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Preys-World - Bioshock Review

Thursday 25th of October, 2007 - 14:03:57 GMT

Well it’s been a good while since the long awaited ‘spiritual successor’ to System Shock 2 was released and it certainly didn’t come as a disappointment. Bioshock puts you in a failed utopia, Rapture, where creator Andrew Ryan, rich business tycoon chap, has lost control of the city due to civil war when the scientific advancements tore a divide between rich and poor. Now all that remains are the Splicers, completely insane civilians who are addicted to the new substance, ADAM, a revolutionary ‘currency’ that allows people to purchase a number of upgrades to their biological self in the form of plasmids. Your plane crashes near the entrance to the city and when you enter you quickly make contact with rebel leader Atlas, who informs you of the events that unfolded in the city and pleads with you to help rescue his wife and child. To be brief in the utmost manner.

First Person-Wrench-Combat Shooter?

The actual gameplay itself is difficult to define, as it bares traits from both role playing and first person shooter games. Unlike generic shooters you aren’t constantly bombarded with enemies that you have to fight every inch of the way to your goals. Instead you occasionally come across a Splicer or two as they desperately scavenge for ADAM or in their home weeping and wailing, befitting of a city where most people are dead. The lack of any real enemy presence throughout many parts of the game makes it considerably more atmospheric as you observe the bodies littered everywhere and explore, a trait obviously borrowed from SS2. You start off the game with a basic wrench and can collect up to 6 weapons in total, of which ammo is extremely plentiful, including a crossbow and shotgun. These weapons can also be supplied with different types of ammo such as armour piercing pistol rounds or an electric buck for the shotgun with temporarily disables electronic equipment, lending a great deal of flexibility to the game with what kind of ammo you might use for a task. Though these sound like excellent options to help you accomplish your goals through many manner of ways there really is little to it, primarily the wrench can get you through the entire game bar the Big Daddy fights and boss fights, the combination of a stun from your plasmid and a whack over the head with the wrench are near fatal in almost all cases allowing you to save your ammo for when you might actually really need it.

Ammo and health packs can be bought from the games numerous vending machines which are scattered around Rapture, including a vending machine that sells plasmids. And whilst they’re quite well placed at the sides of maps away from the action you can be guaranteed that you’re going to accidentally trigger one of them as you walk passed and have to listen to rather loud and distracting music that it emits.

Powahh to the Plasmids!

Alas the key to combat in this game doesn’t lie with its fire arms, but with the plasmids. A number of plasmids can be acquired throughout the game with general attack abilities that you use the left trigger for and passive plasmids that are constantly active. Attack plasmids range from lightning that can stun and electrocute enemies in water, to fire that ignites your opponent and sends them away screaming as they search for a pool of water to put themselves out in (an especially satisfying sight) and even a plasmid that makes a Big Daddy friendly to you and follow you around for a set amount of time. The fuel for these plasmids is EVE, a blue substance which acts as basic mana points for the game (RPG elements ahoy!). EVE hypos can be found all over the game levels and also purchased from vending machines, so it’s quite unlikely that you’ll ever run out and as such can quite happily blast away at every enemy you see with awesome force as if you are Emperor Palpatine. New plasmids can be purchased at specific vendors for a supply of ADAM, the resource which drove the residents of the city insane and helped it down the path to ruin. The only way to acquire ADAM is from Little Sisters, small genetically engineered girls that walk around the city extracting it from the many corpses. Though this may sound easy it really isn’t as each girl has a bodyguard in the form of a Big Daddy, the fabled character on the boxart. After defeating the girls formidable bodyguard you have the choice of either harvesting or rescuing her. Harvesting yields over 150 ADAM but kills the girl whilst rescuing her nets you 80 ADAM but allows the girl to live, the full extent of the moral choices you have to make within the game and slightly disappointing when you think of the claims that were made regarding such a system where your choices have big effects on the gameplay, when in fact its as simple as having a bit more or a bit less currency for more powers.

Bio-waste?

The biggest criticism for the game definitely is against its difficulty. The Vita-Chamber system whereby you immediately respawn at the closest chamber with no ill effect and leaving the game in the same state as when you died means that you can tackle an issue simply by dying and running back constantly to whittle down an opponents health or number. The medium difficulty setting is generally rather easy, at least to the extent where I can kill every enemy in the game with a wrench, with the occasional death coming from carelessness when engaging a Big Daddy. Obviously the reaction to that would be to play the game on the hard difficulty, to which I would simply say ‘No’. The harder difficulty does not change the experience in any way whatsoever other than the fact that you’re going to be making the trip back and forth to the Vita-Chamber a lot more often, as there is simply no way of picking your fights and going about engaging your enemy any differently, which means that the harder difficulty is more likely to be a lot more tedious than it is rewarding in the end unless you’re dying for those 40 achievement points that the 360 version offers for completion on hard.

Removal or modification to the Vita-Chamber system could easily have solved the problem but instead we’re left with a very easy game, which isn’t something that ruins the game entirely, or at all, as it allows you to explore all the areas of the game where the general story mode doesn’t take you.

Of course the game might come under a large amount of scrutiny for the mere fact that it is rather slow. It’s not often that a first person shooter comes about that is in such a style as this and the general FPS crowd might grow to dislike it purely for the fact that it isn’t another Half-Life or Halo game. Likewise it doesn’t bare enough RPG nuances to really pose a big attraction to those RPG gamers amongst us. However, Bioshock does achieve a middle ground that is truly excellent and for those of us who aren’t too diehard about constantly blowing Strogg, Covenant or Combine to pieces in an adrenaline fuelled rush and quite enjoy a nicely paced stroll through a vivid world then there isn’t a problem as Bioshock excels at providing such a thing.

Atmosphere? Ooooh

The brunt of the problems over and done with let us have a look at the more subtle features beyond zapping things with lightning that makes this game excellent. The atmosphere. Whilst the game doesn’t really bridge on the genre of horror it certainly is extremely creepy and strange. Whether it’s defending an area from a large scale Splicer attack whilst classical opera is played to you extremely loudly by the psychotic guy upstairs or raiding an enemies home in search of an item whilst a rendition of Danny Boy plays on the radio, this game undoubtedly has an excellent soundtrack. Add on to that the ambient sounds of dripping water and the distant cries of Splicers desperate for their fix of ADAM and you’ve got yourself something interesting. The audio diaries placed throughout the game that you can find, yes another SS2 trait, explain a good deal of the back-story to the game and make the world feel alive, which is an ironic term considering the setting, as you listen to peoples last words and thoughts in many cases after you find the diary on their rotting corpse. Powerful stuff.

The general spooky atmosphere is also influenced immeasurably by the graphics of the game. A good mixture of dark and light manages to show off the excellent locations as well as create a sense of horror as you pace through the city hoping that there isn’t a Splicer hiding in those shadows. Another point worth mentioning, the fact that you wont get enemies randomly spawning in behind you to try and scare you. Once an area is clear, it’ll stay clear unless you go back to it at a later date. You’d think that being an underwater city would make all of the areas very samey, that’s not the case with this game. Almost everywhere you go has a unique look and feel to it whether it’s the Arcadia forest or the industrial area. Though one thing that all areas do have in common is the abundance of corpses and blood up the walls. Walking into a room that has been completely ransacked with bodies everywhere is an impressive feeling as you scavenge the corpses in hopes of finding money or ammo, until of course one of them gets up and attacks you. The Splicers have a nasty habit of pretending to be dead.

The characters in the game make for a very memorable experience, whether its fighting the Splicers or taking on a Big Daddy (which is still rather intimidating and scary even at the later stages of the game when you’re kitted up with enough plasmids to bring down God) or even the few bosses of the game, who have truly lost their grip on reality and are somewhat terrifying to first glance upon. They all certainly make the game world believable.

Returning to the surface

Overall, everything wraps up neatly into one hell of a game. My play through took a good 15-16 hours with exploring every part of the map and trying to go through with the finest detail, but anybody who just wanted to blitz through the story could probably do it in a considerably shorter time. But this isn’t any normal shooter, if you don’t take your time and admire the world then you’ll miss the main point of the game and its beauty. Everything is worth a look. Unique and excellent, there’s no wondering why it won BAFTA Game of the Year.

9/10

- Davey K