THE GOOD
THE BAD
- Great Atmosphere
- Great Graphics
- Good First Half Of The Story
- Controls Feel Comfortable
- Plenty of 'WOW!' Moments
- Second half of the story isn't as good as the first.
- Switching weapons or plasmids could have been less annoying.
- The endings feel too different.
- Final Boss drags the game down.
- Most enemies are introduced early on and are the same throughout the entire game.
Endless praise seemed to greet Bioshock’s entry into the gaming market. It had a lot going for it. But in the end, for all it does well, Bioshock’s biggest flaw is that it is a game and not a novel or even movie. You see, Bioshock puts heavy focus on its story but being a first person game that never takes you out of the perspective of the main character they had to limit their means of storytelling. With a novel they could have devoted entire chapters to events that would become the audio logs of Bioshock. With a movie they could have given us a creepy atmosphere and maybe broken the story up into a series of movies to better give us the complete picture of Rapture and the terrible events that happened. The story is what you go through Bioshock for and the story could have been better told in other forms.
Is the story in Bioshock really that good? Well… yes and no. The story suffers plenty of problems from being a videogame. Particularly the fact that it has two stories depending on how you play the game. The ending half of the game also drags on and the need for a final boss fight drags the story down further. Several of the later situations feel weak both in story and in gameplay. But the story is still why you play Bioshock and for most of it, it is quite the tale.
The story is of Jack. A young man on a plane to somewhere never mentioned. The plane inexplicably goes down and Jack is the sole survivor lost in the middle of the Atlantic. He seems to be the luckiest man in the world as there is a mysterious lighthouse, which leads him to a bathysphere (sort of an underwater elevator) that takes him to a marvelous underwater city, where a man’s rewards belong to no one else. A city where no one is bound by morals or religion or laws… The city of Rapture. But as he arrives at his destination it’s easy to see that things haven’t gone well…
The story is the biggest part of Bioshock and saying anything further would be an injustice to it. But for the first half of the story you’ll find it atmospheric and quite amazing. You’ll gain friends and enemies and attempt to escape the terrors of Rapture. It’s told through both events you go through and through audio logs and ghostly flashbacks. If you are looking for a good tale you will be hard pressed to find a videogame with a better story, though there are ones out there.
What Bioshock does as a game is far less impressive than what it does as a story. Bioshock is a pretty decent first person shooter with a lot of little nagging flaws and some huge ones that stare you in the face the whole way through. And, in the end, it boils down to being an unsatisfying videogame because of these things. Sure it has some amazing graphics and atmosphere but they can’t really save it in terms of being a game. The actual gameplay has to be good or a great story goes to waste.
Bioshock does have some of the better graphics and atmosphere for the Xbox 360 and it really helps push the story. Rapture, despite being fairly linear, feels like a real city. Looking outside at the view really helps push this feeling, though it also makes it seem like Rapture is too small. The city you see in the opening feels much bigger than what you end up exploring. Perhaps they should have built the gameplay around an open-ended city and actually allowed us to see everything in Rapture to get a better glimpse of how bad it is. But in the end it still is very well designed and made. The biggest complaint is the desire to see and know more about the place. And yes Rapture itself is the biggest character in Bioshock and had a lot of detail put into it.
The enemies you meet along the way look fairly similar if not the same for the entire game through. When you kill one of these “Splicers” and encounter the same person soon after it puts the game’s atmosphere into question. The Big Daddies come in two types for the entire game and they serve as sort of boss battles. They all look very nice when it comes down to it. The various plasmids you can find all look very nice and some can look downright nasty. In the end, there’s very little to complain about in terms of looks. Bioshock just looks spectacular. Except when you can walk through some streams of water in a way that makes it look unnatural and the fact that you don’t get any form of blurry eyes from said streams can shake the feeling that you’re in Rapture.
The various voices and music in Bioshock also deserve praise. Every single character has a unique and fitting voice that stays true to the end. The audio logs add nicely to the atmosphere with unique voices for every character. The game makes you feel sorry for these people by letting you hearing their audio diary of a city falling apart before their eyes. There is a small problem with Splicer audio tending to loop. By the end of the game I can’t remember how many times I heard a Splicer eerily singing, “Jesus Loves Me”. Perhaps a few more unique Splicer models and voice actors would have made for an ultimately better experience. But for what it is they did well. The music in Bioshock is also very nice. Occasionally hearing licensed songs from the time period and sometimes its own very nicely done music makes the experience much more haunting and memorable.
But as said, what Bioshock does as a game is far less impressive as its story. This also holds true in saying it’s worse than its graphics and sound. Those three elements blend together fairly well while the gameplay is a bit too standard… and a bit too scaled back in areas… and a tad repetitive. For every step it seems to go forward it seems to hold itself another step back and not by accident. Bioshock seems very much the game it was intended to be and that’s the saddest thing about it.
The basics of the gameplay are that you have several weapons and then you have several secondary weapons called Plasmids that are based on genetic manipulation. They allow you to do things like set things on fire or freeze them or shoot lightning out of your fist. They get pretty creative as the game goes on but some feel very cookie cutter. Your standard weapons are just normal First Person Shooter weapons designed to look and feel like they’re from the 1960s. You have your standard shotgun and pistol and machine gun. You can upgrade all of your weapons as the game goes on. You do this by finding hidden upgrade machines for your standard guns and buying upgrades for your Plasmid arsenal.
So you have some seemingly unique combat until you get down to using it. You set a single Splicer on fire and you’ve done it all with the flame plasmid, aside from melting ice. You can’t set random things on fire to block off or hurt your opponents, except for random oil puddles on the floor in predetermined places. The limitations for every Plasmid becomes apparent quickly after using them and as much as I’d like to say otherwise, there is little creative ways to really get down to using them. You could freeze an enemy then set them on fire or use insects to distract them while you whittled away their health but it’s the same thing for the entire game and even enhanced versions do the same thing just stronger for the enemies who inexplicably get stronger as the game goes on.
The meat of the combat supposedly are the fights with the Big Daddy. There are plenty of them to encounter and you always have to kill them before dealing with the Little Sister they protect. However they always fight in predetermined ways and while you can be creative it usually is more costly than finding a strategy that is repetitive but works. Sometimes you really wonder how much time was spent trying to make the gameplay creative when it really isn’t so. Everything is a concept visited before only mixed up to fit the games atmosphere and story.
Wait, what are Little Sisters? They’re small ‘monsters’ that look like little girls and sound like little girls but mindlessly gather a substance called Adam which is very much like a second form of cash. You have the choice to turn the Little Sister back into a true girl or kill them. Killing them gains the most Adam and rescuing them gives you less but you gain some rewards for saving them. This moral choice is the story’s biggest problem. Only one choice makes sense as far as the story goes and the different endings, which depend on your choice here, are jaw dropping opposites, which leaves an unsatisfactory feeling in the end.
So as you go you’ll be killing these Splicers and Big Daddys and choosing the fate of the little children of Rapture. Along the way you’ll also find plenty of ‘power-ups’ in the form of food and alcoholic drinks. Sometimes cigarettes and things like that. These things cannot be stored anywhere for later use and the main character gobbles them up as if he’s starving. The exclusion of any form of inventory system makes the game feel like they purposely scaled back any complexity it could have. This is especially true when you start picking up objects that you can invent things with at certain vending machines. The inability to check what you have until you get there can hurt the inventing process.
Speaking of vending machines, there are several different types. Some for ammo some for random items like ammo or medkits. Most sell things for cash while a certain one called Gatherer’s Garden uses Adam as its currency. Most vending machines may be hacked to lower costs and open up new items for sale. Hacking extends to security cameras and turrets and security bots that attack you. Hacking is pretty much the same mini-game, of rearranging pipes to let water flow to the end instead of to a dead-end, for the entire game. They only add a few alarms and blockages as the game goes on. Hacking is something you do all over Rapture so you’d better get used to this screen.
There is little variation in how Bioshock plays from the start to finish. The only real change is what Tonics and Plasmids you equip. Tonics are similar to Plasmids in that you have a limited number of slots for them and can switch them up and upgrade them at will. You also need Adam to purchase them, though many can be found. Tonics can make hacking easier or make you move faster or even turn invisible while standing still. It’s up to you to choose which Tonics make the game most fun. Once you find the ones you like you’ll likely stick with them because mixing things up may lead to unnecessary death or uncomfortable situations. Though for the more adventurous player it may be a nice system.
The only other thing to mention is how well or how badly Bioshock controls. For the most part it controls really well except for weapon switching which can be annoying due to only one button for weapon swapping. Perhaps setting whether you want weapons or Plasmids by the RB and LB and then letting you change between them using the D-Pad would have been better. Either way the game is comfortable to control even with this annoyance.
So that’s all there is to Bioshock really. Sure the environments look pretty and the story is nice up until the half point but in every area you’re sure to find the same Splicers you were fighting a few areas ago and you’ll be sure to run into a Big Daddy and you’ll be sure to find audio-logs and random food and drink and cash scattered around. The games set pieces never really change. Perhaps Bioshock could have benefited from extra time in development to really flesh out the gameplay and the later story and maybe fix up the way the moral choice works so the difference in the endings doesn’t feel so extreme. All in all Bioshock is a good game. But perhaps the story it tries to tell would have been better told as a novel or a series of movies or maybe television series.