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Ask anyone who’s played BioShock, and I’m sure they’d tell you that it stands an excellent chance at being named Game of the Year for 2007. A first-person shooter with a few role-playing elements scattered about doesn’t seem like it’s breaking from the mould too much. After all, there have been plenty of other successful “FPS-RPGs” like Deus Ex and System Shock (1 and 2). What does BioShock do differently to earn this praise? It raises the bar for production values across the board. Everything in BioShock oozes atmosphere, and the developers at 2K Boston have done an exceptional job not only in presenting BioShock’s world, but in telling its tragic tale as well.
Players assume the role of a character known only as “Jack,” based off of a note he reads while onboard a cross-Atlantic flight circa 1960. After crash-landing in the Atlantic and swimming to a strange-looking lighthouse that happens to be located in the vicinity, Jack takes a bathysphere down into the depths and stumbles upon a majestic underwater city. This dream city is known as Rapture, a utopia build by industrialist Andrew Ryan in the late 1940s to serve as a place where “the artist would not fear the censor, where the great would not be constrained by the small, [and] where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality.” It becomes readily apparent that Rapture has suffered its fair share of setbacks when you finally arrive in the city. Walls are leaking, rooms have flooded, electrical doors and locks function intermittently. Oh, and all of the residents have gone completely insane.
What drove Rapture into the seabed was the discovery of a particular species of sea slug that secretes pure stem cells. After figuring out that one could use this material, named ADAM, to alter their genetic code and give themselves wondrous powers, various fights and riots broke out to gain control of the substance. Eventually, people abused ADAM so much that they lost much of their sanity. Andrew Ryan is still alive though, and much of the story unfolds from his interactions with Jack.
This brings us to one of BioShock’s main attractions. You can use this ADAM substance to buy yourself plasmids, akin to ‘magic spells’ in a fantasy title, that range from being able to hurl lightning bolts and freeze people to send swarms of insects at your opponents and send them into a furious rage. You only start out with a single ‘slot’ for a plasmid, but as you gather more ADAM (I’ll get to how that works in a moment), you can buy more slots for your character. The same thing goes for the passive modifications, called gene tonics. They come in a three types, and each track has its own set of slots. Gene tonics can do everything from improving your wrench-wielding skills to allowing you to run faster. ADAM can also be used to buy maximum health and EVE (used to power your plasmids) upgrades.
So how do you get ADAM? The only way to obtain this substance is through the Little Sisters, small children genetically modified to extract ADAM from the dead and reprocess it into a usable form. They’re invulnerable, due to the stem-cell secreting sea slug in their bodies, as long as their oversized protectors, the Big Daddies, are around. Once you figure out how to disable or get past the drill-wielding behemoths, you are confronted with the game’s touted ‘moral choice’ system. You can either rescue the Little Sisters and gain 80 ADAM points, freeing them from their morbid task, or you can ‘harvest’ them, a process that is thankfully blurred out while it is occurring. Harvesting gains you 160 ADAM points, but kills the Little Sister. It should be fairly obvious which is the “good” and which is the “bad” choice, but you’re better off choosing what you’d rather do early and stick to it. The upside to being ‘good’ is that you’ll receive special gifts from time to time to compensate for the loss of ADAM, including some special plasmids that you won’t otherwise be able to obtain. Being evil will allow you to maximize your ADAM intake. There are three potential endings to BioShock that are largely based on your methods for dealing with the Little Sisters as well.
Your weapons are mostly standard fare with a bit of a twist. You have access to a wide variety of weaponry, including a pistol, shotgun, machine gun, chemical thrower, crossbow, and a wrench (among other things), and each weapon has two special upgrades and three ammo types. The weapon upgrade stations in BioShock only work once and you can only choose one upgrade at each before they burn out. There are enough to fully upgrade all the weapons in the game, but they take some serious exploration to find. Two of the three ammo types for each weapon are locatable in the game, but you have to invent one yourself using various components you’ll find in your travels.
There’s a bit of a hacking element in BioShock as well. You can disable turrets, guard robots, and other security implements as well as open safes and locked doors by playing a minigame akin to Pipe Dream. Certain gene tonics make this easier, and if you do your homework (literally; a research camera with film “ammo” is available, and you can gain various bonuses by photographing enemies and security implements), it becomes easier. It’s pretty easy right up until the end of the game, but it provides a nice diversion.
The graphics and soundtrack are top notch, as you might expect from a game with these sorts of production values. The voice acting is also worth mentioning, and the characters in BioShock are some of the most believable that I’ve ever seen in a video game. There’s a lot of moral philosophy buried in the dialogue, and you’d do well to go out of your way to find all ~130 odd audio diaries scattered throughout the city. They’ll give you some keen insight as to what precipitated Rapture’s downfall, and you’ll gain a better understanding of the main ensemble of characters as a result.
Despite all of its positives, BioShock is not perfect (despite what the mainstream reviewers will tell you). Enemy variety is virtually non-existent, as you’ll fight the same three or four kinds of Splicers for the whole game. You basically swim through a sea of medkits, EVE hypos, and cash. When you die, you don’t have to reload your last saved game; you respawn at the last “Vita-Chamber” you passed with around 50% health and EVE, and your enemies stay at the same health levels they were at before you died. This removes much of the.well, let’s face it. Once you figure out that ‘death’ has few consequences, you’re find that you’re not afraid to try a beat a Big Daddy to death with your wrench just for the heck of it. Removing this fear of character death makes the game relatively easy, even on the Hard difficulty setting.
Regardless, BioShock is an excellent piece of work. While it doesn’t break a lot of new ground, there’s so much polish and attention to detail (just stop moving at some point and listen to the ambient background noise) here that you feel more immersed in the game world than you would in many other titles. It’s a lot of fun to play, gives players a lot of leeway about how they can go about completing their goals, and has some great graphics, music, and voice acting. Highly recommended!
8.8/10
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