A note on Horror:
If you're scared of being scared like me, that 'Horror' tag on BioShock's store
page looms over it, and put me on great debate to buy it. However, most of the
'Horror' is body horror, just copious amounts of blood and injecting yourself
with fucking great needles. There are
some scarier bits earlier though, where lights go out and some blokes jump out
from time to time, but the scare factor lowers the more powerful you get. If
you want to ignore the Weeping Angel-esq Plastered Splicers in the level 'Fort Frolic',
just avoid the Power to the People Machines and they won't appear.
The Good:
BioShock as I've said is a single player FPS, or SPFPS if you will, and it has
some similarities with another game I love, Half Life 2. On the surface, both
SPFPS’s, standard suite of guns and some kooky mechanic supporting it, good
story and world established early in the game. But soon things being to
deviate. In BioShock, the narrative is turned on it's head, as you are NOT the
party, the party has happened, and you're the unlucky sod who comes in the next
morning to find everyone very badly hung over.
BioShock at first isn't particularly exiting, point guns at
dudes and bang, with the standard suite of Melee, Pistol, Machine Gun, Shotgun,
Grenade Launcher, Crossbow and the Chemical Thrower, a weird weapon that you
only use for boss fights and has ammo rarer than a triple cheeseburger at a
model show. Being set in 1960, the weapons have some difference, so the Pistol
is a revolver, the MG is a Tommy Gun, and the Grenade Launcher, Crossbow and
Chemical Thrower have a cool homemade design.
But BioShock has a supporting cast of 'plasmids',
effectively Magic, and similar to another favourite of mine, Dishonored.
There's a full suite of them, and they can be upgraded, and can be used in
conjunction for sweet c-c-c-combos! All have a weird visual design on your arm,
for example, the 'Incinerate!' plasmid picked up early visibly burns your
fingers and hand, and only gets more gross as you upgrade it to level 3. The
RPG-esq elements come into it with 'gene tonics'. There's 3 different
categories, Combat for combat (duh!), engineering for hacking and stuff, and
physical for general buffs. They're all scattered around, and most a more
useful than others, but I'll come back to that. You begin with 2 Plasmid slots
and 2 slots for each Tonic, but you can upgrade, chop and change and stuff to
your heart's content.
BioShock's real strength is it's story and atmosphere.
BioShock is set in the fictional city of Rapture, located on the bottom of the
mid-Atlantic ocean, where our silent protagonist Jack finds after becoming a
sole survivor of a plane crash. He must then survive, fight, and then escape
Rapture, as he is hounded at every turn by madmen, psychopaths and people who
are 'a bit weird' to say the least. The world is explored through Audio logs,
not just of major characters, but also the normal people of Rapture, all
recorded before you turn up of course. The art-deco style of the 60’s is very
nice, and everything is kind of run down or barnacle encrusted really improves
on the atmosphere of the crumbling city of Rapture.
One of the most defining parts of BioShock are the Little
Sisters, who are little girls (unsurprisingly) between the age of 5 and 8, who
have been converted into Gatherers for ADAM, a wonder substance that created
Plasmids than can be refined into EVE, the substance that powers Plasmids.
Throughout the game, the player encounters Little Sisters, and has to save or
harvest them for ADAM in order to upgrade Plasmids and things. Provided you can
get through their bodyguards, the hideously strong, disgustingly powerful and
excellent parental figures, the Big Daddies. If you haven't seen them, they're
a real wonder of design, just go Google them. Aside from them, there's also
security systems and Splicers, basically people who got a little too addicted
to ADAM, and come a wide variety of flavours, standard thugs.
So, a decent arsenal combined with a supporting cast of
powers, excellent atmosphere and story, somewhere between Dishonored and Half
Life 2. But there are always some bad things.
The Bad:
BioShock is not difficult in the slightest way possible. You
get showered with health kits and EVE hypos to recharge your Plasmids. I only
died once on normal difficulty, and that was intentional to see how it worked.
You get revived at Vita Chambers, but they’re bloody everywhere, and you
respawn with half your ammo and things anyway, so death has little consequence.
There’s also vending machines, ammo vendors, healing stations, and U-invent
machines introduced about halfway though.
Hacking in this game is bloody awful. To hack, you have to
disable a turret, then begin. You have to play some fucking connect-the-pipes
minigame every bloody time, and it really pisses you off. In the end, I was
drowning in money because I never had to buy ammo, health or anything, so I
just bought Auto-Hack tools or bought out machines to avoid them. The
aforementioned ‘U-Invent’ machines are introduced about halfway through, and
are pretty pointless. You gather miscellaneous items from around the place,
then craft them into stuff like Auto-Hack tools and nothing else.
The lack of inventory is also quite weird. Apart from Ammo
and Health, you never know how much of a thing you’re carrying if you’re
invested in crafting because you’re mad. Food you eat as you pick it up, and
you can carry a measly 500 dollars with you at most. The general interface is
also a bit crap to boot. You have to swap between Guns and Plasmids with right
click, and you can only ‘reload’ Plasmids when they’re active or empty, which I’m
not too sure why but really annoys me.
There’s little enemy variety as well. There are a few
flavours of Splicer, Melee, Gunner, Grenadier and weird spidery ones than climb
everywhere, but most are largely harmless and seemingly never ending. There are
four flavours of Big Daddy, but actually only two, a melee focussed and long
ranged focussed one, and an elite version of each. They'll randomly be 'boss' enemies, which basically are regular dudes or dudettes with a health bar larger than Andrew Ryan's boner when he reads 'Atlas Shrugged'.
All of the weapons except the wrench have alternate ammo
types, normally an Anti-Personnel one and an Armour-Piercing one as well as
standard ammo. I found the base ammo on all guns was completely fine, and the
alternate types are super rare anyway. The only alternate ammo type I did use
was the Proximity Mine for the Grenade Launcher, and even then it was only
against Big Daddies. The Camera, which can be used to take pictures to research
an enemy, so you do increased damage or something is totally useless, as
everyone is so easy to kill anyway.
Plasmids have the same problem. I maxed the Plasmid Slot
upgrade to six, but I found I wasn't really using them. I was only using
Electro-Bolt for the ‘1-2 Punch’, where if you bolt an enemy, then attack, they
take four times as much damage. Incinerate! I used occasionally for variety
because fire is fun. Insect Swarm was
useful for clearing rooms. Telekinesis I used about twice then realised a
bullet did a better job. Security Bullseye was useless as I had already hacked
everything anyway. Enrage I never used, because I killed everyone so
effectively anyway. Finally, Hypnotize Big Daddy I used twice, but I only paid
attention to Big Daddies after I’d killed everyone else, so it was largely
useless.
On the note of Big Daddies, Little Sisters and ADAM is not
as useful as the game would have you think. You have to use most of your
special ammo types and health kits to deal with them, and there’s commonly 2-3
in a level. While I maxed out on Plasmids, I would have been fine with only
about 3 slots anyway. Gene tonics are similar. I picked up a lot of hacking
focussed ones, but apart from Speedy Hacker that (strangely) lowers the liquid
speed in hacking, and one for making safes easier, I was fine. I only had 4 of
the maximum engineering tonic slots, and I was fine, especially I had 50% off
ALL purchases from another Tonic. The Combat tonics were better, but the
combination I had meant I took literally no-damage from any source smaller than
a nuclear explosive, and did increased Wrench damage with silent footsteps, so
I was one-shotting anyone looking the wrong direction. To add to my already
insane resilience, I received almost double health from my health packs, and
restored some EVE when I used them, while I was also taking reduced damage and
dishing out extra when it came to electricity based attacks.
Oh, and the final boss fight is laughably shitty.
Overall though, I enjoyed BioShock, and all these negative
points are relatively minor compared to the positives. Yes, it’s a bit aged
here and there, but it’s hard to recommend. BioShock’s overall ‘goodness’ is
mainly from the player’s perspective, not really a ‘yay or nay’ basis.
And in case I forget: ‘7.8/10-Too much water.’
No swimming though. Weird.
