BioShock

Unless you have been living on the dark side of the Moon in recent years, it is likely that you have already heard of BioShock. It generated enormous hype before launch, and has now gained one of the largest aggregate critical review scores ever (according to Metacritic with 96 out of 100, coincidentally the same as Half-Life 2). Whilst the game does have a number of minor flaws, including a final lacklustre ending and sporadic difficultly problems, it is very clear that BioShock is still a fantastic game to experience, creating one of the best settings for years, and accompanying it with an immersive and creepy atmosphere, and a plot worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster.

The game opens in extremely dramatic style, with you travelling across the Atlantic Ocean in 1960, when your plane suddenly crashes into the sea. Playing as Jack (a name derived from a present you are holding in the opening cutscene), and with no idea of why you are there or how the plane crashed, you make your way inside an isolated lighthouse the plane just so happened to crash near. From here you take a bathysphere (a primitive submersible) ride to the underwater Objectivist utopia of Rapture. After a brief spiel from the designer and architect of the city Andrew Ryan, you quickly realise that Rapture is far from the perfect, sophisticated, laissez-faire capitalist state it is supposed to be. Due to a mixture of genetic splicing and class struggle, society has collapsed, and the denizens of Rapture have become insane psychopaths, save for a few who have barricaded themselves away from the chaos. The game consists of a long and twisted journey through numerous different locales; including amongst others the fashionable shopping district of Fort Frolic and the beautiful forested gardens of Arcadia, interacting with several of Rapture's more sinister citizens, and fighting the splicer hordes. Naturally, I cannot say anything specific plot-wise without spoiling everything terribly, save to mention that the story is most definitely top-notch, featuring much inspiration from the philosophy of Ayn Rand, genetic engineering, and the problems of a completely free, unregulated capitalist society. Whilst the final ending(s) themselves are exceedingly disappointing and simplistic, there is a plot twist to rival that of 'The Sixth Sense', and the journey itself is wonderful.

As is expected, there is a nice variety of conventional weapons, from the wrench and pistol to an experimental chemical thrower, almost all of which are great fun to use, although most of them feel a little underpowered, as enemies will tend to take some time to go down. The far more fun weapons are the "plasmids", genetic alterations which give you a variety of superhuman powers. These range from abilities such as Electro Bolt, which allows for the electrocution of enemies, to Insect Swarm, which shoots hornets out of your arms at enemies, slowly stinging them to death. On the whole, you will normally be using a combination of both weapon types to take down enemies, for example stunning them with Electro Bolt and then clubbing them senseless with the wrench (an surprisingly powerful weapon), or alternatively shooting them with the shotgun.

To pay for these genetic enhancements, you must make use of a material called ADAM, which most unfortunately, can only be obtained by getting at the Little Sisters, who are small girls that wonder the ruins of Rapture, accompanied by hulking brutes known as Big Daddies, who protect the latter. These Little Sisters obtain ADAM from the numerous corpses littering the different locations, and it is your job to obtain it from them. You can do this in two ways, but both require the Big Daddy to be taken out first. This can be very tricky, as Big Daddies are extremely tough to kill, and any assault on one will require quite a bit of planning. Once you have dealt with them though, you are given a binary choice: you can either 'harvest' the girl, meaning she will die but you will gain a large amount of ADAM, or you can 'rescue' her, letting her live but only receiving a smaller amount of ADAM. Naturally, both choices have important outcomes that effect the overall progression of the plot. However, the choice is so starkly black and white in nature that you instinctively know which is the 'good' and 'evil' path, and thus, there is little or no moral ambiguity.

There are some problems relating to the difficulty of the game. On easy setting, the citizens bite the dust most realistically, taking only one or two bullets to bring them down, making combat a relative cakewalk. However, the further you progress through the game, the more difficult the enemies become to kill. This makes little sense (unless they were using plasmids or gene tonics to improve their resilience, which is altogether possible), and is quite annoying in itself. Similarly, on medium and hard settings, the splicers become even more difficult to kill generally, meaning that it can sometimes take more than half a clip of machine gun rounds before they are put to rest. A much more sensible system would have been to make your death easier, but unfortunately, death is not a problem for Jack in BioShock. When you die, you will be automatically revived at a nearby Vita-Chamber, with some health and EVE, all ready and fresh to face a new day. Although this was meant to improve the overall gaming experience and keep the pace moving, it means in practice that it is possible to continually die and rise from the dead over and over, something which is both stupid and irritating. Overall, these problems mean two things; either the game is too easy, and you'll never die, or the game is too difficult, and you'll continually die and resurrect, meaning it's actually just as easy. In principle therefore, it would be almost possible for a Marmoset to complete BioShock (apart from the ending section), as long as you could teach it the controls. Patch 1.1 does solve some of these difficulty issues, by allowing you to turn the Vita-Chambers off.

Graphically the game is amazingly detailed. The water effects everywhere are mesmerising to watch, the environments are stunning to look at, and the characters are also very detailed, though they do appear somewhat unrealistic, though this could be because of the genetic experimentation that has occurred. Environments are mainly spacious and quite varied, though later levels do feel like they were rushed as they suffer from being both smaller and also more similar to each other. AI you encounter is quite intelligent, will duck and run behind cover when needed, and will also make a beeline for the nearest health station when they are nearly dead so they can come at you again. There are also several different types of splicer, ranging from the gun touting 'Leadhead' variety to 'Houdini', which can teleport around at random, whilst throwing balls of fire or ice towards you. It would have been great if there could have been even more variety in the enemies, but only towards the end will this thought crop into your mind. There is also the ability to 'hack' several of the installations in Rapture, by playing what is essentially a game of Pipe Dream.

Musically, the game is really fantastic, featuring a number of classic 1940s and 50s songs which occasionally start up in various areas of levels, making everything feel very sinister and retro-futuristic. I am naturally drawn to compare this to Stanley Kubrick's film 'The Shining', when Jack (strange how the main character of that film and this game have the same name, isn't it?) walks down a corridor with 'Midnight for the Stars and You' playing quietly in the background. There is also a full orchestral score, parts of which I am sure have also been drawn or inspired from the aforementioned film, as they both heavily feature high tension string sections. On so many levels, this game is like 'The Shining', from the music to the setting itself. Further, very few other titles have ever made me stop and think about a game's philosophy in such a way as BioShock has. Deus Ex was one and this is another good example. Randian philsophy believes in unregulated capitalist markets; yet if anything, Rapture is the perfect example of why an uncontrollable capitalist system is inevitably going to fail. The way the game's plot is delivered through a series of taped recordings is also quite interesting, as you can feel slightly nostalgic whilst listening to the past lives of the citizens.

Without too much trouble, it is possible to look past the difficulty issues surrounding BioShock and see it in better light. The story is ace, the setting is perfect and the gameplay itself is wonderful. Naturally, it is not perfect, but as BioShock itself tells us, the pursuit of perfection can lead to serious problems. We wouldn't have wanted Irrational Games to become insane psychopaths whilst putting the game together, would we? As with many games, BioShock was partly a victim of its own hype. If you look behind the hype though, you can find a game that is well designed and is most importantly very fun to play.