Bioshock...It's Awesome!
Bioshock is an excellent game. Let’s just get that out the way. There is pretty much nothing wrong with this game. The story is excellent. The gameplay is amazing. And the visuals are great even for a two-year-old game. I am rarely this surprised by a game and I am usually not used to playing a game of this polish and caliber.
With all that out of the way, let’s get to it. I want it to be known that I am not a first-person shooter kind of guy. I rarely play them. But that is not because I don’t like them. It is mostly because I am no good at them. Well because of these facts I played through the game on easy. Now finished with the game, I can say that if you are no good with first-person shooters the easy mode is more of a cinematic experience with no true challenge. I never even came close to death and always had more than 6 health packs and EVE packs at all times.
You start the game as a nameless character whose plane crashes over this underwater city called Rapture. You quickly realize that everything is not what is seems and the place has gone to hell. After about 10 minutes you get one of the coolest parts of the game, a plasmid. Plasmids are substances that genetically alter your DNA to allow you to do things like shoot lightning out of your hand or have telekinesis. There are a lot of plasmids in the game and I did not even get to explore them all. The main abilities I used were the aforementioned lightning and telekinesis.
The thing that makes everyone crazy in Rapture is the hunt for a substance called ADAM. Possessed little girls called “Little Sisters” collect this ADAM. ADAM allows you to get new plasmids and increase your health and EVE, which is your plasmid consumption. To get the ADAM from the little sisters you have to kill their protectors, a Big Daddy. Big Daddies are, in my opinion, the best enemies in the game. They are these huge creatures with either a gun or a drill in the right hand. They are scary as hell and they are tough to beat. Another cool thing about them are they do not automatically agro to you unless you shoot at them or the sister. Once you beat these guys you get to engage in the only moral choice aspect of the game with the sisters. I won’t go any further as to preserve the story of the game.
And talking about the story, it is amazing. I have not experienced a great story in a video game in a really long time. There are a lot of great moments in this game and none I will spoil. But let’s just say that when I finished the game, I got the same satisfaction I get from finishing a great book. The game took around 20 hours for me to beat and there was probably more for me to experience, but I felt like I got the most out the game I could. It’s a pretty linear game but after playing a ton of sandbox kind of games, it was a welcomed change. And I could not review Bioshock without talking about the visuals. They are amazing. I do not have a high definition TV as of right now but they still looked amazing. The water effects were spot on and everything just felt right. Even walls that were wet looked like they were wet and not all plastic-y. The only thing that was less than perfect was when you opened your map. For me, the framerate dropped dramatically and made it almost a hindrance to need to look at it. It is just a shame that something that is just a 2-D object slows the game down so much.
So to sum-up everything, Bioshock is a must play. If you have any way to play this game, you have no reason not to play it. It is a work of art and I applaud the quality of this title. I know I did not talk about the guns very much but you do get some very cool weapons in the game, they just did not match my play style. I usually stuck with either the shotgun or the wrench. Also there is unique ammunition, which was a first for me. So yeah, GO PLAY THIS GAME!
