BioShock

"Not bad, but not great.."

I have to say I was fortunate enough not to even know about Bioshock's existence up until its release. I say fortunate because it left me away from all the hype of the game so I got to experience it from a somewhat more realistic angle.

The game is decent, I enjoyed it more or less my first time through but I cannot see playing it again. Ultimately it leaves you feeling like there was a great game that was bogged down by a few stupid, but significant, problems.

First things first though, a basic breakdown:

Graphics: If your computer can handle it they are pretty damn good. The use of light and shadow, reflection, etc add a lot to the experience. My computer couldn't quite handle them and still offer the appropriate performance for a shooter, but I could see them and they were impressive to say the least.

Sound: Absolutely excellent, just astounding. Between the random advertisements for fictional products, the propaganda recordings, the audio diaries and the general ambiance it was great, really pulled you in. The only possible complaint is that the bad guys (splicers) who did say random things seemed to only say the same random things.. So unless you found and killed them you just heard the same phrase again and again and again.

Gameplay: The most important part of course, and done fairly well. It was pretty easy to pick up, felt pretty fluid and overall worked well. The storyline is awesome with loads of detail regarding the city itself, the people who lived there (even those not really related to the main plot) and everything else.


So right now your thinking that thus far its been nothing but stars for this game and yet I only gave it a six (which is "Fair - Game is okay, but there are many better", pretty accurate I think).

Well, as I said at first, the game mostly is pretty good, but it has a few flaws that pull it down.

1) Its almost criminally easy. I played on medium and quickly found out that you could play on hard if you wanted to because dieing is a pretty difficult thing to pull off.. I mean sure, you can "die", but you simply get revived fairly close to where you were with no penalty, and even more, the enemies you damaged stay damaged. So as long as you get off at least one hit between deaths you will eventually win this game no matter what.

Beyond that, weapons and ammunition and such are really only necessary for a small amount of fights, using a technique involving your melee weapon that you learn on the second enemy of the game is enough to take out most of the things you come up against.

Because its so easy it becomes sort of pointless to strategize too much, and really even while blasting through the later parts of the game I still rarely if ever died, and I'm really not that great at shooters.

2) Lack of variation. So okay I get that I am gonna be in Rapture the whole game and that its a city and thus the idea of seeing certain environments are unlikely. I also get that it takes place on Earth and assumes a certain level of reality so the idea of seeing anything besides humans is pretty unlikely as well.. But c'mon, give me something besides the same five or six bad guys to fight the whole game, really I mean there are only a half dozen or so different types of bad guys in the game and generally you only see about three of those with any regularity (if that), it gets old fast. They change nothing about them except their damage dealt and their damage taken.

3) Cliche.. While the background stories and history of Rapture are quite interesting, the primary storyline has a "been there done that" feel game wise.. I don't want to give anything away of course in this review, however during much of it you will definitely feel like you've been there before.



So, as I said, its not a bad game, it was fun for one play through, but don't expect much more then you get with your average shooter, just replace "find the blue key" with "Find the plant sample" and reduce the difficulty to the point that literally anybody can get to the last boss in this game using only the wrench on the hardest difficulty if they wanted to.

Thanks for reading,

-MB

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 10/29/07

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