So Bioshock hit the stores a couple of weeks ago and the hype on release was immense.
Bioshock tells a story of the rise and fall of the great underwater city of Rapture created back in 1946 to hold the best and the brightest people without being suppressed by world governments, the city was made to exist without any contact with the outside world and be totally self sufficient. You enter the city in the year 1960 which is under a year since the city collapsed and fell into complete anarchy and chaos, you’ll see plenty of evidence of this as you walk through the waterlogged metropolis. The whole story of the city is told through a series of audio diaries which play out much like in Doom 3 except thankfully you don’t have to stop to hear each audio message, you can continue to progress while you’re being fed back-story. These diaries do a great job of story telling, you may be following a series of diaries about one woman’s struggle in the city, only to find the last document next to a female corpse, it’s all quite moving and splits up the action yet things still flow smoothly.
Looking through the screenshots, Bioshock could be mistaken for another run and gun first person shooter, although there is a surprising amount of in-combat depth while keeping an easy to use and simple control method. Switching weapons is as simple as holding a button and moving a control stick around a dial, as you do this the action will freeze, it may seem like a small point but when you are up and fighting a big daddy you’ll be glad you can switch quickly between your firearms. The weapons here are pretty run of the mill; wrench, pistol, shotgun, machine gun, crossbow, chemical thrower and grenade launcher. Their mundane nature is forgiven thanks to weapon upgrades that can be performed at any of the 12 (single use) weapon upgrade stations throughout the game. Each weapon can be upgraded twice with features such as faster reloading or dealing more damage, you’ll find yourself hunting out these locations so you can get the most powerful arsenal available. The thing that really adds interest to the weapons is the three different types of ammo that can be inserted into each gun, have your grenade launcher fire rockets, or your crossbow shoot flaming arrows and electric traps. This gives the weapons some much needed appeal as they are outclassed by the games other offensive ability, plasmids.
Over the course of the game you’ll be harvesting Adam which essentially behaves as a secondary form of currency, this currency can be spent at gene banks to upgrade your body in various ways. These come in several flavors; plasmids, physical tonics, engineering tonics and combat tonics. Combat tonics improve your ability to deal and resist damage, Static discharge is my favorite here, giving off a powerful zap and often killing anyone who performs a physical attack on you. Engineering tonics, unsurprisingly improve the way you interact with machines, these generally make the crazy “pipe dreams” hacking minigame much easier. Physical tonics improve your strength and make you more powerful, easily confused with combat tonics, these can increase the healing effects of food, or give other useful benefits. Often these ability’s can be found throughout the game, or even researched by taking photos of creatures with the research camera, most abilities also have different levels of effectiveness, Static Discharge II does more damage than Discharge I.
For the majority of the combat you’ll find yourself using Plasmids, these are the major element that makes the combat fun. Unlike the tonics plasmids aren’t a passive ability, which means you’ll have switch and use plasmids in the same way as weapons and activate them to take down any serious opponent Bioshock throws at you. The first plasmid you’ll find will be the electro bolt, fire it at the door to short a fuse and open it, shoot at a puddle water to shock everyone inside or just shoot at an enemy to stun him. Other plasmid examples are fire and ice, you can use the fire to unfreeze a door or use the ice to slow down the liquid in the hacking mini game, or you could just fire the plasmid straight at your enemy to get the expected effects. Getting creative with plasmids proves 2K’s point of many people will play through the game in different ways and hearing how others use the environment and plasmids in different ways sets Bioshock above the rest.
On the Whole, Bioshock is an immersive and highly entertaining game with only a handful of drawbacks worth mentioning. The worst problem I experienced was a degree of tedium near the end of the game, much like I experienced towards the end of Doom 3. Although the level designs are great and highly varied, your just attacking the same handful of characters over and over. The creative AI prevents this from being a huge problem but the variety here felt a little lacking. The only other thing worth mentioning is the infinite lives and respawns, you see, every time you die you re-appear at one of the very frequent Vita-chambers (checkpoints). This removes the tension of death, when a huge big daddy starts charging towards you fear should be at least slightly on your mind. Instead caution you can just go all out, die, then run straight back to the battle where the Big Daddy will still be weakened from your first onslaught. These drawbacks are noticeable, but minor, Bioshock should be experienced by anyone who’s looking for a different FPS experience