is one of those games you where you will find yourself spending hours away from where you should be just exploring and looking around at all the great environments you come across. It greatly expands what might be a 20 hour game into easily twice that. They augment this with a intensely immersive story. There is so much back story that it compels you along to find out more. They do most of this through these little cassette recordings scattered throughout the world. Citizens of Rapture used these to record their thoughts on current events in the city and as you might have guessed they get more and more current the further along you get in the game leading up to a twist that if you have managed to go this long without spoiling it for yourself, will cause your jaw to hit the floor.

And that’s Bioshock. I want to note that I spent more time focusing on the drawbacks of the game rather than the good points because, as I already told you, this game is one of the best I have ever played. In the interest of being thorough, I also need to point out the fact that I had some instances of frame rate stuttering including one time where I literally could not do anything until the game caught up with itself. But I could also tell you a lot more about why it is so amazing but like most games, you really need to play it yourself to see. And play it you should. Scratch that, you cannot call yourself a hardcore gamer if you have not played this. No amount of screwy aiming or lack of diverse enemies, or anything could take away from how great of a job Ken Levine and the team at Irrational Games did on this fantastic gaming experience. By the way, I recommend you play this.