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Genre: First-Person Shooter
Rating: Mature
Platform: Xbox 360 (also available for Playstation 3 and Windows PC)
Publisher: 2K Games
Developer: 2K Boston/2K Australia
Take a deep breath and get ready to dive down to the bottom of the ocean in 2K’s First-Person Shooter, BioShock. Set at the turn of the decade in 1960 you assume the role of Jack, sole survivor of a plane crash in the middle of the ocean. Upon resurfacing, you find yourself near a building surrounded by miles of endless water. With nowhere else to turn, you enter the mysterious structure, finding a bathysphere that transports you to an underwater city known as Rapture. Within you find a world in ruin; a fallen utopia where you will have to fight for survival against its crazed denizens while attempting to discover the truth behind its downfall.
BioShock is at its heart a first-person shooter, but several elements raise it up a notch above your standard FPS fare. Aside from the typical weaponry of machine guns and grenade launchers, you have access to plasmids: genetic modifiers that grant you superhuman powers. These new abilities can be offensive in nature, such as releasing a swarm of insects to attack your enemies, as well as strategic. For example, the Rage plasmid makes your enemy go berserk, attacking friend as well as foe.
The controls are simple and functional. A mere tap of the trigger swaps between your plasmids and weapons, allowing for on-the-fly switching during heated battles. Holding down the bumper buttons freezes the action on screen and brings up a plasmid/weapon menu, allowing you to calmly choose the best means for dealing with the situation at hand.
Completing a stage’s multiple missions opens the path to the following portion of the city, allowing you to progress throughout the areas that make up the city of Rapture. However, these missions can be tackled in whichever order you like, adding an action/adventure feel to the game. This added freedom compels exploration, and increases the tension as you pass from room to room, not knowing what lies in store in any direction.
Graphically, BioShock is a beautiful game, as is to be expected from a title running the Unreal 3 engine at its core. The city of Rapture is well thought out and highly detailed, and you can interact with nearly everything you come across in the game. Knock over a spinning record player to bring the music to a screeching halt, ignite oil spills with your fire plasmid to damage incoming enemies, or lift and throw debris with your telekinesis plasmid. Also of note is the water-rendering technology, which was highly touted during its development period. Water flows and reacts appropriately, and looks remarkable, considering the element is traditionally difficult to represent in digital media.
Atmosphere is an important part of the Bioshock experience, and 2K took many steps to ensure an unsettling experience. The city is in a deplorable state, while still evoking a sense of the grandeur that was, as if the buildings themselves are ghosts. The great lighting and shadow play makes each room feel like that scary basement from your childhood that you were too afraid to enter. The soundtrack, which is a wonderful collection of some of the best jazz songs from the Great American Songbook helps thicken the already eerie atmosphere, while providing a refreshing change from your typical video game scores. The enemies, known as splicers, are not just mindless beasts, but rather people driven to madness—twisted visages that shout and scream as they attempt to disembowel you. And of course, the icing on this creepy cake are those lovely little girls that formed the epicenter of the controversy surrounding the title.
In order to strengthen your character throughout the game, you must purchase enhancements with Adam, a compound held by zombie-looking, air-duct traveling children known as Little Sisters. They are each guarded by a Big Daddy, a hulking beast in a diving suit that protects its Little Sisters as she extracts Adam from corpses. If you want to survive, you need that Adam. Here, you are posed with a moral dilemma: return the Little Sister to their previous human form and receive only some of their Adam, or harvest the Adam directly from the parasite within the child, killing her but receiving significantly more in return. Will you do the “morally correct” decision and save their lives, or sacrifice them to ensure your survival? The game leaves the choice up to you, and your decisions will affect your overall experience.
BioShock has a lot going for it, with its heavily defined atmosphere, unsettling enemies, and moral conundrums. Unfortunately, most of the excitement of the game is washed away early on by repetition. The game starts off strongly, delivering a legitimately unsettling introduction to the world of Rapture. Yet, once you get used to world you are in it loses its edge, and the game does little to shock you again until it nears completion. The level objectives become repetitive as well. Each stage inevitably requires you to go on a fetch quest to progress, adding to the repetition. It gets old pretty quickly.
Overall the game was too easy. Ammo and health are scarce initially, attempting to replicate the sense of desperation that early Resident Evil games did so well. However, ammo and item stores become extremely common, and there is no need to be frugal as money is plentiful. Not that you actually require all that ammo. I rarely ever felt the need to wield the weapons in my arsenal. I progressed throughout the vast majority of the story by using nothing but the lightning plasmid and my trusty wrench.
The splicers, your main opponents, come in a total five varieties with no real change throughout the game. It was a huge waste of potential considering all of the creative leeway available. The enemies lose any sense of intimidation once you realize that all you need to do is strafe them while whacking away with your wrench to win. Not to mention, the last boss was a highly disappointing experience. I had more difficulty dealing with the Big Daddies. Just remember: strafe, strafe, strafe!
Even with such flaws, you cannot deny that BioShock is an entertaining gaming experience. It is a solid first-person shooter and the creative plasmid abilities add a fresh element that breaks free of the traditional mold found in games like Call of Duty and Halo. The graphics and physics are superb, and while the story is somewhat transparent, it is fed to you in pieces so you feel just as in the dark as your character is supposed to.
Has BioShock changed the realm of FPS gaming as we know it? Certainly not, but that does not mean you cannot get any enjoyment out of it. And since it is one of the Xbox 360’s Platinum Hits, it is certainly worth the price of admission. Give it a shot before the upcoming release of BioShock 2: Sea of Dreams later this year. It may not be the second coming of the FPS messiah, but at a reduced price it certainly would not be a waste of money.
February 26, 2009
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