BioShock

"Definitely solid, but vastly overhyped."

Bioshock. After a lengthy development cycle, the spiritual sequel to PC classic System Shock 2 has landed on PC and Xbox 360. Wait, I only said long development time? I forgot to mention the accompanying months of hype served up by every self-respecting publication, piling on more promises with each article. Unlike the hype for the likes of Halo 3, this was more like a constant, medium-loud buzz than a rockslide that comes in waves.

But whatever its hype type, the fact remains everyone had been promised some pretty head-exploding stuff. I read the same interviews as everyone. An organic, independent ecosystem! A huge world open for free exploration! A wide variety of magic-like "plasmid" powers, "ammo invention", weapon upgrades, and so much more! So the big question now is... does Bioshock deliver?

Well, one could euphemistically say... it somehow feels like some alterations were made to the plan along the way.

As atmospheric as a concentrated mix of N, O2, and trace gases!

Starting with what I really liked about the game: like SS2 did back in the day, it pretty much defines "atmosphere". The underwater city of Rapture is both a monument to the first half of the 20th century and an immensely creepy place that surrounds you with signs of interrupted everyday life while the echoing voices of insane, barely human enemies stalk you through the halls.

I feel sound plays a big part in crafting that atmosphere. The soundtrack is a mix of stellar licensed era songs with some original orchestral ditties interspersed throughout. As for what songs are licensed, think stuff like "Beyond the Sea", "How much is that doggy in the window", "It's bad for me", with special appearances by classical classics (with little to no redundant repetition.) You know, good songs from when quality was having a catchy tune and a solid voice to back it up. They play from loudspeakers and jukeboxes in areas that are otherwise eerily quiet, in places that ought to have been full of people relaxing and conducting their daily business. It really gives off that golden bipolar vibe.

The short orchestral numbers composed for the game are very subdued, rarely very noticeable, and seemingly played at random times. Why didn't this crescendo play all those other times I stuck an EVE hypodermic needle in my wrist? Wait, why is it even playing now, I'm basically just restoring my MP. You get the idea. It's not that they're bad, they just don't add as much as they could have. I'd still rather have them than not, though.

On the flipside of music, the sounds. Enemies have a wide variety of quotes depending on their type, their alert state, and your status and actions, although the latter point is occasionally subject to misuse. These quotes are suitably unnerving or disturbing, and are all-around well-acted. The Big Daddy diving-suit clad miniboss enemies emit deep. animalistic moans and groans, which are actually very effective at scaring the crap out of you. Other environmental sounds such as flowing water, alarms, machinery humming, etc., sound great and round out the aural aspect of the atmosphere quite nicely. Plus, I may never be able to get the vending machines' themes out of my head.

One can't talk about the atmosphere and neglect to mention the graphics. Although, it's worth mentioning that the PC version demands that your graphics card support Shader 3.0. Not Shader 2.0b or Shader HD (whatever the hell that is, goddamned ATI marketing BS) but Shader 3.0. Why does it require S3.0? Crysis, coming soon to computers near you, promises to run on "4 year-old computers". Did Irrational/2k think it would be more impressive if they served up a big, manly, fuel-guzzling, air-polluting Shader 3.0 exclusive game? King in the castle, king in the castle, I have a Shader, I have a shader. Sounds like someone wanted to compensate for something. Color me impressed... NOT!

So anyway, I had to use a user-made fix so my Shader 2.0b card would display the game. This left me with a few graphical glitches, so most of the praise I'm heaping here will come from my friend's XB360 run through the game, which I was present for a part of. The water effects are indeed very nice. Water outside the glass walls distorts your view slightly, just as it should. One point of contention is, how come you can see outside so clearly? At that depth, there shouldn't be enough light, and what light there is couldn't spread very far. The water and oil patches inside the city also look great. You'd have to see them to believe them. Just one thing, again: when you shoot some bodies of water (example: around the bathyspheres) they do not react in the slightest. Kind of harms the immersion. Get it?

But water is not all there is! The town structures themselves look clear and clean, really giving you the feeling that they were lived in until a short time ago. Everything is greased up with the hateful fad effect that is "bloom", but reasonably so. That shine, those neon-like lights, the bright vending machines... It all feels like a dream world or paradise, and the wonderfully varied color palette proves next-gen doesn't have to equal brown and more brown. See: Call of doody, Re----stain: fail of man et al.


The narrative.

The driving force behind your adventures. A few minutes after the FMV intro, you arrive in the great failed utopia of Rapture, finding insane masked people and audio logs everywhere. That's the first thing I'm questioning: why are all those big tape recorders laying around with people's incremental diaries on them? A poster in-game tries to hang a lampshade on that situation, advertising the all-new voice diary machines or some such, basically telling the player "those bulky things that record at most forty seconds were the latest fad, that's why you see them everywhere" but I didn't buy it. Audio logs made more sense in the hi-tech environment of SS2. I think they were implemented here to cater to the ADHD/barely literate crowd. More on that later. To the logs' credits, they are all formidably well-acted, save for the occasional forced russian or german accent.

The characters you get to know through the audio logs are somewhat nebulous. They'll mostly say what is required of them either by the storyline or to shock and amaze the player. Among the paper cut-out personalities are the Worried Woman, the Callous Foreigner Mad Scientist, the Repented Foreigner Scientist, the Foreigner Scientist with Conflicting Feelings Shoved Down Your Throat, and the Foreigner Tavern Owner who questions the two biggest authority figures in the city. For some reason, that last one sometimes switches between Irish and Cockney accents.

One character that really impressed me was the visionary responsible for the creation of Rapture, Andrew Ryan. His mantras, loudspoken all over the city, his unique view on things. the way he wavers between obstinacy and self-doubt as his house of cards begins crumbling, and his dignified last appearance on-screen... He is easily the best-developed character, and his depth is not the mass-produced, "S/HE IS BLACK BUT ALSO WHITE OK" kind (see scientist #3 above). All in all, Ryan was among the most memorable elements of this game. It's a shame he had no co-star in the rest of the sock-puppet show.

The story has another problem: very little actually happens in your presence, if you think about it. Through several people's recordings, you uncover what happened here a while ago, but not a lot actually happens to you. I can think of only three noticeably influential/interesting story events after you enter the city (spoiler-free): meeting a madman, meeting an important man and identifying and pursuing a traitor. The problem is that everything's already over by the time you arrive. All that's left is for you to go from place to place, with some uninteresting pseudo-drama sprinkled in along the way to slow you down (Oh no! the trees are dead, go fetch chemicals to revive them. Oh no! Such a thing is in your way, go fetch such and such things to proceed!) It's so-so.

Allow me to pile on a third problem: the narrative uses a liquid MacGuffin device called "Adam" that is the excuse for having little girls collecting blood and turning it into controversy, as well as the substance that allows plasmid powers and gene-enhancing tonics to work. It can be used through an enhancement vending machine or injected directly with little difference in the effect. It can affect surgery, breeding, psychological development, mental attributes, it allows for mind control, it can be stored and transported god only knows how many different unexplained ways, it cooks lunch, brunch and 8-course dinners and tends to the missus' private needs when the master is out. Basically, if the plot had called for aliens to invade Rapture, or for time travel to occur, or for bouts of random anti-gravity, you can bet Adam would have been the cause.

So, besides the initial concept, setting and mechanics of the world (all things you discover within your first 40 minutes) there isn't a lot to hold your attention, live story-wise. The all-powerful plot device Adam doesn't really help matters.

My bellyaching aside, thank fate for the logs and the great voice acting. An honorable mention goes to the touching good ending FMV for splendid direction, though it's only 30 seconds long.


The reason why it's a game... the gameplay! Or, "porblem"

Lemme get one thing off my chest straight off: my nerves are simply raw when I think back to kids and brown-noser pundits harping on and on about "OMG IT'S ART" months before this game's release. Can't you see and appreciate the beauty of the art of harmonious movement, lights and music in Space Channel 5~2? Don't you feel moved by the skillful storyline buildup to the climax of Persona 3? If the written word and music are art, how about the chiptunes and fantastic localization of Lufia 2, whose ending was the first time I cried playing a video game? Do you need to see a stuffy oil painting with 40 layers of paint before you declare something "art", you wannabes?

A-haanyway, Bioshock's biggest problem is that unlike what we were promised, and unlike its spiritual prequels, it's... pretty much like most FPS games. Either Irrational 1) Was lying, 2) Has lost the touch or 3) Made an enormous number of concessions to the "usual FPS crowd". Imagine me reading out the last point in a venomous,spiteful, stern tone and you'll understand what I mean. Don't worry, it's not like they've read this far. Sometimes prepubescent, sometimes foul-mouthed on Xbox Live, sometimes spotted in game stores being their 60-watt self. They're the reason EA makes money, and sadly, they seem to be the public Bioshock was trampled over to please.

Inventory management? What's that? Diablo-style grid inventories have no mainstream appeal, let's just freaking cut it and have 90% of items be immediately consumed and the rest held invisibly! We'll rationalize it by implying "where would the character carry it?" Never mind that he has over half a dozen guns with overlapping functions! That's what you need for mainstream success!

Hey, check this out! You never need to think about where you're going, thanks to that big-ass arrow over your head all the time. It's straight out of critically acclaimed successes like [insert WW2 FPS] and "Baby's first 3D Game" by Fisher Price! It's not like you need much more, since all our objectives are fetch quests. That's how you spell big-name adventure game!

The on-screen instructions are a riot and a half, too. The developers always make sure to CAPITALIZE a few key WORDS that would enable the DEFICIENT to get the basic gist of what they're jamming in the wrong orifice. For example, "Press F to use FIRST AID" ten hours into the game, or "The machine you just damaged is HACKED and FRIENDLY to you" or my favorite, "ZAP enemies in WATER to instantly FRY them!" Yeah, me TARZAN, you JANE, let's make SEXY TIME.

You know those engrish catchphrases foreigners (especially the Japanese) sometimes use? Like "Let's positive thinking!"? I propose this game was built on such a catchphrase, "That's mainstream!"

Moving right along, the enemies are divided into five types plus two Big Daddy types (that's right, two of the promised four-plus). The only way they're changed over the course of the game is to have their damage output and resilience cranked. Or, in the case of the Big Daddies, receive "Elite" before their name. The enemy AI is fairly transparent: a probability generator handles the percentage of chances, based on distance from you, that they'll try to use a nearby healing station. When set on fire, they'll head for a body of water. They also have a percentage for hiding behind a wall for a second or briefly running away and dropping explosives. Beyond that, welcome to the jungle. You'll see the same three glorious AI routines throughout the game: physical attackers that chase you relentlessly, ranged attackers that follow you while shooting relentlessly (and sometimes disappearing), and other physical attackers that drop from ceilings and backflip relentlessly.

(It's worth noting that the only difference in difficulty between a normal enemy and a "boss" or Big Daddy is how often their gunshots unavoidably snap to your character. That's the charm of first-person shooters in single-player, right?)

Whenever you see a different behavior, such as an enemy throwing a piece of the environment at you or running to what's eventually revealed to be more enemies, well, that's a product of our good friends, SCRIPTED EVENTS! Enough of those here to insult all intelligences! Gotta have scripted events in your FPS games, everyone knows programming more interesting default behavior is hard :(. You know what's even better? Mouthing off about organic worlds in interviews while we're scripting flaming sofas and barrels down stairs! (See also: lying)

There is an exploration element to the game, in the sense that if you break away from Empowerment Arrow's almighty directions for a second, you'll find plenty of side areas that have zero relevance to the main quest. Those areas are filled with stuff, but due to the aforementioned lack of any freaking inventory, you'll mostly be looking for plasmids and gene tonics. Thing is, a lot of those can safely be ignored. About three basic spells are required for opening paths, but they're just as useful in combat. Apart from electro bolt, incinerate and TK, I used maybe two hypnosis spells with any regularity, and I discovered how useful decoy dummy could be at castrating the final boss battle. That's it. The game is so short, and it's not even that easy to create GTA-like mega-lulz situations. I guess what I'm trying to say is yes, you can explore and backtrack, but who gives a damn? You're fine with the basic tools you're spoon-fed.

That reminds me! Apart from that backyard exploration, deciding when you'll kill a Big Daddy, and one "optional boss", the game is entirely Grade-A on-rails linear. When you're not walking somewhere to kill someone, you're walking somewhere to fetch your latest plot advancement tickets. The rest of the time, I guess you're just walking to the next objective dispenser. No brainpower involved either thanks to our friend The Arrow, and no new areas unlocked in old zones as you'd see in a Metroid game. Just keep walking! I hear livestock like the exercise too.

(Note: I know it fits with one of the storyline's themes. But guess what, it's still not cool.)

I'll just touch on one last point, since I mentioned it earlier and I feel it wouldn't be right not to explain. When they promised ammo and item invention, I expected you could create ammunition customized to certain choices you could make upon creation, with more powerful choices demanding more effort to fund. Item invention implied a similar level of uniqueness in the products. Instead, the invention machines are vending machines that use materials instead of money. Can you say, big whoop?

Hey, I lied, there's one more thing. "Vita-chambers" are the game's checkpoints. Whenever you run out of health, you respawn in the closest one with everything in the game world as you left it 2.5 seconds ago and with no penalty whatsoever. Wanna take down a Big Daddy russian-army style with your wrench? What's stopping you? Oh, the soul-crushing feeling of playing a game that's been made pre-school level to appeal to all audiences! Say it with me! IT'S MAINSTREAM!

Really, I could scarcely have summed up Bioshock's gameplay better than Mr. Mikal when he said it was "[An] underwater first-person-shooter that felt more like Condemned with magic fireballs".


Yeah, so...

I'm not really writing this review for you. I'm writing to get it off my chest and on the off chance that it might travel back in time and save me 80 bucks. But then the review wouldn't exist in the first place, that would be a time paradox! NO WORRIES CAPTAIN, I HAVE ADAM AND IT FIXES TIME PARADOXES!

Bioshock was so promising. My personal theory, as I've exposed to you, is that it took a sad turn for the mainstream at some point, and we ended up with dumbed-down gameplay and mechanics in colorful clothes. That's a damn shame, there's some real quality ambience and voice acting here, and great taste in music, among other things. It's just a beautiful wasted scaffolding that could have been so much more without being forcefully wed to the generic FPS formula.

Incidentally, those glimmers of potential are why I absolutely cannot muster the resolve to choose "5/10 - Playable, but nothing special about it."

No, if I'm to be honest with myself, it's gotta be "6/10 Fair - game is okay, but there are many better."

A lot better, and a great many of them.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 09/05/07

Game Release: BioShock (Limited Edition) (US, 08/21/07)