As a preface, Bioshock has gotten amazing reviews from every major electronic games magazine out there and has one several "game of the year awards" as well. It received an aggregate score of 95 on metacritic.com and basically has been called the bomb by everyone whos anyone in the video game world.
My experience was a little less enjoyable than that. And I'm not surprised. I'll put it out there right now: I am an extremely hard to please gamer. I demand constant innovation and immersion to keep my attention. I am a developer's worst nightmare. So, while there are many parts of Bioshock that are admirable and deserve high praise, overall I was dissapointed with my gaming experience.
Bioshock is a first person shooter that begins with you taking the role of an unnamed man on an airplane that suddenly goes down in somewhere over the Atlantic ocean. You rise up to the surface surrounded by a ring of fire and are able to swim to tiny creepy island, where upon you discover an "elevator" that does down. . .way down. . .
The elevator takes you to Rapture, a gleaming city built at the bottom of the sea, a place its architect and god-like ruler, Andrew Ryan, has built to escape the oppressive regimes of our world. "Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?" Ryan asks. "No, says the man in Washington, it belongs to the poor. No, says the man in the Vatican it belongs to God! No, says the man in Moscow, it belongs to everyone." Such is the context of the rich world you are about to enter. The writers of Bioshock have done a superb job of creating a world unto itself. Ryan has gone about creating his own utopia under the sea and the production team behind Bioshock has mounted an incredibly believable model of this world. The visuals, although for the most part dark and saturnine, are rich a mix of stylized 1950's naivetee and an underwater labrynth constructed with steel, glass and fire. The sound is equally as enthralling. T
he heap of metal you are in is constantly creaking and heaving under the oppressive weight of the ocean and these
sounds really help in immersing you into this world. The denizens of Rapture are a twisted bunch and you can almost always hear them before you see them. Their mutterings, death cries, and caterwauls echo off the metal walls and, and the beginning at least, produce a palpable sense of fear. Its equally terrifying and pleasurable discovering what Rapture was and has become, mainly due to the impressive production value the designers have instilled in the game. The story unfold through audiotapes left around Rapture and its up to you weather or not you want to listen to them. They add considerable deapth to the story, although I found them sometimes distracting and hard to understand. I had to turn on the subtitles option
halfway though because almost every main character speaks in one crazy accent or another. I've heard they are filming Bioshock movie, which comes as no surprise, as this game is ripe with the makings of a creepy action blockbuster.
Rapture is a world gone insane. Unchecked scientific progress has lead to widespread use of personal genetic modifications - think of plastic surgery gone mad - that clearly spun out of control until a tipping point was reached and anarchy erupted in Rapture, killing most of its occupants. The things that remain, the Splicers, are deranged, mutated humans who are constantly searching for adam, the stuff that lets you genetically enhance yourself. Soon enough, you'll have the opportunity to splice yourself up and be able to wield awesome powers - fire, electricity, telekinesis, even command swarms of insects, as well as outfit yourself with suped-up tonics that provide sweet passive bonuses such as invisibility and electric skin. And
you'll need them, because you're goona have to take down Big Daddies, and lots of 'em.
A Big Daddy bears down, Little Sister in hand. Uh, I think we're gonna need a bigger wrench.
Big Daddies are the hulking, drill-for-a-hand equipped behemoth protectors of the Little Sisters, the Keepers of the Adam. They'll do anything in their power to protect these little girls. After you do eventually take them down, you're confronted with the a decision - save the Little Sisters from the "worm" that is infesting them and take some their adam, or kill them and take all their adam. Huh? Exactly. The specifics of what exactly is going on when you chose to save or destroy the Sisters is muddled and therefore, for me, diluted the intensity of the moral decision I had to make. Yet it is still there. Do I save this little girl, albeit one with glowing, red evil eyes, and scrape by, or do I destroy them, and become more powerful than I could ever possibly imagine MWAH HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH. Personally I decided to save most of the little girls, cause, y'know, I'm a stand up guy, but I had to kill a few just to see what happened cause, y'know, I'm bad ass like that. Critics have hailed this feature of the game as one of its best, because it "makes you feel." Now, I did have to think a few seconds about what I was going to do the first few times, but there are so many Little Sisters, the experience became rote and repetitive.
While it might sound like I liked this game overall, there are several major problems in it for me. The most important for me was the repetitive nature of the game. Overall, there are only about 5 enemies. There are the Splicers that either jump at you, shoot at you, or throw bombs at you, there are gun turrets, and there are Big Daddies. I quickly grew bored of level after level of the same thing. The Big Daddies are scary and menacing, but after the 12th one you've killed, the excitement is gone. I wish they each had different strengths weaknesses, different attack styles etc. similar to Mega Man bosses, because as it is, I used the same strategy for each one - stand back, launch a few grenade rounds, stun with electricty, launch a few more, repeat. The levels have a similar been-there-done-that feel to them as well. While its true you go to lots of different places like the Medical Pavilion, the energy generator, the "Vacation Land," etc. They all feel so similar and are colored with such dark, murky tones, I got more than a little inured to the style. Now, perhaps I didn't spend quite enough time with the game, or play it on a high enough difficulty level, but frankly, I didn't want to. I've read how innovative the game can be, and how you can progress through different parts in different ways, but to be honest I don't have any desire to go back and experience this again. Even as I could tell I was nearing the end of the game, I had to force myself to keep playing, mainly so I could just beat the damn thing and move on to my next game. THAT, more than anything else tells me that this is not a stellar game. Or, maybe its just me. I DID play it all the way through and thats not something I can say about every game.
Overall, I give it an 86 out of 100
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