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Review

Bioshock

10.0

Format Xbox 360

Developer Irrational Games

Publisher Take-Two Interactive

Genre First Person Shooter, Action

24-Aug-2007 Welcome to Utopia, 1960; population 5,023... 5,021... 5,010... 4,978...

30 Comments

"It wasn't impossible to build Rapture on the ocean's bottom; it was impossible to build it anywhere else." The quote is from Andrew Ryan, the fictional founder of Bioshock's setting, the great utopian city 'Rapture', but the sentiment could apply to the game itself. Bioshock is the ultimate self-contained game, completely internally consistent, beautifully-designed and endlessly rewarding. It fits perfectly in its location, a dreamlike steampunk city where biotech has run rampant and where philosophers and scientists murder artists and musicians over conceptual quibbles.

The game is set in 1960, with you surviving a plane crash in the mid-Atlantic to find yourself by a lighthouse jutting improbably from the ocean. Entering it and descending by bathysphere, you find yourself amidst the submerged blocks of an art-nouveau city, looking like an amphibious cross between Times Square and a 1950s drive-thru. The Gomez Addams doppelganger Ryan planned Rapture as a demonstration of his individualist philosophy, attracting the brightest and best from all around the world, scientists and artists living side-by-side, in a shining conflicting model of what man can achieve. Unfortunately, it also has the potential to show the depths of man's degradation and inside the city all is not well.

Welcome to Rapture
By the time you arrive "not well" has turned to "****". The discovery of a stem-cell carrying sea-slug with regenerative and splicing attributes has set the underworld of the city, headed by gangster John Fontaine, against the city's establishment, headed by the elitist Ryan. After starting a war between his genetically-spliced gangsters (called "splicers") and Ryan's, Fontaine has lost but the repercussions still rumble on. Roaming splicers battle each other and the increasingly-rare innocents for the precious serums of the sea-slug: Eve and Adam.

We're not going to say anything about the plot beyond that stunning opening sequence, because it's 24-carat gold. Amazingly-written and beautifully constructed, it's a complete emotional-rollercoaster that we can't draw any parallels with, not because it defies comparison but because any such comparison would give away some of the plot and it would be a tremendous moral crime for us to spoil this gem in any way. If you want to avoid ruining this game for yourself and others, would you kindly not talk to anyone about it until you know they've completed it too?

Ken Levine, the studio's founder, took the majority of the script-writing up himself, and it's really paid dividends. Beyond the wonderful plot, the messages you receive from your allies and friends are pithy, the incidental dialogue from the splicers and Little Sisters is kooky whilst still being believable, and the individual character of each audio log author really comes through. There's such a wit in the writing, such an understanding of people that the lines approach the heights of classical aphorisms, great quotable sayings that match the best products of the minds of antiquity.

This sounds like ridiculous overblown hyperbole, but it isn't. Ryan describes you as a "termite in Versailles", amidst the rest of his rhetoric, and the fantastically insane artist Sander Cohen matches him for oratory, among others. Even incidental characters come out with gems, such as a splicer with ice-powers who temporarily freezes you and keeps you as a statue in his anteroom, intoning to your frozen form "the iceman cometh, yeah, the iceman cometh mother******". The plot literally turns on such wordplay and the game achieves a completely different air once completed, necessitating at least another playthrough merely to understand the connotations of how later revelations alter your early discoveries.

Action replay
Both the discoverable diaries and the dual endings (what, you thought anything about this was going to be simple?) also require a replay. The audio tapes (left by the mostly-deceased inhabitants of rapture) reveal more of the backstory of the game, introducing sideplots galore and revealing key details about the plot. Without them, this could simply be an exceptionally solid first-person shooter, where you go from bathysphere to boss battle. With each audio log, more details about the world, the power structures, and the history are revealed, fundamentally altering your perceptions about your character, the city, and what happened to turn the planned utopia into this collapsing dystopia you find.

There's an enormous amount of optional content. We think you could probably speed-run the game in eight hours, if you knew exactly what you were doing and where you were going; but if you want to explore the world, acquire the other weapons, plasmids and gene tonics, and hear all the audio logs, you'll have to play twenty-five hours at least; much more if you play on Hard difficulty and want to save or harvest every little sister.

Up the arsenal
The gameplay is tremendously well-designed. It works as a level-headed shooter, involving seven weapons which are all familiar (wrench, pistol, shotgun, tommy gun, grenade launcher, crossbow) - that is, apart from the nearly game-breaking Chemical Thrower, which could kill an army by itself. However, each weapon has three types of ammo, all of which are in short enough supply that you're forced to vary armament regularly, and these aren't your only weapons (we'll talk about both your enemies and the plasmids in a moment.) You can also mod them at Power To The People stations, increasing damage and clip size, reducing kickback, ammo consumption and range. All these improvements that are visually represented on the weapons themselves, so they get increasingly cool as you go along.

There's auto-aim but it's never intrusive and in the more hectic moments it's definitely welcome. Because of the resilience of your character, you've always got a moment to plan your next move, whether that's hacking a turret, Security Drone or security camera to your side (the game pauses for hacking) or using the environment to your advantage. You can also use plasmids like Enrage or Hypnotise Big Daddy to turn enemies to your side, or Telekinesis to set up nasty traps.

Come to daddy
The Big Daddies are Tough. You notice how we capitalised that? Even the most arrogant fps player is going to be surprised by these big sods. Their main weapon is disorientation - especially the close combat variety, the Rosie. They'll slam the floor so your vision distorts, charge at tremendous speed to knock you clean across the room, and wait patiently for you to get back up before knocking you down again with a giant drill. Get hit by a Big Daddy and you have to be lucky to get back up. And that's even without the longer-ranged Bouncer Big Daddies shooting rivet guns at you...

But the rewards are so good. Every Big Daddy guards a Little Sister, an Adam carrying girl. Adam equates to Plasmids which equates to new weapons and power-ups, meaning you have to take down the big daddy to get stronger and handle the later levels. As these Plasmids vary from distractions (Decoy, Enrage) to direct damage (Winter Blast, Electro Bolt, Incinerate), they become essential parts of your arsenal controlled by the left trigger. You also get access to tonics, that improve other aspects of your game, from hacking to healing to resilience. You'll only become aware of how important these items are to you later in the game, when your control over them is temporarily removed.

Apart from the Big Daddies, there's a small selection of enemy types, from Thuggish close-combat types and Leadhead gun-equipped ones to Nitro explosives experts and Houdini teleporting/fireball splicers. However, their appearance varies from level to level, as does their difficulty, increasing the variety. There's also security drones, turrets and security cameras to contend with so, though there's not the huge selection of enemies of, say, Blue Dragon, you never feel bored with the enemies you're facing.

The impossible game
Even the soundtrack on this game is amazing, the optimistic classics of the 50s era shoehorned amidst early 20th century music, random sounds, traditional tonal tunes, and late romantic stuff. The composer, Schyman, has even used musique concrete, sounds of the real world, ranging from footsteps on stone to a diseased man's breathing (for the big daddy we think.) Everything else in the world is equally well composed, from the catchy tunes of the vending machines to the clunky reloading of your shotgun. Even the machine-gun equipped Security Drones have their own intuitive jingles that tell you if they're friendly, hostile or just bored.

Bioshock is a novel compressed into a first-person shooter. It manages to be both a tricky, exciting action game, a fascinating creation of an enclosed world and a deep enquiry about what it means to be human, which is a trick most action movies and books fail to achieve. It also plays with you at every stage, confounding your expectations and your control over events repeatedly, from your control over your weapons, plasmids, plot, self... without spoiling any more, we will be playing this game for years to come, exchanging story elements to build up the bigger picture, and arguing about what it all means. Come, join the argument, play the impossible game.

Dan Griliopoulos