There's way more lurking under the sea than Bill Murray, singing crabs and Jacques Cousteau.
Drawing on elements of The Manchurian Candidate, Plato’s The Republic and Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, Bioshock’s story is one of its strongest selling points. You play as the nameless, faceless protagonist (like the IRS), who’s plane goes down in the mid Atlantic. Luckily, (or unluckily, as the case may be), you swim to the relative safety of a nearby structure, which is home to a bathysphere, which promptly whisks you off to the city of Rapture, an art deco stylized undersea world, where the inhabitants have gone quite mad (think American McGee meets Atlantis), where you’re immediate goal is to find some sort of escape, eventually catching the attention of Andrew Ryan, the kid with two first names that all the other kids picked on, now the despotic ruler of Rapture. If not with an iron fist, then Ryan almost certainly rules with a silver tongue, he’s the kind of villain you love to hate, like the sexy French teacher that gives you too much homework on Friday. Simply calling Ryan a megalomaniac is probably doing him a disservice. He’s probably the most interesting character you’ll run into in Rapture, from his attempts to block your forward progress through the city, to his taunts and observations over your radio. Even though its now in shambles, Ryan’s passion is Rapture, and he makes it clear early on, that he’s not giving it up without a fight.
But you’re not quite alone on your trek through Rapture. As soon as you land in the city, you’re given a walkie talkie like radio, which tunes into your first real contact in the city, named Atlas. (On Friday nights, you also get the best of the Rapture Philharmonic). He loosely guides you through various objectives, which are pretty easy to find, due to the fact that its almost impossible to get lost, thanks to a nifty arrow like compass and a map and hint system (and it’s a good thing too, since looking up to find the North Star doesn’t work so well when you’re in an undersea city). Of course, you don’t have to follow the arrow, you can wander off on your own way, exploring every nook and cranny of Rapture, and there are a lot of nifty items to find if you do, though the game doesn’t encourage this type of random wanton merry exploration, unfortunately.
You’re also going to come across a ton of nifty weapons to use in your battles with the splicers (genetically altered people who’ve taken a drink from the genetic alteration fountain once too often and have gone insane, like people who watch too much Oprah, they wander aimlessly, looking for their next fix). Early on, you’ll find a trusty wrench, which becomes deceptively powerful over the course of the game. Nothing like bashing skulls with a wrench to get the job done (Oh yes, there will be skulls to bash). For people that enjoy a more cowboy style of diplomacy to get your point across, you’ll find pistols, machine guns, shotguns, a chemical thrower, and a mean looking crossbow. What’s also nice is you’ll come across these “Power to the People” vending machine type stations, which let you upgrade a gun one time, per station. You can increase the rate of fire, or ammo supply or other options, on the different guns you may have come across to that point. There are a couple of these in each level and are usually well hidden off the beaten track, though explorers shouldn’t have any trouble finding them.
If you’re low on ammo, or just tired of firearms altogether, you can elect to use plasmids, to make splicers’ lives more interesting. Plasmids are powers you come across, or purchase from a vending machine and turn your hand all sorts of neat colors (and give it some useful abilities too!), you can toss out devastating bolts of electricity (effectively turning you into Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars, and really, who doesn’t want to be that guy?), toss flames at enemies, shoot ice, throw insects at people, create cyclone traps, etc. Using plasmids depletes the little mana like bar below your health. Splicers will twitch and convulse when shocked, (and fall dead if shocked in a puddle of water). Light one on fire and they’ll run to the nearest pool of water and dive in. Its little touches like this that really add to the game, and make you want to keep playing. You’ll also find tonics, which are like plasmids, only they’re more passive aggressive (like your little brother). You find em, you stick em in one of the specialized slots (combat, physical, engineering, etc), and they work, passively. Some help you with hacking, some increase damage in combat, and some give you more health when you eat potato chips (if only Ruffles’ could market something like that…).
The easiest way to get plasmids and tonics is to spend ADAM, which you get from Little Sisters. Unfortunately to get to the Little Sisters, you have to go through the Big Daddies, which are huge, hulking dudes that slowly walk around, and crush anything that tries to harm a Little Sister. They’re pretty imposing at first, but just think of them as buffed up versions of David Hasselhoff, stuck in a large diving suit, and they become a lot less threatening. There are two kinds of Big Daddies, one that lobs frag grenades and mines at you and one that has a huge drill on one hand and tries to drill you into next week. But hey, if you cant take down David Hasselhoff..
Once you’ve taken down one of these souped up dudes, you get a choice, whether to harvest a little sister or to free her. This moral choice isn’t nearly as involved as in games like Knights of the Old Republic, or Fable, its simply that harvesting nets you 160 ADAM while freeing them gets you 80, plus 200 every few freed and some nifty plasmids and such. Once you get your hands on a nice stack of ADAM, you can spend it at the gatherer’s garden vending machines, nifty little violet-lit machines with statues of the little sisters on the side. These are also the only machines you cant hack (Hacking other machines, like ammo or general goods ones simply involves creating a path of tubes for liquid to flow from one pipe to another and out. Its pretty easy, and gets progressively more difficult, though tonics you can find/buy make this a lot easier). Hacking gets you slightly lower prices and sometimes access to items that wouldn’t normally be available.
Graphically, the game is a mixed bag of sorts. The opening touchdown is one of the best graphically, in recent memory, and on your journey through Rapture, you’ll see lovely lighting and some of the most drinkable water since that little “unannounced” tour of the Evian water factory. Some of the textures though, don’t look nearly as good, though I suppose it could be rust. The music and sound effects are appropriately haunting and creepy. The weapon sounds work fine, as smashing someone over the head with a wrench sounds just like it would in real life (er not that I would know anything about that….). You can hear the lamenting cries of the damned, as they wander through the city, probably looking for you.
Back-story isn’t handled by traditional cut scenes, rather most of it is through little tape recordings judiciously placed about the city, that recall thoughts of the now extinct inhabitants of the city. There are occasional two second flashbacks here and there, but most of the story progresses over the radio you’re carrying.
There are a few minor quibbles that keep Bioshock from being the perfect game, however (besides the overall lack of nudity, that is). Even on hard, the game is far from punishing, as the sparkly vita-chambers populate many of the areas, making death in the game a minor inconvenience at worst. Its rather easy to get killed, and pop back out at a nearby machine, only to resume the fight, this time, with your life at full and whatever you were beating on, their life at whatever they had previously. Other issues include weapon balance, as the various guns don’t feel that much different or more or less powerful than each other, or the wrench you find at the beginning of the game. You could make an argument that, this isn’t a typical first person shooter, nothing like Half Life, or Halo, or F.E.A.R. and win some sympathy points, but still, in the long run, it really doesn’t seem to matter which weapon you use to blast your way through the hordes of splicers. Speaking of, there aren’t that many different enemy types either. You get maybe a few different splicers, and that’s it, for the entire game. Bosses, when you come across them, are only buffer versions of ones you’ve fought a billion times before. (If variety is the spice of life, no wonder Rapture went down the tubes).
Complaints aside, there is still a lot to like here. Andrew Ryan’s Rapture may not be the utopian world he hoped for (or the utopia of games, we hoped for), but it’s still an entertaining journey, full of danger, intrigue, and most importantly, David Hasselhoff. And who doesn’t want a little more of that?