Developer: 2K Boston
Publisher: 2K Games
Rrp: £9.99 (Humblebundle) £13.99 (Steam)
Released: 21st August 2007
Available on Steam and Humblebundle
Played Using: Mouse and Keyboard
For some unknown reason your plane crashes somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, somehow you survived and… is that a lighthouse? Here?!
Welcome to the strange and somewhat terrifying game that is Bioshock. The game is set in the underwater city of Rapture, a capitalist utopia turned dystopia.
Bioshock is a first person shooter with some RPG elements and is also the spiritual successor to System Shock 2. You play as Jack, the poor sod who’s plane has crashed leaving him with little choice but to enter Rapture.
After a beautiful intro (even with the game nearing a decade old) you’re introduced to the game proper with the helping hand of Atlas on a radio to guide you. With his help you’ll be shooting Splicers, hacking vending machines and generally raising hell in no time.
The majority of the enemies you will fight in this game will be these Splicers that I mentioned. Splicers are humans that have absorbed too many plasmids and gone mad from it. Thankfully that doesn’t mean that you will end up fighting the same thing over and over though, Splicers come in many different forms. Some simply attack you with pipes or guns, others will crawl across the ceiling with hooks and some… teleport. There are many others besides those but its nice to find things out for yourself. It’s the Big Daddies that will be the ones you’ll really want to watch out for, they’re strong and move a lot quicker than you think they would. But taking one down gives a great reward, the chance to harvest, or save, a Little Sister.
Weapons are used with the left mouse button with no alternate fire mode available, instead you can change the ammunition type to suit your situation, if you have any that is. The right mouse button brings up your plasmid power which too is also fired with the left mouse. These plasmid powers vary wildly from telekinesis to firing bee’s from your hand and each use of a plasmid drains some of the players ‘eve’ (the blue bar below the health bar). This energy can be quickly regained through the usage of eve syringes, which have a bright blue glow and tend to be scattered reasonably liberally about the game.
However, unlike your weapons you can only arm yourself with a limited number of plasmids at a time, at the beginning of the game its two but this can be increased later. This can’t be just swapped out at any time, instead, you need to find and use a Gene Swap station to re-equip. What’s impressive is that your plasmid powers aren’t limited to combat, you can use them to unlock area’s of the world, for example if a area is iced up you can use fire to melt it away.
Plasmids aren’t the only way to improve your capabilities with weapons that can be upgraded and items that can be crafted. You can also find tonics, which once equipped will grant a bonus to you, some will make hacking easier and others will increase your attack power with melee weapons.
You can increase the effect of these (and your plasmids) further still by upgrading at Gatherer’s Garden stands that you will occasionally find. You’ll need a resource called Adam to purchase anything though and that can only be attained through the Little Sisters.
With a little forethought the game allows you to stack the deck on your favour. For example, if a Splicer is injured enough it will sometimes run to use one of the wall mounted healing stations that can be found sometimes. This could pose a problem except in this case you hacked it to poison the next user.
Hacking machines is done through a ‘connect the pipes’ style mini-game and while I greatly enjoyed it I do have one major frustration with it… Its randomly generated, meaning that sometimes you literally can’t complete it, it rare that happens but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating.
As I mentioned in my System Shock 2 review, there are a lot of parallels that can be drawn between them both mechanically. Just as with System Shock 2 you can hack vending machines (as well as many other things), if you die you are brought to life again through some means other than simple respawning. Also as with System Shock 2 a finite resource is used to reward you for your actions and allow you to improve your abilities this resource is called Adam.
However, unlike System Shock 2 you can’t change your base stats, you are as strong at the beginning as you will be at the end, of course that doesn’t mean you won’t acquire skills or improve upon abilities that you already have.
I love the Art Deco aesthetic, its always been my favourite art and design movement so getting to play in a game which has me walking around in it is amazing to me. There were a lot of little touches scattered across the game such as the short animations you got every time a new plasmid was picked up. You can see the designers really tried to adhere to the design principles of the period.
All of that is great but its the Little Sisters that really make this game special and provided the moments in the game where I really had to evaluate myself. Do I stick to my morals and save this girl which hinders my progress or shall I harvest them and reap the rewards they grant? There are very few games that have managed to do that in such a way.
Like most things though its not all roses, the game has a lot of issues some of which are due to its age admittedly but are no the less infuriating. For me the default FOV when starting the game was too low and I had to manually edit the games files to change it to a setting where I wouldn’t feel ill.
On some systems Bioshock has an extremely annoying habit of forgetting keys that have been rebound, meaning that every time the game is restarted you have to re-rebind them again (as well as manually re-edit the FOV again). Sadly I did not find any way to successfully fix this.
If System Shock 2 influenced this games mechanics then the book ‘Atlas Shrugged’ by Ayn Rand is the major influence for its themeing, in fact the developers even went far as to give a major character a name that is a play on the authors.
I can’t think of a reason not to get this game, its beautiful despite its age, challenging both in skill and intellect and is yet another piece of gaming history, thankfully this time its one with a happier ending.
If this appeals to you perhaps try;
System Shock 2
Dishonored
The rest of the Bioshock series
