Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

40 to 100 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Solid"

There's no question that Bioshock is a very good game that would be enjoyed by RPGers and FPSers alike. The graphics and setting are simply amazing and completely immersive but the story is not very engaging and by the end, the action begins to feel a bit like more of the same.

Since the developers themselves hold up Bioshock as the spiritual successor to System Shock 2 one cannot help but take them up on the comparison - and there are a lot of similarities between the two. In short, while Bioshock clearly excels visually, SS2 is a better game.

The game starts off with you out in the middle of the ocean next to a crashed airplane. You swim to a nearby rocky outcropping and descend into an underwater city. You are almost immediately contacted via the radio by someone else in the city who wants to help you (the first similarity to SS2).

The first thing that will strike you is that there is water everywhere. It's clear the developers nailed the visual effects here and just wanted to show it off. There are puddles and pools of rippling water, water flowing along the ground and water falling from waterfalls over a city that is apparently falling apart.

As in SS2, you will find audio recordings throughout the city that contain journals for the various citizens. In SS2, these journals slowly filled in the mystery and added a sense of dread and terror to your progress, but in Bioshock, you may find yourself quickly uninterested. There's really not much of a mystery as to what happened to the city and what your goals are and that weakness in the story is a letdown from the beginning.

The game is also completely linear. Once you leave an area, you can usually return to it, but you will rarely find any reason to backtrack.

Throughout the game, you will entire a handle of enemies to deal with. Unfortunately, there's not much variety here. The main enemy is the Splicer who are just people who are jacked up on too many gene enhancers. There are a handful of different types of Splicers but Splicers are mostly what you get to fight throughout the entire game. By the end of the game, fighting Splicers gets quite old.

There are also security cameras, turrets and defense bots to deal with, all of which can be hacked in a manner clearly taken right out of SS2.

The encounters that do break the lack of variety in Splicers are the Big Daddies. As you progress through the game, you will encounter these real big guys protecting little girls that you can either rescue or harvest for ADAM that you can use to improve your strength. The Big Daddies are passive toward you until you attack them, but once you do, you're in for a fight.

Throughout the game, you will collect money that you can spend at various vending machines to purchase supplies. The supplies don't vary much over time and there's no point in hording your money. In fact, you can only carry $500 which is even more surprising since your money counter has four digits. It's a rather frustrating and useless limit.

There is a decent variety of equipment you can acquire throughout the game. There's a standard compliment of weapons such as pistols, shotguns and rocket launchers but also nonstandard weapons called Plasmids which provide the ability to do things like shock your enemies, light them on fire or pick up heavy objects and throw them, even incoming grenades.

You can also acquire additional strengths and skills by finding tonics. There are three types of tonics and you start off with the ability to have one of each but over the course of the game, you can increase the number. You can change the tonics you currently have in use by visiting the abundant Gene Bank machines. I was quite unhappy at the beginning of the game because you'll acquire several of these but the game doesn't tell you how to see what you have available or how to change them; you won't find a Gene Bank until the second level.

The game also provides a pretty good sense of immersion by making for an interactive environment. There are lots of items lying around that you can pick up and use as weapons. You can also do things like electrocute enemies standing in water or light oil puddles on fire.

The last thing I want to mention is the element of research. In SS2, you discover recipes for creating new items or powerups, but you have to hunt out and find the various ingredients (some of which are rare). Bioshock has research element to it, but it's rather lame in comparison. You eventually find a camera and by taking pictures of your enemies, you gain new skills and abilities. There's nothing as interesting as having to searth for that rare ingredients you might need.

If they had focused on a better story and put more variety into the encounters and environments in the game, this game could very well have been one of the best games of all time. As it is, it's just pretty darn good.