Bioshock

Pleasure and beauty are the best words to describe the world of Rapture. Not many remember the System Shock series and I have to say I didn't especially enjoy the second game in the franchise, System Shock 2. Sure it had all the attributes of a great game and many have started to reminisce the golden days when Bioshock was dubbed the spiritual successor of the aforementioned game, but I had some doubts.

I wanted to post the review immediately after the release but I thought to myself I had to abstain so I could watch everyone around me go nuts. There is a wild concept going among reviewers and more game journalists adhere to it: it's called a negative review. The idea is not to start from an objective point of view but to begin with a simple supposition that the game is inherently bad or at best poorly designed. The first victim of this trend was in my opinion The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. By doing such a review you are guaranteed to piss against the wind and get more readers subsequently. The idea may have a commercial foundation but is kind of crappy if you analyze it from an ethical point of view. Even so, treating a game with this kind of prejudice was too appealing and I had to wait quite a while until a title that had enough controversy around it appeared. Bioshock is the unhappy winner as no other game has spawned so many forum threads for some time.

Unlike my fellow negative reviewers that have tons of experience in this kind of dirty business, I lack the background so please bear with me while I try to take down Bioshock with my negativist aura. As I will prove further on, this method of approach can be a two-edged sword because just like a mathematical demonstration that's using the absurd in order to get to the real outcome, I might begin by demolishing the game and end up praising it.

Concept First person shooter is the most appealing genre on the market and registers the biggest sales but it lacks a major feature: depth. System Shock 2 became one of the most acclaimed games in history because it gave what other mindless shooters couldn't: a purpose and a strange upgrade system with tons of options that influence everything in the game making its replay value go through the roof. It mattered not that it had bugs and many people had troubles playing it right from the start. The gameplay sufficed to make history.

Bioshock is not an original game and frankly with this kind of legacy many are glad 2K didn't use this opportunity to experiment. The wheel is already out there and it has been proven to work. With the recipe in hand they only had to improve the ingredients and launch some teasers on the net to get the hype going. What makes Bioshock great is not the impeccable visuals or the beautiful plasmid effects; some developers understood that most gamers are just simple kids that need a beautiful story before bedtime. This simple fact has pushed Bioshock into history (whether negative journalists like it or not).

Story It's hard to tell new stories that the gaming industry and consumers haven't heard of yet. It's even more difficult to escape the pattern of aliens, Nazis and all-out wars that stretch over continents and across the galaxy. How do you think at something that doesn't make everyone say "been there, done that"? How many Germans have to die before our imagination can finally be free? Rapture is the answer. You will be surprised to know that in the early phases of development Rapture was populated by desperate Nazis but I think I speak for everyone when I tell you that the guy who put his foot down and said "No more!" should be getting a raise. In its final form, Bioshock presents a deep and credible plot which couldn't have been any better. Andrew Ryan was a brilliant industrialist that wanted to build a world where he could be free of all the moral constraints and at the end of 1946 he founded an underwater city called Rapture that would allow his rampant imagination to go wild. He gathered scientists from all over the world and started developing his utopia. Many of the scientists brought from the surface weren't exactly the most conscientious to be found and they apparently lacked some basic ethical principles which contributed to the disaster. It wasn't long before Andrew had this megalomaniac thing going for him and with the help of the good old paranoia he began experimenting on people. The outcome was a decaying society that was dependant on genetics and was biologically unfit to continue. Somewhere above the city, a plane crashes and the player is forced by circumstances to enter Rapture where he is thrown from one side to another over the remains of a civil war.

Gameplay Bioshock is so much more than a shooter. Many will beg to differ at first glance and I heard a lot of stupid opinions stating that it looks too much like Doom. As I said? stupid. The gameplay mechanism is not something every FPS gamer will care to ingest on a Sunday afternoon. You can play the game with all guns blazing and not worry one second for the customization options available or you can enjoy the extremely detailed way of playing.

You see, Bioshock is about choice and plasmids will offer this for you. The evil Andrew Ryan and his crew have developed some enhancements for the genome called plasmids that have permitted humans to master telekinesis, manipulating elements like fire, ice, electricity and a ton of other attributes and to top all these off they also have developed tonics, which are basically traits you can use at all times and that will help in different situations. They let you hack more easily or transform your Eve into Adam, but let's not get carried away here: the only way you can acquire new plasmids are through the help of Adam, which are basically stem cells created for some kind of a marine creature. The discovery of Adam has pushed the boundaries of genetic research way beyond any moral boundaries and disrupted the flow of the society by introducing more evolved humans. At a later time, the sisters were created in order to extract the necessary materials from the dead and process the ADAM themselves, like tiny little factories. There was a catch: these traits could only be used with an activator called EVE. After the ensuing civil war, little sisters remained wandering around mainly because they were protected by their bodyguards (Big Daddies). They were the only producers of ADAM and the most hunted characters in Rapture. If you still have trouble comprehending the mechanism then we can make a simple comparison: ADAM can be viewed as experience points that can be later transformed in various offensive powers and EVE is the mana you need to unleash the ADAM.

Most of the level design is not just pretty but it holds the answer of destroying Big Daddies. Almost everything you do in the game is related to ADAM and how you can get more of it. Little sisters are invulnerable and cannot be touched with such powerful guardians. Your chances in a head on fight are slim, not to mention that you will lose tons of ammunition if you don't play the cards right. There are several ways of disposing of Big Daddies, from turret hacking to making another enemies turn on him or each other. It's all up to the player and you can even ignore them if you choose to, although it's not recommended. I strongly suggest that you first scout the level for different traps and only after that you can choose to fight them. Don't worry because you can't really die. If you get killed (I'm not sure if that's the proper word for it) you can return to a tank that acts more like a checkpoint. All the enemies in the level retain the damage inflicted so if you hurt any of the Big Daddies you can easily go back and finish the job. Even with this gimmick in place the game will take more than 15 hours if you have the patience to fully experience the world of rapture through the diaries and small secrets that can be found scattered in levels.

All the upgrades you need to develop from harvested ADAM are only available through special stations throughout the city that will provide you with more than a simple interface. You'll be able to upgrade your slots and even buy new abilities. The same thing is available for the tonics, the passive abilities that can be also upgraded. Another nice machine that can be found is one called "Power To The People" and it's responsible for upgrading weapons. I found them to be a little scarce mainly because you can only use them once. Unlike this one, "U-invent" is a lot more common and responsible for usual stuff like bullets, EVE injections and medikits, just to name a few.

As you can see the world of Rapture is not just a pretty first person shooter and the gameplay presents a depth that few titles can achieve these days. There was only one thing I truly feared before the launch and that was the reaction to the one moral choice you constantly have to make: to harvest or not to harvest the little sisters. Killing little kids is a known and welcomed tabu in western developed games so Bioshock was going in a dark alley where only weird Japanese games dare to go. There is a beautiful animation when you choose not to gather the ADAM from the sisters and it's quite rewarding to watch it but there is no animation for the opposite action. You don't get to see what's happening if you follow the dark force path. I have no idea if there was an animation that has been stripped along the way but I'm glad there isn't any. I may be old-fashioned but I consider games to be ways of relaxation and I hate going to bed with a guilty conscience.

Graphics I am somewhat of a fool for graphical engines; not that I can't tell them apart or anything or that I'm not up to date with all the technologies and gimmicks that everyone is struggling to use these days, but I tend to let myself influenced by the pretty textures a little too much. I often had disputes on various games that I considered beautiful and others weren't even impressed. Bioschock is such a game and from the first glimpse I got (even if it was on an Xbox 360) I knew this is one of the most beautiful engines to date.

Bioshock is built, as everyone is already aware, on the Unreal engine 3. This is not the first title to see the light of day under the Epic franchise but unlike other engines out there it doesn't have any particular fingerprint. If we take an engine like Source from Valve, the one used in Half-Life 2 and compare its implementation in another game there will be obvious similarities like textures, effects and even menus. Titles based on Unreal technology like Gears of War, Stranglehold and Medal of Honor Airborne look extremely different because it's quite versatile and I'm pretty sure that Epic held some features back for their online shooter Unreal Tournament. The complexity of the engine can be seen right from the start and even if we need to praise Epic for the great engine we must also notice some glitches. Gamers will let a lot of problems slide if the gameplay is off the charts and this is certainly the case. I noticed some serious problems with texture boundaries and I don't even want to mention the spooky physics problems in ragdoll animations. But as I was saying before, all these problems go away when you consider the other great features of Bioshock.

Sound This is one of the few games that are almost perfect in the sound department. I couldn't find even one single bug although some people have reported certain problems with voices and high pitch sounds. The voice-over is perfect and convincing while the weapons have all the characteristics they should have. It's hard to stay negative when you're confronted with such quality.

Multiplayer As you must have guessed, Bioshock is just a profound single player and it would have been a profanity to have a multiplayer. Ergo no multi Daddy slaying coop features.

Conclusion I have to admit that writing a negative review is not only more difficult but it's also a lot more moronic than I expected. To dish out a game just because you can will not make your article more interesting or the writer more intelligent. Bioshock is a masterpiece and anyone who claims otherwise has nothing to do with games. It's not the perfect game and I don't think I'll ever see the perfect one but it's damn near. This is the first game in years that has not only graphics and up to date AI but also heart. I'm sure many of us will return to this title to use it as a reference point for a long time.