Nelson Schneider's Game Review of BioShock

Atlas Fragged
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/31/13

Anyone who knows my taste in games knows that I don’t really pay attention to upcoming FPSes. In order for a FPS to get my attention, it needs to be on the market for a while and garner an enormous amount of praise from people who are not typical FPS fans for reasons that make the game in question seem less and less like a typical FPS. “Bioshock” is one such game, which had praise heaped upon it by nearly everyone since its initial release in 2007. With my beloved Razer Hydra in hand (the only way to play a FPS) and with a mere $2.50 cost (bundled with its sequel for a total of $5), I figured it was time to see what all the fuss was about. Unfortunately for me, it turns out that FPS fans seem to know even less than I traditionally believed, and that “Bioshock” is not nearly as mold-breaking as anyone, including the game itself, wants it to be.

Presentation
2007 was not that long ago that 3D graphics should look terribly dated. “Bioshock” is kind of a mixed bag in this respect. While the environmental models look great and just ooze atmosphere, creating a realistic illusion of an underwater city built in the 1950s, the character models don’t. While the fact that every character is hideously mutated makes sense in the context of the game’s story, the fact that there are no normal looking people leads me to believe that the development team either didn’t have the ability or didn’t have the money to create a few more models for special characters. Even worse, while the vast majority of the game’s narrative and conversations take place via radio transmissions, the few instances that characters appear on a CRT viewscreen for a conversation use static sprite textures instead of animated models. Of course, if these viewscreen characters had been animated, they probably would have suffered from the same awful lipsync issues as the few characters who actually stand close to the player’s character and deliver lines. Other instances of poorly utilized graphics include the spray effects for blood and/or wine (which are identical) that look less like liquid squirting out of a hole and more like a tapeworm riding a rainbow. And while the water effects look great, in most instances the water is static and doesn’t interact with character or object models that make contact with it. Essentially, the graphics in “Bioshock” look like someone tried to re-create the engine that powered “Half-Life 2” in 2004 and didn’t really bother to improve on it.

The audio in “Bioshock” is significantly better than the graphics. As I mentioned, most of the narration and conversations in the game take place via radio broadcasts, which are fully voiced. Other voiced segments include audio-logs that can be found scattered throughout the game. In addition, enemies continually talk and mumble to themselves, creating yet more atmosphere and providing glimpses at who they were before the terrible events of the game’s narrative occurred. The voiceacting in “Bioshock” is extremely well done, and I didn’t recognize any particularly familiar voices, which is always a plus. There isn’t really much music to speak of, but what there is fits perfectly into the game’s environments, typically coming from loudspeakers or semi-functioning record players and jukeboxes. Most of the music isn’t original, but licensed (or perhaps public domain… at least it should be by now) recordings of actual music from the time period of the game’s happenings (1947-1959).

Technically, “Bioshock” hearkens back to the days when getting a PC game to work wasn’t always a guarantee. When I first started playing the game, I almost immediately had the audio cut-out and never return. I had to spend hours messing with my system and searching online for a solution (which turned out to be updating the driver for my PC motherboard’s integrated audio). Once I got the game working, it did crash on me a single time over the course of ~30 hours, which isn’t bad in the long run. Also, “Bioshock” is built using a weird physics engine that tries to emulate the groundbreaking (at the time) physics engine used in “Half-Life 2.” Instead, however, the physics in “Bioshock” tend to go insane more often than not, resulting in ragdolled corpses that begin twitching manically if the player so much as looks at them and small objects that fly through the air as though flung by a poltergeist if the player so much as attempts to walk past them. I also found myself technically frustrated by the game’s menus. When playing the game in controller mode, the menus are navigable via the joystick… yet the aiming cursor doesn’t respond to the mouse. On the other hand, while playing the game in mouse/keyboard mode (which is necessary when using a Razer Hydra), the menus change to mouse only. I would have preferred menus more similar to those in the ‘Borderlands’ games where the controller-style highlighting of menu items is still available when using a mouse (or Hydra) to aim in the non-menu portions of the game.

Story
What I didn’t realize about “Bioshock” going into the experience is that the game is pretty much 60% Survival Horror. Most of the horror comes across visually via spooky lighting, obscured vision, footsteps in the dark, and shrieking maniacs. This type of setting really does nothing for me, and I was disappointed that the game fell back on this crutch as often as it did.

The remaining 40% of the game’s story and setting are an interesting take on the kind of society that would arise if a large group of people gathered behind a charismatic leader to enact the ideologies put forth in the writings of 20th century philosopher/writer/lunatic Ayn Rand.

The game begins with our mostly-mute and nameless hero on a trans-oceanic flight in 1960. He muses to himself about how his parents always told him he was someone special, only to be interrupted by the plane crashing into the sea. Our nameless hero soon finds himself in the water, surrounded by flaming debris and burning jet fuel. The only way for him to survive is to swim toward the mysterious lighthouse that just happens to be nearby. Upon entering this lighthouse, our hero finds a bathysphere, a device on the technological scale between a diving suit and a submarine, which takes him down 10 fathoms to the city of Rapture, which was founded by a Randian exemplar, cleverly named Andrew Ryan. An introductory movie narrated by Andrew Ryan that plays as the bathysphere descends laments the sorry state of Western Civilization – how the sweat of a man’s brow is always stolen unjustly by governments or religions, and how illusions like morality and ethics artificially limit individual freedom and prosperity.

From a writing perspective, the team behind “Bioshock” did a fantastic job of creating a Randian dystopia and building up the character of Andrew Ryan. Throughout the game, I found myself – as an anti-Randian – fuming at the man’s hubris and ego, all while surrounded by the ruins of what was apparently once a prosperous city. Indeed, the main premise of “Bioshock” at first seems to be remarkably similar to the premise of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” in which the worthy and brilliant members of the human population leave behind the ‘parasites’ of their societies and form their own city where free markets and unfettered Libertarianism rule all. Yet “Bioshock” turns the premise of “Atlas Shrugged” on its head by showing the ruins of such a society that has failed after less than 20 years of existence.

Why did Andrew Ryan’s miraculous underwater city fail? Without ethics or regulations to keep the greater good in mind, naturally an ex-Nazi collaborator scientist would find her way to Rapture, both to avoid the stigma of her former associations and to avoid unnecessary restraints upon her research. This scientist’s research, as it turns out, happens to be in the field of genetics; and after hitting numerous dead ends, she finally stumbles upon a semi-magical McGuffin that allows her to completely unlock the human genome IN Rapture itself: A biochemical produced by sea slugs that the game dubs ‘Adam.’

The backstory of Rapture and the experiments with Adam come across mostly through audiologs, which seem really weird and out of place for the 1950s… who used personal reel-to-reel tape recorders to take notes back then? Wouldn’t it have made more sense to find handwritten journals lying around? Regardless, as more and more details are revealed to the player, Andrew Ryan, his associates, and the entire existence of Rapture and Adam come across as increasingly sordid and detestable. By the time I was ready to confront Andrew Ryan, I wanted to stuff and entire clip of frag grenades down his pants so he could experience what it was like for anyone working for him. Yet the game denied me that simple pleasure by throwing in an unnecessary plot twist revealing a villain even worse than Andrew Ryan. And in pulling this late-game switcheroo, “Bioshock” sabotages the anti-Randian narrative it had built so marvelously from the start, leading to one of three (actually only two, with a one-line difference in the ‘third’) endings that are short, unsatisfying, and – in the case of the ‘good’ ending – seem to sweep the entirety of the game’s happenings under the proverbial rug.

Gameplay
“Bioshock” purports to have deep character customization, moral choices, and resemble an RPG or action/adventure game in a few superficial ways. Unfortunately, the descriptions of the game as anything more than a bog-standard FPS with a few power-ups are overestimations.

“Bioshock” is old-school enough that the hero doesn’t regenerate health or have a shield of any kind. Instead he carries around up to 9 first aid kits that he can use to instantly restore a chunk of life. He can also use health vending machines for a full health restore in exchange for a little bit of money. Furthering the old-school FPS vibe, the first weapon the hero finds is a monkey wrench, which is the only form of melee attack and must be switched to manually, unlike modern games that always have a melee attack available for when the player character’s gun runs out of ammo and the enemy they are fighting isn’t quite dead.

The most obvious modern additions to “Bioshock” are the ubiquitous vending machines. These sell a variety of things, ranging from healing items to bullets to hacking tools. Most enemies have a few dollars on their corpses and there are plenty of hidden money caches in Rapture, so I never found myself strapped for cash… or indeed for ANY resource, which I understand is supposed to be a staple of the Survival Horror genre (though, to be fair, I played on Normal difficulty, and I have it on good authority that on Hard difficulty there are far fewer resources scattered around).

The game’s only real unique feature is the system of plasmids and tonics the character can equip. These are all genetic modifications (that play incredibly fast and loose with the rules of DNA and genetic engineering) that can be found, purchased, or researched. Plasmids act as additional weapons that use a ‘magic’ meter (called EVE to complement the Adam that makes these modifications possible) instead of bullets, while tonics provide the hero with passive abilities in one of three areas: Combat, Technical, and Physical. While I found many of the tonics incredibly useful, especially the one that allows the hero to turn invisible if he holds still for a few seconds, I found most of the plasmids to be pointless outside of the free ones that are required to progress through the game’s not-so-mindbending puzzles (Use the shock plasmid to override the broken electric door lock! Use the fire plasmid to melt the ice that is jamming the door frame!), with the exception of the Decoy plasmid that creates a phantom image that draws enemies’ attention 100% away from the hero (it even works on bosses… including the final boss). I’ve lost count of the number of action/adventures and action/RPGs I’ve played with poorly balanced magic systems that end up rendering all but one or two abilities useless, so I shouldn’t be surprised that “Bioshock” fell into the same pitfall.

“Bioshock’s” other not-so-unique features include a moral decision to kill certain NPCs for the Adam contained in their bodies or to save them and get less Adam but also not feel like an ass. Then there’s the annoying hacking minigame that involves playing a round of “Pipe Dream” to get a stream of eletrogel from Point A to Point B. While the hacking minigame is kind of annoying, it is integrated fairly deeply into the game by allowing the player to convert sentry guns and security cameras from hostile to friendly, allowing these automated defenses to attack enemies instead of the hero. Of course, the only reason sentries are necessary is the fact that enemies continually respawn in impossible areas. In a game like this, I would expect an area that has been cleared of enemies to STAY cleared of enemies, yet instead I found that “Bioshock” uses a slightly less in-your-face version of the tried-and-sucky ‘monster closets’ from FPSes dating AAALLL the way back to the dawn of the genre, allowing enemies to magically appear in small rooms that I had JUST searched.

Of course, as a FPS, the biggest question anyone should ask about “Bioshock” is, “Is the shooting good?” The answer is, “Kind of.” Aiming seems to work well, though there is an unfortunate invisible range on most weapons that seems far too short for reality. There are also far too few guns in the game with anything resembling accuracy. Even more fun, most enemies require far more than one shot to take down, even requiring 2 headshots. It’s possible to increase damage to each major enemy type by ‘researching’ them by taking photos with a Polaroid camera, but with the amount of health enemies have toward the end of the game, this ‘bonus’ damage seems a bit too ‘mandatory.’ At least enemies in “Bioshock” have more interesting AI than most shooters, and they do an incredible job of dodging bullets, all while landing perfect shots on the hero. Sometimes a threatened enemy will run away and use a healing vendor to restore his health, sometimes enemies will start a battle ‘playing dead’ to look like the numerous corpses scattered through the game (and they are unfortunately invincible both while playing dead and while standing up). It’s also noteworthy that while enemies are landing their 100% accurate shots, the hero’s vision goes all cloudy and starry, making it impossible to aim at anything.

It’s possible to somewhat customize the game’s stable of guns, though these customizations are limited to single use vending machines that simply improve one of two stats on each gun. There are also three types of ammo available for each gun, with the extra types being ‘inventable’ at a type of vending machine that accepts bits of trash as ‘components’ instead of money. I was not particularly impressed by the weapon customizations as they all seemed less like ‘improvements’ to the guns than they did ‘nerf removals.’ All of the game’s guns start out as complete crap, like a tommy gun with so much barrel climb it’s unusable without the anti-recoil upgrade, and the upgrade choices are far too limited to feel anything like a ‘customization.’

Overall
“Bioshock” is a well-produced, if not slightly dated, game with a thought-provoking story to tell. Unfortunately, a few missteps in the game’s presentation and story prevent them from being able to carry the less-than-stellar FPS shooting gameplay. Outside of the narrative, “Bioshock” doesn’t do anything particularly original, nor does it do anything particularly well. Survival Horror fans should probably enjoy it for a few particularly well executed scares, but otherwise it’s an utterly average experience.

Presentation: 3.5/5
Story: 4/5
Gameplay: 2.5/5
Overall (not an average): 3/5