Reviews » BioShock [PC]
Reviewed by inpheaux
It is exceedingly rare for a game to come along that makes me feel like BioShock does. A game which instills such visceral fear in me that I find myself constantly looking for a place to hide, where I can hole up next to a health station and just figure out what the hell I'm supposed to be doing next without having to worry too much about something sneaking up on me. One where I really care about the decisions being made, and actually feel bad about some of the choices I make. One where the storyline isn't a cookie-cutter "get the powerup, win the game" affair. One where I can only stand to spend an hour or so in-game at any time, as I need a chance to recover from all that crippling fear. And of course, I can't get enough of it.
I've thought about this at length, and I'm pretty sure that the last game that made me feel this way was System Shock 2, a game which still holds a permanent spot in my Top 5 Games of All Time list. I'll admit, I didn't jump on the SS2 bandwagon early. I was still enjoying the hell out of Jedi Knight and being blinded by the then-more-recent releases of Team Fortress Classic and Unreal Tournament when SS2 was released. It was off my radar for a very long time, but when I finally picked up a copy I was instantly enamored. The setting was brilliant, the plot was gripping, the freedom to play the game how I wanted to was refreshing, the RPG elements were unlike anything I'd seen in an FPS at that time, and most importantly it was scary as hell but in a good way.
When I heard that Ken Levine and his team at Irrational Games (now 2K Boston) were working on a spiritual successor to System Shock 2 (only spiritual because they lost the rights to the series when they parted ways with EA) I knew it would be a groundbreaking hit. I knew right then it would be spectacular. I usually try to not get hyped up about games that far in advance, but I knew it would be outstanding. It had to be.
I turned out to be very, very, very right.
Even if you haven't yet played BioShock, you've probably heard the premise. Just in case you haven't, here's the short version. Following World War II, corporate superstar Andrew Ryan decided modern society sucked, so he rounded up like-minded individuals and set up a self-sustaining objectivist utopia on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. Unrestrained by politics or religion, the inhabitants of Rapture were free to go nuts with regard to scientific advancements, and thanks to the discovery of a new species of sea slug that conveniently secretes stem cells, advance is exactly what they did. This bountiful source of stem cells (called "ADAM") led to giant leaps in the science of genetic engineering and the creation of a vast array of "Plasmids" and "Gene Tonics", gene therapies as simple to use as over-the-counter drugs, with effects ranging from weight control to pyrokinesis.
And then things got out of hand. ADAM led to clear classes forming within Rapture. Ryan tried his best to keep Rapture hidden from the outside world, but that only led to smugglers starting up a lucrative black market. Tensions between Ryan and the smugglers, and between the two classes escalated until an all-out civil war broke out in the city. Wars need weapons, and thus, Plasmids were weaponized, leading to more powerful and more dangerous powers. More Plasmids meant a higher demand for ADAM, so to keep up with demand "Little Sisters" were created: little girls from all over Rapture were implanted with the sea slugs and brainwashed, resulting in zombie-like . . things . . that wander the city in search of corpses to harvest unused ADAM from. But since Little Sisters can't just wander around a war-zone on their own, a protector class of "Big Daddies" had to be created as well: giant lumbering beasts in diving suits, hell-bent on keeping the Little Sisters safe by whatever means necessary.
As time went on, the civil war ended in a stalemate. Excessive Plasmid use resulted in most of Rapture's population becoming horribly mutated, disfigured and insane. These Splicers are doomed to wander the city in search of another fix of ADAM. If they have to pick a fight with a Big Daddy so they can pop open a Little Sister like a piñata filled with so much ADAM-flavored candy, so be it. The smugglers largely abandoned the city as well, as all the Splicers cared about was ADAM, and there wasn't much of a non-splicer population left anymore to sell goods to. And this is Rapture as it is when you show up.
The game opens in 1960 on a plane which very quickly crashes into the ocean. As you swim through the wreckage you find a lighthouse containing a bathysphere which takes you down to Rapture. From there you befriend one of the few non-insane inhabitants of the city, a man by the name of Atlas, who just wants to get himself and his family out, and he would be happy to take you topside as well, in return for your assistance.
It isn't just the conceptual backstory and plot that are wonderful, the game's engine and art direction back it up with some unbelievable visuals and one of the most immersive gaming experiences I've come across. Unreal Engine 3.0 is some amazingly powerful stuff, in particular the water effects are some of the most realistic ever. Walking through a waterfall (of which there are plenty in the run-down Rapture) results in water sheeting over your field of vision in an incredibly realistic manner. Even little pools of water look fantastic, bubbling up in a believable manner, sending ripples of foam around the edges and so on. Fire effects in BioShock are also pretty astounding, and there's plenty of it, from things that are just on fire, to things you set on fire, to people you set on fire, to things people you set on fire run into, etc. It's been a long time since I found myself wandering around in a game slack-jawed, in complete awe of everything around me, and with BioShock I find myself compelled to do exactly that, more or less all the time.
Ok, ok, so the plot is super engrossing and I loved it. You probably get that by now and I can stop talking about it. Time to move on to other more important stuff, like gameplay. If there was one thing you could really fault System Shock 2 for, it'd probably be the fact that when it came to being a first person shooter it was really rather shit. I mean, it was first person and you could shoot things, but it didn't have anything approaching a solid FPS engine behind it, which led to clumsy shooter segments. But that was ok because everything else was so amazing and perfect that you could overlook the shooting. This was one of the top things the team wanted to get right with BioShock, and as soon as you get into your first real fire-fight it will become incredibly apparent to you that it's real this time. Guns have recoil and built-in uncertainty to their precision, clips are realistically limited, and you shouldn't expect a hulked-out drug-crazed splicer to go down in a shot or two.
But this isn't a straightforward FPS. You have item management to deal with similar to SS2, but simplified this time around. You don't have an inventory to worry about, but you do have a huge variety of junk to scrounge around for. In addition to weapons and ammo, there's food, bandages, booze, smokes, plasmids, and random crap used to make items. And they're not all just sitting around in the environment, you might have to loot a corpse, dig around in a crate, or find stuff hidden away in a shoebox.
Your real friend in rapture will be stuff you can hack. Hacking was a big part of SS2 and it's back here, this time in the form of a Pipe Dreams minigame. If you come across a vending machine, turret, health station, security camera, security bot or safe, you'll be given the option to try your hand at hacking it. When you do, again, it's like Pipe Dreams. You have to click around a grid to uncover pipe parts and arrange them so that green goop flows from an entry point to an exit point. Hacking has a different effect depending on the target. It'll make security cameras friendly, and send friendly bots after Splicers. It'll make vending machines cheaper and unlock more items. It'll make health stations cheaper and make them gas Splicers that try to use them. Hacking is incredibly important, because having a friend in Rapture is a very rare thing.
Items and friends alone won't keep you alive in Raptrure, though. If you're going to survive you're going to need to stop being a baseline human, and for that you need ADAM. This is where the moral decision comes in: to survive you need ADAM, to get ADAM you need to crack open a Little Sister, but that just feels wrong because they're just little girls. Little creepy girls, mumbling about how they're ready for dreamtime, Mr Bubbles. But you're given a choice: the scientist responsible for the Little Sisters and for ADAM in general, Dr Tennenbaum, gives you the ability to save the Little Sisters from their horrible existence by turning them back into normal little girls rather than killing them. But this moral victory comes at a material loss: saving them scores you less ADAM, and you need that ADAM to arm yourself with more and better plasmids. So you have to choose: do you want to do the Right Thing, or do you want to have a better chance of surviving? I chose the former because knowing I'm doing the Right Thing in a place like Rapture makes me feel a bit better.
The moral choices aren't really what makes the game, though. What makes the game is freedom. Not Elder Scrolls or Grand Theft Auto style of freedom, where you can choose to fuck off and do whatever you want even if it's totally irrelevant to the plot, but a freedom more like SS2 or Deus Ex, where the freedom is more about tailoring how you play to how you want to play. In any given scenario you have a wide variety of options in how you can tackle it. I like hacking stuff and don't really like charging into battle guns blazing, so I focused on souping up my hacking tonics and defensive plasmids like Electro Bolt. This meant my average encounters revolved around zapping turrets and security cams so they'll help hold off Splicers and serve as extra targets for them, while I hide in the corner and pick off Splicers who are too busy to notice me. If a Big Daddy's around, I might mind-control him so he helps me wear down the Splicers too.
Had I chosen another path, I could have decided to become an invincible death machine, mowing down everything in my path with offensive powers like Incinerate. Or I could have chosen to depend on my environment, setting oil slicks on fire and luring Splicers into water so Electro Bolt becomes deadly, and setting tripwires or cyclone traps to keep Splicers occupied. Or I could have used Enrage to piss off a Big Daddy and make him go all berserker rage on the Splicers. Or I could have used Security Bullseye to mark someone as a target for all the automated weapons in the room. Or I could have done all of the above, or done any of them depending on what was the most useful for that specific encounter. Unlike System Shock 2, where you pretty specifically pick your path at the start of the game, by choosing to go with the Marines (Soldier), Navy (Hacker) or OSA (Psionics), in BioShock you can swap out your tonics at Gene Banks, permitting you to change up what kind of scenarios you're ready to dish out.
I wouldn't feel like I was doing my due-diligence if I didn't manage to find something to complain about in BioShock, so here we go with the incredibly pedantic crap I came up with to whine about.
Complaint #1: Load times are long. Before being allowed to play the game you have to sit through a copyright notice, Unreal Engine 3 logo, Nvidia logo, and then click-through a 2K logo. Then you get to select your savegame and wait another minute or three until you actually get to play. Now, I'm not sporting a quad-core processor, but my PC isn't anything I'd call low-end, and those load times are ridiculous. But it is an Unreal Engine 3 game, and there is a ton of crap for it to load, so I can forgive it there, but my real gripe is that there isn't even a loading bar, just a looping ambient track in the background and some quotes or tips about the game. If you're going to have long load times, give me a damn loading bar so I can know if something is actually happening.
Complaint #2: BioShock requires a rather beefy PC for it to run well, and unfortunately sometimes that alone isn't enough. My cousin and I have effectively the same hardware configurations for our PCs. Despite this, BioShock runs perfectly for me and not at all for him. We have no idea why. To further confuse things, random builds of Nvidia drivers (THE WAY IT'S MEANT TO BE PLAYED!!!!!!!!!) hose my ability to take screenshots with Fraps. This sucks, and is why I don't have any screenshots from the last third of the game. The best part is I don't know who's to blame: Nvidia, Irrational, Fraps, or some combination thereof.
Complaint #3: Plasmid usage could have been a bit cleaner. Plasmids work like a second set of weapons. You can toggle over to plasmid mode and then select your plasmid like you would a weapon, and then start firing. Personally, the best method of handling an FPS with "powers" is to allow individual powers to be mapped to individual keys (example: Jedi Knight & Friends), that way I can actually have some chance in hell of using more than one in a firefight. I can give some leeway on this one, though, since you don't always have all your plasmids equipped, and you'd only really be able to map "slots" to a key, and that'd get confusing as hell to use.
. . . and that's sorta . . well . . it. Apart from those tiny little complaints the game was perfect in every way imaginable. It was everything I could have possibly hoped for and more. So if for some reason you've been putting off getting BioShock, you should probably rethink your reasoning for it. Right now.
BioShock - PC
Presentation
Prettiest and most immersive game I've played to date. If you disagree there might be something wrong with you.
Gameplay
It's like if System Shock 2 was built ontop of an actually solid FPS, rather than the Thief engine. Which is to say, amazing and wonderful.
Replayability
There's two endings, and a shitload of achievements if you're playing the 360 version. I can also guarantee that if you focus on something different, like combat rather than hacking, it'll feel like you're playing a completely different game.
Value
If you can't be bothered to pay full retail price, just wait for the inevitable forthcoming Game of the Year editions.
Overall
BioShock is the best single player FPS I've played since System Shock 2. Please believe me when I say that this means something. Now if only we could get games of this caliber released more than once or twice per decade.
