Well, I finished it. I was waiting to have an opinion, since I wanted to complete the game before I said whether it was awesome, or whether it sucked all manner of donkey balls, and last night I fired my last plasmid, watched the ending sequence, and sat back breathless, tired and awe struck.
So here, for the reading pleasure of anyone who cares, is my (not so) little write up on Bioshock.
In the vain of all good reviewers everywhere I should probably say something about what the game is all about.
Bioshock begins with your character, cryptically named Jack, sat on a plane which promptly crashes into the ocean. OK so it's the middle of the night, and you surface to find yourself surrounded by nothing but infinite blackness and an alarming amount of burning jet fuel... oh yes, and a large, inexplicable tower. Strange to have a lighthouse in the middle of the ocean, you think ? Or perhaps it's a really committed hermit's house. Anyway, with little choice either way you head towards it, and are enticed and lead down to a strange submersible pod which upon entering takes you to the ocean floor.
As the instructional video which plays in the sinking bubble announces, you are headed to Rapture. A city under the sea built by visionary and part time madman Andrew Ryan, to house the brightest and best of the world. There they could pursue their art, science or lifestyles without the constraints, laws and petty ethics of society, and thusly introduced your transport floats over a cliff edge to reveal the utopian place in all it's glory.
It's awesome. As you gracefully float between the neon skyscrapers, surrounded by shoals of fish and at one point a singing whale, you can't help but be a little blown away by the beauty and audacity of it all. What it also does is instantly create in you an unquenchable desire to explore this fantastic place - a feeling which never leaves you.
As your water bubble docks and you prepare, all jumpy and excited, to begin your journey through this place, you get your first indications that something is amiss. To be honest, first indication is a bit glib since what actually happens is you see some dude sliced in half by another dude who has glowing scythes for hands right in front of your eyes. Scythe boy then proceeds to attempt to smash his way into your submarine, presumably intent on releasing your innards too, but is prevented from doing so by the resistant metal of the hull of the thing, and he wanders off to wait for you to come out.
As you take your first tentative steps what greets you is a room with large windows looking out into the watery streets of the city, barely adequate lighting cutting through an atmospheric haze, and the sure knowledge that somewhere here there is a weird monster waiting to slice you into iddy-biddy-hero-bits(tm).
This is not a game for the easily startled.
Around this time you are greeted by the seemingly warm and fuzzy voice of a guy calling himself Atlas, who promises to guide you through the city to safety, and help you out all he can. What he tells you is that the inhabitants of Rapture discovered the ability to quickly and easily genetically modify themselves. Initially they used this ability for the obvious - making themselves prettier or stronger etc. - but soon enough human nature set in, and people were running around shooting fireballs and lightening from their finger tips, and making shit move just by pointing at it. With the genetic material required to achieve this miracles in short supply, and everyone fighting over it, a genetic civil war broke out, and it is in the wake of this terrible event that you come to Rapture.
Rapture is a monument to the folly of the human spirit, and it shows. Broken, hopeless and dark, Rapture is the physical manifestation of everything that is bad inside all of us... let's make no mistake about it - it's not a fun place to take a holiday.
And so it begins... a long journey through the bowels of a destroyed and hostile place, to find... what ? Freedom ? Secrets ? Yourself ? You'll have to play it and find out, wont you ?
I guess the first thing to say about Bioshock is that it looks gorgeous. The graphics are of a typically high standard for a game in this day and age (shader effects, dynamic lighting, realistic shadows, realistically rendered woolen sweater), but the art design is unmatched. Every tiny part of Rapture; from it's windows looking out into a hypnotic aquatic world to it's posters, furniture, interior design and the amazing representation of it's recent decay is faultless. Not only this, but designers Irrational Games did an amazing job making you always aware of the ever encroaching ocean. Everywhere you go water seeps in through cracks in the glass, or runs down a corridor in ominous streams. You constantly feel that at any moment the structure might give in to the power of the sea, and it only adds to the sense of fear and tension.
So, looks lovely ? Check.
However, classy visuals do not a great game make, and so what about the rest of it ?
Bioshock is a first person shooter. Like Half-Life (for example) you run around shooting things dead, surviving from room to room, eventually achieving whatever short term/long term goals you might have on your to-do list at the time. However, there are some major differences between Bioshock, and the so called 'run and gun' FPS games we know so well, like Doom, Half-Life, Quake or Fear.
Mainly (or so the developers tell us) these differences come in the form of choices.
What we are led to believe is that Bioshock is all about choice. Choices in story, choices in character development and choices in the way you approach combat. On the box it tells us that no two players will have the same experience.
This is all pretty much shash.
There's very little actual choice in Bioshock, and to be honest it shouldn't have been sold on this basis, since all it does is lead people to point, make a strange aaaaaarrrrrrrrrgggg noise, jibber for a while, and then criticise the game for not living up to it's promise.
I feel that this is pretty damn unfair, since the game stands up perfectly well on it's own, and if the developers and marketers had just kept their fat mouths shut they wouldn't have give the nay-sayers the chance to tell them that they were wrong.
Most of the criticisms I've heard of Bioshock (and despite it's very high review scores I've heard a few) have been to compare the game to it's promise and claim that it in fact isn't all than 'n a bag, since reality doesn't quite match up. I believe that the game should be judged purely on how good a gaming experience it is when you actually sit down and play it, and not on the witless blatherings of some drunken PR guy in the bar at E3.
Bioshock is a linear adventure. You can't do different sections of the game in any order you want (although once you've 'beaten' a section you can return to it at any time to see if there are any new areas unlocked or to find anything you missed the first time), and you will find it very difficult to stray from the pre-determined narrative path. You can tackle each area in a non-linear fashion, and some sections are optional - meant for exploration only - but yeah... it's pretty much a straightforward story which you move through a level at a time.
Choice in combat is definitely in there, and in truth is one of the areas of the game which actually works pretty damn well. Not perfectly, but pretty damn well all the same. They've gone to great trouble to introduce many many little ways for you to deal with the offending assailants you'll meet as you pass through Rapture's halls. Security cameras and gun turrets can be 'hacked', putting them on your team. The environment has all manner of cool stuff you can use to help you (oil on the floor you can set alight, water you can electrocute, exploding barrels etc.). Enemies can be turned against each other. You have standard weapons (shotgun, pistol, grenade launcher, crossbow etc.) and of course your bio-enhanced super-powers. There are enough variables here to mean that you can tackle any encounter in various ways. Not only this but there is genuine room for your playing style to dictate the way you approach the combat. There's enough variety and opportunity for variance that your individual preference of approach to combat will be imprinted on your choices. I've spoken to people who approached things from a stealth point of view, an explosive point of view, or a tactical point of view. It all works, and works well. I found the combat satisfying and fun, and once I got bored with shooting a gun, I could change tactic and approach things in a different way. There are even sections of the game which restrict your access to certain weapons or abilities to encourage a different tactic, which are all extremely well handled.
Where it falls down is simply in a small matter of game mechanics. As you enter a room you tend to get bombarded by screaming nutters, spluttering droids and moaning monsters in fairly urgent fashion, causing you to scream a little, bash your fire button with one hand while covering your eyes with the other. Once all the enemies have been duly dispatched you wander into the room and go; "oh look, there's a oil patch on the floor I could have set alight or a pool of water I could have electrocuted. That could have been fun!" Boh.
Even when you become more accomplished at the game the combat still tends to be fairly reactive, not leaving you much chance to strategically plan out your attacks, and with a few notable exceptions (the Big Daddy fights in particular) you tend to feel a bit like your playing Doom rather than Thief.
The last significant kind of choice you are promised is more of a moral choice, and it's this which supposedly affects the way the story turns out as you play through.
To talk about this we have to talk about Little Sisters and Big Daddys.
Little Sisters are small girls who wander the corridors and catacombs of Rapture with a big needle looking for dead bodies. When they find one they stick they're big needle into the body and extract the genetic material in their blood. This is how you get Adam; the stuff you need to genetically modify yourself, and increase your arsenal of wacky powers. You get it from the little girls.
The problem is that to get to the girls in the first place you have to get past their body guards. The Big Daddys. Great lumbering beasts in weird diving suit type armour, with hugely intimidating weapons, a disconcerting turn of speed and an amazingly well developed resistance to being smacked on the head with a wrench.
These creatures moan like whales, which is quite eerie, and follow the Little Sisters around like puppy dogs. All the time the Little Sisters talk to them like they're a big teddy bear ("I'm ready for bed now Mr. Bubbles"), and to be honest following them around and watching the way these two personalities interact is one of the most rewarding and unsettling experiences you can have with a video game.
Neither, however, is aggressive until you initiate combat with the little girl or the protector, so you can pretty much leave them alone and set traps and plan strategy to take them down. Not only is this essential, since they're pretty damn tough, but it also means that these battles are the most rewarding and fun in the game. Good then that they happen often.
Once you remove the Big Daddy and advance on the Little Sister for your prize, you have to choose whether to forcibly take it from them - killing the child in the process - or to gently take it from them, rescuing the brat from it's life of genetic servitude, so it can live out a life of worrying about makeup, and paying taxes. Probably. The kicker is that you get half the Adam for saving them than you do for killing them.
Bummer huh ?
Well, not really... because if you save them they keep giving you presents which kinda makes up the difference in Adam, and also gives you access to powers which you can't get if your a mean cold-hearted bastard who enjoys slaughtering 8 year olds. So really, it's only the XBOX Live! achievements which will encourage me to re-play the game as a serial killing sociopath.
What this choice does give you is a variety of different endings and story elements depending on how many of them you kill and save. Personally, being the pathetic left-wing hippy that I am, I couldn't bring myself to kill a single one of them, so I can only comment on the 'Disney' ending... which is actually really touching and satisfying... But I'm getting ahead of myself.
So I've just used up a whole lot of words telling you why the promised 'choice' in Bioshock isn't quite what we were expecting. But I submit to you, dear reader, that I don't give a hoot and a holler. I only wish that they didn't make such a big deal out of it before release, because disappointment can only come from expectation. There is enough awesomeness in Bioshock to last a lifetime, but it does not come from some imaginary (and potentially unrealistic) choice mechanic.
It comes from 3 things...
A.I., narrative and atmosphere.
These three things, combined with a capable gameplay mechanic and unprecedented design are the reasons why Bioshock is one of the most astonishing gaming experiences I've ever had.
There is a lot of fuss made these days about emergent gameplay. What this means is that the A.I. is good enough that any encounter with computer controlled characters will change as a result of the players actions and the realtime reactions of the A.I.
For instance, in a Mario game you might walk into a room and a boss baddie will drop from the ceiling. Based on a simple set of rules the baddie will shoot stuff at you in a certain pattern, hesitate every few shots to allow you to get your own attack in, and then repeat it's routine.
(important note : I am not criticising Mario... just making a point ok ?)
What people are trying to achieve in games like Bioshock is a situation where there aren't rules that govern the enemies, but an intelligence which allows them to react as if they were human controlled, and make the battle encounters unpredictable. So for instance, you could walk into a room where two characters are involved in their own nonsense, and when you knock something off've a table they turn, startled. One, in a fit of panic, let's loose his grenade launcher and accidentally kills the other. He then runs towards you screaming and falls into a large hole in front of him because he was so flustered he wasn't watching where he was going.
Another time you could walk into the same room, but this time they spotted you earlier because you behaved differently, and took the attack initiative themselves, teaming up on you attacking from different directions, making use of the terrain. This would then of course be a very different and much more difficult encounter.
Because the characters are governed by the reactions of their A.I. routines rather than simple rules of combat, anything could, and does happen. Make sense ?
OK good. Well, this is something that Bioshock does very well. The enemies are genuinely reactive, going about their business, seemingly acting with personality to your presence, turning on each other when the mood suits them, and sometimes getting into all sorts of trouble regardless of whether you stick your nose in or not. Apart from the obvious 'plot' moments Bioshock never EVER feels scripted for forced. It feels exactly like you are wandering around someone else's territory, and they're not pleased to see you, and react accordingly.
I've seen an enemy recently set on fire by my awesome fireball, run around a room screaming. They nudge another enemy setting them on fire too, and both then run around screaming. They then ran headlong into each other with a satisfying thump, and both fell down dead on the floor. Awesome.
To stroll into a corridor and happen upon several Splicers (the genetically modified creatures that make up the bulk of Rapture's inhabitants) battling with a Big Daddy for some reason known only to them is fantastically fun. They shout and scream at each other. They gang up on the bigger enemy. The Little Sister shouts things like "get 'em Mr. B" and hides behind his legs. It pretty exciting stuff.
Added to this you can then decide to step in, taking advantage of the fracas to easily overcome all, stroll on by or wait to see how it plays out. Of course if you choose this last option you run the risk of being spotted, at which time there is the distinct possibility that they will all forget their quarrel with each other and come after you. It's pretty cool stuff.
The last thing to talk about is perhaps the most important.
Narrative and atmosphere.
Bioshock borrows heavily from Irrational Games' previous classic outing System Shock 2 (and it's predecessor). One of the game devices it borrows in spades is the idea of audio logs for back story. Going back to Shock 1 we had this idea that everyone you could possibly communicate with is dead, but they leave behind audio diaries and personal logs which tell the story of their lives, the story of the place and in some cases their final moments piece by piece.
By using this device again it allows Irrational to not only reveal the plot to you at their own pace, in a subtle and elegant way, but also to fill in their rich back story, and create a fantastic sense of atmosphere and place without leaving the real-time environment of the gameplay.
Here, especially, it works incredibly well. You just have to make sure you pay attention, since you'll be wanting to listen to them all, and some of them are well hidden.
The story itself is fantastic. It really is. Complex, interesting, unexpected and utterly captivating, if there's one thing that Bioshock does better than almost any game out there, is it makes you desperately want to know what happens next. Not only that, but breaking with video game tradition (but not their own) Irrational have managed to maintain the story's intensity and intrigue right to the final moments, creating a twisting and turning journey which carries you breathless to the last image of the game.
It's truly something to be marveled at. I wish I could talk about it, but it's all about the reveals and immersing yourself in the story, so I refuse to put anything even approaching a spoiler in this write up. Just play it and then come talk to me about it. It is one of the greatest gaming stories ever told.
I realise that I've been rambling for a while now, so I shall wrap it up. But I will say that even in this epic post I have just constructed I have not even begun to say all the things I would like to say about Bioshock.
If Bioshock has any real faults, for me they can only be identified when judged against the pre-release hype or the crap spouted on the back of the game box.
It was touted as a new paragon of player choice in gaming, and to be quite honest it isn't. Personally I'm not even completely sure that's possible.
However, what we should be focusing on is it's strengths. Bioshock is an action based first person shooter/adventure, which demonstrates genuine emergent combat, a riveting plot, more atmosphere and immersion than almost any other video game ever created, and a sense of place that's unrivalled in the medium - thanks to stunning graphics, intimidating attention to detail and the most beautifully realised and designed game world I've ever visited.
My experience with Bioshock has been sublime. I found it compelling to play through, bags of fun to pick up and play, exciting, interesting, intelligent, impossible to put down and utterly wonderful in every way.
If it has any little problems hiding under it's surface, for me they were completely eclipsed by the sheer joy of the experience of playing it.
It's unsettling, tense, creepy, utterly fucked up and fantastically rewarding.
For anyone who finds genuine pleasure in playing a video game, I simply cannot convey how passionately I recommend playing through Bioshock.
Like the greatest movies, books or music, Bioshock truly is an experience.
One of the most magical and just plain awesome video gaming experiences there is to be had in the world. Period.
Good night Mr. Bubbles.
