Spoilers!: Be warned although I wont go out of my way to divulge details of the plot, I might. This is entirely dependant on what mood I’m in and possibly what I ate that morning. I wont do anything as fuckwitted as wandering about town in a tee-shirt proclaiming ‘Bruce Willis is really dead! – The Sixth Sense’, but you get the idea. If you read on and I ruin something, it’s your own fault!
So, Bioshock then.
Hailed by many as the spiritual successor to System Shock 2, this is the latest in a string of impressive releases from 2K Boston/2K Australia/Make your fucking minds up about a name Studios (previously Irrational Games). An FPS with a few RPG elements thrown in, it attempts to convey the idea of a Randian dystopia gone wrong situated on the ocean floor, and it must be said, it mostly succeeds.
Plot
Andrew Ryan is a man of vision, a man who believes that the intelligent should not be constrained by the stupid, that the fruits of a mans labors should be his own, to do with as he will, and apparently, that it’s a perfectly feasible idea to build an underwater city in the 1940s. He therefore rounds up a veritable cavalcade of professors, artists, doctors, visionaries and…er…pole dancers and heads off to create ‘Ratupre’. A secret sub-aquatic utopia cut off from the uneducated masses and conformity-demanding governments of the surface world.
The city beneath the waves prospers, with the genius population creating artistic masterpieces and scientific breakthroughs left right and proverbial center. However, it is one of these breakthroughs, specifically the discovery of an ocean floor life form that produces pure stem cells (dubbed ADAM), that spells the beginning of the end for Rapture. The ADAM allows the population to begin ‘splicing’ their DNA, and thus change their own genetic code as desired. At first this simply leads to people doing rather mundane things like having genetic ‘plastic surgery’ to make themselves more beautiful, or changing their sex on a regular basis. But then the growing feud between the ideological Ryan, and Frank Fontane, a one time Mobster and kingpin of Raptures black market smuggling operations explodes, leading to the creation of offensive genetic modifications (otherwise known as ‘Plasmids’). Soon enough there are riots in the underwater streets, and pyrokinetic, teleporting composers are fighting machine gun wielding superhuman botanists for control of the city.
To cap it all, the over-exploitation of the ADAM producing sea slugs has lead to their extinction in the natural world. Apparently the only way to procure a fresh supply of this splicer equivalent of crack cocaine, is (and this is where the plot nosedives from ‘rather improbable’ to ‘George Lucas’) to implant the remaining captive slugs into extensively spliced little girls called ‘little sisters’. They are given the unenviable task of running about the place with massive hypodermic needles sucking the blood out of the corpses littering the streets, drinking it, and processing it into useable ADAM. Of course these little sisters require protection and this comes in the form of the ‘Big Daddies’, massive ogre like chaps in metal diving suits who batter anything stupid enough to try and ‘harvest’ the ADAM from said syringe wielding moppets.
So in summery, everything in Rapture has pretty much gone from something good, like ‘Monkeys in top hats’ to something bad, like ‘Essex’.
Into this mess falls your character, the victim of a plane crash that conveniently dumps him in the drink right next to a lighthouse that serves as an ‘entrance’ of sorts to Rapture. The basic aim of the game is to find out what the hell is going on in the under water city, why it all went so horribly wrong, and above all, to get out alive.
Good
Bioshock is a very good game.
In the run up to its release, as is so often the case these days with ‘big’ games, the industry media, who seem determined to ruin the chances of any decent upcoming title before it comes to market by spunking an endless selection of puerile fuckwitted fanboytastic previews on it, were all over Bioshock like a cheap hooker on Rob Lowe. Coupled with this was ‘Creative Director’ Ken Levine’s nasty habit of releasing smug ‘developer diaries’ in which he and his team (complete with ‘token hot female employee hired only to make the workplace appear enlightened in stupid videos and pander to the spotty, pocket mining 13 year old twat demographic’) waxed lyrical about just how wonderful Bioshock was going to be and managed to look more pleased with themselves than God must have done when he created tits.
I got to the point where I actually wanted Bioshock to be crap simply so that Ken Levine would get his face smashed in, though of course that would require an industrial drilling crew to tunnel their way through his sternum in order to find his face, since its currently lodged along with the rest of his skull, somewhere in his small intestine.
It could so easily have been a total disaster, and I’ll begrudgingly admit that it’s a testament to Ken and the gang’s skills (modesty aside) that Bioshock turned out the way it did.
The game is gorgeous, with wonderfully atmospheric environments that look like a twisted, crumbling, art deco version of Atlantis. The enemies you face are suitably evocative and never look out of place, though they could do with more variation since there are only a few types (see the ‘Bad’ section). There has been much written and said about the water effects in Bioshock, and they are quite impressive. Not as impressive and the gushing (badum-tish) previews would have you believe, but still pretty good. Water doesn’t flow and move realistically around the environments, filling up rooms and spilling out of doorways when you enter, but it does do a very good job of falling down the odd staircase and sitting around lackadaisically in pretty puddles.
The weapons are all nicely realized and feel necessarily chunky and robust. One of the nicer aspects of the game is the upgrade system, which has you using ‘Power to the People’ machines to staple all sorts of crap to something like a shotgun to make it work better. Each of these modifications looks appropriately ‘home brewed’ and retro enough to fit in with the games 1960s setting. Only the wrench is un-upgradeable, but this is presumably because a wrench cannot be made more ‘wrenchy’ by stapling crap to it. However, in a masterful piece of game design, the developers have included many ‘tonics’ (basically modular upgrades for your character) that allow you to improve the effectiveness of the wrench. By the end of the game, I was able to kill pretty much anything apart from a big daddy with a couple of swings. So rather than simply being a glorified crate smashing tool (Bioshock actually lets you open containers rather than breaking them, see that Valve, that’s called ‘common fucking sense’) the melee weapon is actually useful throughout.
The plasmids all look pretty good too, from the blackened, cracked and glowing skin that appears on your hands when you splice ‘Incinerate’ to the sub dermal electrical energy crawling through your veins when you activate ‘Electro-bolt’. Their effects vary in terms of attractiveness, but overall, they do the job.
Of special note should be the game story and script. Much like System Shock 2 there are various ‘Audio Diaries’ left laying about for you to find as you make your way through Rapture. This is a wise move since the developer had to not only satisfy people who own PCs and therefore understand what a decent game with a decent story feels like, but also the millions of slack jawed, shit-for-brains , Xbox live retards who have the misplaced audacity to call the Halo series ‘The best games ever made’ and only require things to go ‘boom’ in a game to get a raging stiffy about it.
If you want to “push duh shiiiiiiney buttons and watch da baddies fall down” you can, whilst your fuddled little brain tries to tune out the likes of Andrew Ryan taunting you with witticisms you can’t understand. However, should you actually be intelligent and sensible enough to have played Deus Ex and understood the whole thing, you can rest assured that there is a genuinely decent exploration of human nature, a mans right to creative freedom and the principles of objectivism to be found here. Take a second to read that last sentence again. Now think, when was the last time you could say that about a game?
Propping all of this up is by far Bioshock’s greatest achievement: its sound design. The world of Rapture creaks and groans in exactly the way you would imagine a decaying underwater metropolis to as it struggles to keep the ocean out. The thumping footsteps and haunting groans of the big daddies imbue them with a form of personality that graphics alone simply couldn’t. Even the bizarre dialogue uttered by the splicers and little sisters is both perfectly in keeping with the games overall themes and well written enough to make its constant repetition by said NPCs bearable. There is something genuinely haunting about hearing the shambling footsteps of a male splicer just around the corner whilst listening to him sobbing loudly (yes, men crying in a video game) and mumbling ‘I am a success, I AM A SUCCESS’. There is also something to be said for a game where a deranged, mutated doctor in a blood stained lab coat catches sight of you as you poke your head round a corner, runs toward you shouting to nobody in particular “Nurse, help me find this patient” then proceeds to try and smash your brains in with a lead pipe whilst yelling “It’s just a standard procedure!”.
All of this would be totally unimpressive if the voice acting were not some of the very best in the business. The audio cast in Bioshock is brilliant without exception and makes the laughable efforts of other titles (Resident Evil’s slack jawed ‘look at me, I’m acting!’ morons for example) look…well…laughable.
So all in all, a flawless experience then?
Heh, not quite.
Bad
Ok, so I have explained why Bioshock is one of the best games of the year, but now let me explain why it is also one of the most disappointing.
Imagine one of the most beautiful, immersive game worlds in history. Imagine sound design that makes the world breathe exactly as it should. Imagine scrambling through the darkness of rapture, with two bullets to your name and your heart thudding as you hear the splicers closing in around you. Imagine the shitty industry hype setting up the ‘Big Daddies’ as one of the biggest challenges in gaming, and it actually turning out to be true. Imagine the heart thumping, adrenaline pumping thrill ride of fighting one.
Now imagine that you are some sort of immortal who suffers no penalty from death. Suddenly it doesn’t seem so scary does it?
This is the almost game breaking position Bioshock puts you in. When you die, you are revived at a ‘Vita Chamber’ (basically a big cloning tank thing). But rather than using this as an in game explanation for why you are being booted back to the last checkpoint you passed, and then reloading your last save-game, Bioshock literally resurrects you a second or so after you die and leaves the world exactly as it was. No loading of saves, no punishment, no replaying of content, it just plops you back in the game world and says ‘there there, its all better now, go kill those nasty monsters for being so mean’.
I played Bioshock on the hardest difficulty setting and the first time I came across a big daddy that I could fight, I nearly shat myself when it stormed across the room and killed me in about two seconds. ‘This is good’, I thought ‘I’m going to go back in there, and find a way to show that motherfucker who the real ‘daddy’ is. Imagine my utter disgust when I got back to said room only to find that the big daddy still bore the scars from our last encounter. He hadn’t healed the admittedly minuscule amount of damage I had done to him when I died. For a second, I stood there stunned, then I walked up to him, disbelieving, and whacked him over the head with my wrench. Three seconds later I was respawning at the vita chamber and making my way back to the daddy again. Sure enough, his health was exactly as it had been immediately post-wrenching. In a horribly mangled word: Un-fucking-believable.
I simply cannot describe how utterly terrible the death system in Bioshock is. Why a developer goes to all the trouble of creating some of the most compelling, challenging and downright fucking vicious enemies in gaming, and then makes them all seem about as threatening as a cross-eyed care-bear with Parkinson’s is beyond me. Realizing that I could beat every big daddy in the game to death with my wrench (which would admittedly take about six million years) was one of the most crushing disappointments I have ever experienced in gaming. Nothing is scary when you know that death is a non-issue. If a mutant freak in a waistcoat beats me to death, so what, I’ll just resurrect repeatedly and beat him to death whilst shouting ‘fuck you hard difficulty setting’. Admittedly, I would also be moaning my tits off if the game forced you to replay the last two hours of content whenever you died, but there should at least be a balance.
As alluded to in the ‘Good’ section, the enemies, although varied in terms of aesthetics, are depressingly bland in terms of behavior. For a bunch of mutant geniuses, they are surprisingly retarded when it comes to dealing with intruders. ‘Run at him and cut him up’ is the sort of behavior you expect to see in any northern British city on a Friday night, not in an underwater one full of supposed visionaries. The main problem is a distinct lack of variety.
There are only a few types of splicer whom you will see again and again but with slightly different clothing. It seems mighty unlikely that every single citizen of rapture is going to assign themselves to one of five or six ‘classes’ and stick rigidly to the same behavior patterns, but that’s exactly what they do. Why couldn’t they have switched weapons mid fight? Or done intelligent things like set traps or rip a pipe off a wall and try to hit you with it if you disarmed them?
The hacking system in the game is also noteworthy for being total shit. It’s basically ‘Pipe Dream’ but wedged improbably into a 1960s steam punk setting simply because some nobber on the development team thought it was ‘cool’ and ‘retro’. What it is, is really really repetitive, fucking annoying and sometimes outrageously unfair since some of the ‘puzzles’ it throws at you have no possible solution. It’s pathetically easy when it is solvable and lacks the depth and complexity necessary to make it a worthwhile addition to the game
Another major problem is the ‘resource’ system. In the very early stages, you are armed with nothing but a wrench, a plasmid and a revolver. For about half an hour, I enjoyed some fantastically tense game play where I was scrambling about, juggling between shocking splicers with my electro-bolt and twatting them in the skull with my wrench, or trying to shoot them in the eye with one of my very limited supply of bullets. Every time I pulled the trigger and missed, it was accompanied by a wince at the wastage of such a precious resource. Similarly, I was at several points, wandering about on the very brink of death, desperately hoping that I would be able to make it to the next aid station or med kit before a splicer managed to plug me. It was brilliant, though mostly because I hadn’t discovered the death system at that point.
However, pretty soon, I began finding more and more med kits, EVE hypos and ammo clips. Suddenly, I could afford to miss and not worry about it. I could take a few hits and simply top myself up when needed. I could use my plasmids as often as I liked and it didn’t matter.
By the latter stages of the game, I was carrying more weapons about my person than your average American inner city teenager and I had ammo popping out of my ears. I was stumbling across med kits, money, ammo and EVE so ridiculously often that I was unable to pick most of it up due to a full inventory (which the developers neglected to put a management screen in for) and could happily mow down anything in my path without even bothering to aim properly. I mean who in gods name was leaving all this shit lying about? ‘I know’ thinks Jonny splicer ‘I may be going slowly insane is this crumbling sub-aquatic dystopia, but rather than masturbating myself to death whilst whistling the national anthem, I think I’ll go raid the local hospital for medial supplies, and then toddle about the city leaving them in piles of refuse and on otherwise totally unadorned tables’. It makes no sense, and worse, it removes even more tension from the game.
To cap it all, the knock on effect of this massive imbalance of late game resources is a drastic drop in difficulty. It goes from ‘Hard isn’t really hard enough’ early on, to ‘A monkey could beat this by poking the buttons with his cock’. Big daddies go from being a rock solid challenge in the early game, providing you actually attempt to take one down properly and don’t simply resort to zerging him from the vita chamber, to being a chore in the late game that takes seconds to dispatch. Even when facing the ‘elite’ big daddies in the final stages of the game on hard, all it takes is eight tripwire crossbow bolts strung across a corridor, and a single normal pistol round to ‘aggro’ the daddy and you can stand there picking your nose whilst he blindly charges toward you and murders himself.
Being able to set traps for enemies = good, being able to set traps their AI routines have no idea how to notice or avoid = bad.
The levels in Bioshock are well designed for the most part, with plenty of secret areas for the inquisitive to discover. However, the last level of the game lacks any kind of creativity and resorts to a boring linear trudge through ‘Halo 2’ style dingy corridors whilst shooting things with some of your millions of bullets. It’s as if the developers just thought ‘fuck it, the rest is pretty good, lets just knock up some of the usual FPS bollocks and let’s ship this thing’.
The same thing applies to the final boss battle. Much like Gears of War, Bioshock suffers from the same ‘mostly awesome game with infrequent and unsatisfying boss battles syndrome’ (early game big daddies aside). The finale has a very ham fisted, tacked on feel and floats disjointedly aside from the rest of the game.
Finally the endings are a huge let down. As with so many games which offer the player the ‘choice’, there is no middle ground whatsoever. You either turn out to be a head-up-arse paragon of virtue and light who makes Florence Nightingale look like an unsympathetic whorebag, or a despotic tyrant who would employ Hitler as a tea boy in order to teach him the ropes. Its brain meltingly irritating to purchase a game that supposedly offers choices, only to find that the choices aren’t really choices at all but instead the game only contains a single choice: depressingly predictable path A or depressingly predictable path B.
I understand that every game can’t be expected to be as complex and involving as some of the great PC FPS/RPGs, especially when it has to cater to the ‘Xbox live’ morons. But for the love of god 2K, you could have given us something a little more involved than ‘murder the little girls or save them’. Dead Rising has more possible endings that this for Christ sake.
The most depressing thing of all is that had Bioshock been as complex as something like System Shock 2 or Deus Ex, it would quite possibly have been a genuinely worthy successor to the former and maybe as good as the latter. As it is, it comes of as a slightly poorer imitation that would have been nigh on perfect if only the developers had spent more time actually developing and less time sucking each other off in an orgy of backslappy hype-mongering.
Conclusion
Bioshock is one of those rare games that actually makes a decent attempt at pushing boundaries, and certainly in terms of story, looks and art design it succeeds. It’s brilliantly written and has a few genuinely interesting points to make about the world we live in. Also any game with this many literary references clearly has something going for it. The game play itself is brilliantly executed, the world immersive and the sound design simply staggering.
That said, it’s shallow, the enemies lack variation, the hacking is repetitive rubbish and the death system is almost unforgivably shit. Luckily though, none of these gripes is enough to make Bioshock a bad game. I just can’t help looking at it and thinking that it could have been one of the very best games ever made.
Rating: 9.1/10
