Review: BioShock
Okay, let’s cut right through the hyperbole, the 10/10 scores, all that bullshit. BioShock is not that great. In fact, it’s hard not to be disappointed by BioShock. It is at once the most incredible and most frustrating game in recent memory.
BioShock starts off beautifully. After an amazing, cinematic opening, you are led into a series of scripted events that suggests a lot of care has gone into crafting a stunning experience for the player. This is reinforced by the way the story tacitly unfolds around you. When games have a story as strong as this, the designers sometimes feel a tendency to shove it down the player’s throat, as if to say “We paid our writers a lot of money and, by Christ, we’re going to get value for that money.” BioShock is different. By picking up crew ‘diaries’, you’re given glimpses into the back-story of Rapture, but you’re left to piece them all together yourself, if you want to.
And even if you don’t, there’s still plenty of things to shoot at – your first introduction to a splicer gives you a great taste of your vulnerability down here, and had me twitching at the controller in an equal mixture of excitement and terror.
After the first hour, however, things start to get a little lazy. The environments, which were so dazzling and atmospheric at first quickly become cramped and uninspired. The possibilities of a huge, sprawling underwater city become reduced down to a series of similar-looking halls and offices and you realise that the open sandbox has been replaced by a very linear shooter.
By the second hour, you begin to wonder if Wind Waker hasn’t been usurped as the most offensive abuser of fetch-quests to pad out a game’s length. Once you have settled into the rhythm of BioShock, the rest of the game is spent collecting random items strewn around labyrinthine levels. Often you are told to travel far away to collect something, and once that’s done, you are told to travel back to your starting position to collect something else.
It’s frustrating, lazy game design, and completely mars the experience. Because once you notice this, you begin to notice that there aren’t actually that many enemies in Rapture. There are, all told, five or six character models, repeated ad infinitum. You begin to notice that your vulnerability has disappeared and you are suddenly armed with an arsenal of massively destructive weapons and psychic abilities. There is nothing you can’t kill, and barring any major fuck-ups, nothing that can kill you. Even the Big Daddy, the iconic, melancholy giant of the game, is easy prey when you’re loaded up with a grenade launcher and shots of electricity.
There are still moments of genius to be found in BioShock. The meeting with the artist is genuinely entertaining and unnerving in a way that I wish more games would emulate. But there are very few of these standout moments in the game, and the majority is spent in unremarkable encounters with unremarkable enemies in unremarkable locations.
There’s no question that BioShock is a good game, but given a longer gestation period, it could have been a lot better. Even without the padding, it could have been a lot better. Give me a 10 hour game of solid quality over a 10 hour game with 8 hours of padding any day of the week.
Addendum
Other things I didn’t mention that also disappointed me about BioShock:
- The ‘moral choice’ of saving/harvesting the little sisters – once again, games reduce morality into a completely binary decision.
- The weapons/plasmid upgrade scheme – pointless and irrelevant. A double-whammy.
- Glitchy physics – throughout the game, I don’t think I saw one corpse that wasn’t twitching in some way.
yeah, it’s great but not that great. maps can be confusing when you have to travel all over an entire area to do something, those directional arrows do make that handy. the ‘hacks’ are total shit, they shoulda just gotten rid of them entirely.
- hacks were pointless
- plasmid upgrades weren’t pointless; they were just the product of sheer laziness. like fuck, there’s only a handful of useful plasmids (most are useless) which they have you upgrade as you go because they didn’t take the time to think up new ones.
- Bioshock’s supposed to follow a linear story, so the open sandbox concept’s hard to employ – although ya, a lot of the searching for random items is just padding (im thinking of you chlorophyl cannisters or whatever you’re called)
- the later levels are BORING (everything after hephaestus is terrible and even then hephaestus isnt that great)
- levels should have been larger; more area to explore that didn’t necessarily have anything to do with game progression
still a fun game though
hey dummy!-> author of this article
i want you to name one game that you have played that wasnt as intriguing and allowed such a varied amount of gameplay style as bioshock. I bet you that you cant find a single game that isnt as well rounded visually, gameplay wise, story driven, and innovatively as bioshock. you name the game and i will shoot it down with the fury of an AA gun. and what effing first person shooter were you expecting!! a sandbox firstperson shooter underwater?? you dum as hell for thinking that.
@Kevin
You seem to have missed my point. I’m not saying that Bioshock wasn’t good. There was a lot that Bioshock did better than a lot of recent games. I completely agree that Bioshock had a great story and amazing visuals (that got a little lazy towards the end). I was just pointing out a couple of things that I thought were flaws – the fetch-quests, the ineffectual upgrades system, the broken ‘morality’.
But if you want comparisons, what about System Shock 2? Graphics aside, I still feel like that nine-year-old game holds up amazingly against Bioshock.
dude, author, thank you for pointing out the useless flaws. Bioshock is an amazing game. It delivers great gameplay, exciting story (the best of a game ive ever seen), and amazing graphics. Bioshock is the essence of gaming. it got 10/10 AND game of the year 2007. After this there’s one conclusion. you just dont like it. Dont make a big report about its flaws after everyone knows them and really, honestly doesnt care..
What are you talking about Anonymous?! There were tons of areas to explore that had nothing to do with game progression; hours worth.
Its a fantastic game that has a unique and interesting story, and seat-gripping action. I loved it.
Yeah I think it’s quite amazing as far as atmosphere, immersion and story.
But I appreciated the points you brought up. I only started playing it recently, so I’ve had plenty of time to be inundated with the hype surrounding the game, which made me expect the second coming of christ basically.
I’ve become intensely frustrated by a couple of things. The constant hacking that needs to be done in order to survive. The extreme variability in the availability of ammo and the lengths required to gather it. Also its cost, 20$ for one round of pistol bullets, give me a fuckin break. The way that the stealth elements were added seemed forced and very frustrating, too much to have to pay attention to, so it just ends up feeling like a chore.