The bad in Bioshock!

BioSHOCKed…

Warning! Disclaimer! Alert!

This is the BAD of Bioshock. We really think there were a lot of fine qualities regarding Bioshock the First. Fortunately there have been many other qualified reviewers to painstakingly detail these publicly in their positive reviews. We on the other hand, have chosen to illustrate a different side of Bioshock – that you may not have thought about whist wrapped up in the stylistic glory of this near masterpiece.

You may be wondering what prompted me to do a review of Bioshock at this particular point in time. After all, Bioshock was released in August of 2007, and Bioshock 2 came out quite recently. Shouldn’t I be reviewing Bioshock 2?

Well, that’s the thing. Bioshock 2 is reputed to be much a continuation of Bioshock, and while there were parts of Bioshock that were absolutely fantastic, the game has its problems. Problems that would make me hesitant to pay full purchase price for the second offering in the series, or to advise anyone else to do the same. I am of course aware that Bioshock received rave reviews from the gaming community at large.

Now even if you haven’t played Bioshock, I’m sure you’ve read all about what a groundbreaking game it is. And it’s undeniable that the game is visually something of a masterpiece, showcasing the Art Deco style beautifully. It starts off with a bang, as you find yourself floating amidst the brightly burning wreckage of a crashed airliner; and the game just gets scarier from there! It’s obvious from the opening sequence that Bioshock is a game which must be experienced with a big screen TV and something other than composite cables to really be experienced at all. The opening sequences of the game are very promising indeed.

The descent down the staircase into Rapture is delightfully creepy. What follows is one of the most exciting beginnings to a game that I’ve ever experienced – which is why the overall experience of Bioshock was such an utter disappointment to me when all was said and done. First off, let’s talk about what was new and exciting in this game which was billed as such a groundbreaking piece of gaming history. We’ll leave Ayn Rand and John Galt out of this one. Bioshock is, of course a first person shooter, but with an intriguing twist. Rather than simply acquiring new and better weapons as you progress through the game, Bioshock – as the name implies – employs a system of genetic enhancements (in the form of plasmids) which allow you to incorporate some rather unconventional attacks alongside the arsenal of more traditional first person shooter type weapons which you accumulate throughout the game. Discovering all of the various plasmids and weapons was definitely something I enjoyed. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take long to accumulate all of them, and once you’ve exhausted the possible combinations of plasmid attacks with the various weapons, things get monotonous pretty quickly. Once you have collected your plasmids, it’s a simple issue of upgrading your attacks in order to take on stronger enemies. Not that the enemies change much, mind you – they just get stronger, and so must you. Ad infinitum.

Somewhere around the midpoint of the game, I find myself yawning through yet another routine battle with a big daddy, grimacing at the NO! NO NOOO NO! shrieking of yet another Little Sister, trying not to think about the creepiness of what I just did as she scampered off to her hole in the wall, not even wanting to know what it would look like if I actually decided to HARVEST the EVE, going through the motions at the nearest Gatherer’s Garden whilst Tenenbaum sings my praises for the umpteenth time. I mean come on people, I can’t be the only one who got really fucking sick of this repeated set scene with the little girl I was raping. I mean rescuing. Seriously, I may be the kind of obnoxious loudmouth who is totally okay talking about being knee deep in your mom, or anybody’s mom, hell I’d do it in front of a priest. But somehow, I’m just not thrilled about the fact that the game developers decided that incorporating systematized child abuse into the game’s structure would be just a fabulous idea. Call me old fashioned. So anyway, with that uncomfortable, fucked up sequence temporarily out of mind, I pause the game, check how many Little Sisters I have left to rescue on the level (I’m not afraid to admit I literally can’t bring myself to click the harvest button, thank God, because that is NOT a visual I’m prepared to have floating around in my rather wilful subconscious) so that I don’t fall behind on collecting the Adam I need to make me grow up big and strong, and on and on. Wait, why am I starting to feel like this game is a chore? Probably because I’m surrounded by really beautiful and interesting scenery that I’d just love to explore, but I’m being constantly harassed by screaming splicers who are more of a nuisance than a challenge.

The splicers aren’t the most annoying thing in the game though, not by half. No, that is a distinction reserved for the endless waves of security bots buzzing about, crashing into things, bouncing off of other things, making an incredible racket and generally making me miserable. They reminded me very much of flies and all of their most irritating insect friends interrupting a nice dinner – they can’t really hurt you, but they do their best to ruin your mood and ensure that you waste a bunch of time swatting them out of the air before you can continue about the business at hand. Except that in real life, when I swat a fly down, it stays down. But in Bioshock, I’m forced to either spend Eve and ammunition on killing the stupid things, or I must hack them. By my 20th hack, I was really starting to wonder why on earth they didn’t include some variations if they were going to make hacking such a constant, inevitable part of the game. After all, you don’t just hack into security bots. You must also hack into safes, gun turrets, and security cameras, using the exact same method with varying degrees of difficulty. If there’s anything I’m forgetting – good! I don’t even want to think about this part of the game any more than I absolutely have to. By my 200th hack, I was gritting my teeth to keep my eyes from rolling back in my head, which would cause me to fail at my hack, which would mean I’d have to start the whole insufferable process all over again. With depleted health. Which is a real shame, because at the outset of the game I thought the hacking mini-game was kinda fun. Too bad lack of variation and the overabundance of items to be hacked turned it into such painful drudgery.

Speaking of painful, I don’t even know what to think about the maps in this game, because trying to make sense of them literally gave me a pain in the back of my skull. The same pain I felt in my skull in grade 9, when the teacher handed out petitions to ban dihydrogen monoxide, and people actually signed it???

Yeah, that pain. I can only hope that the developers of Bioshock went out and spent a little of their bonus checks on a copy of nearly any Role Playing game, saw how actual usable maps are done, and implemented some serious changes in Bioshock 2. I haven’t even begun to mention the several hour “glitch” that I was hopelessly stuck on as I equated my failure to lack of ability using the navigation system, rather than a splicer that fell into an area inaccessible to my research lens.

The constant repetitive cycling of the same noises over and over again, regardless of the level or the location within Rapture, becomes tiresome in a big hurry. As much as I would have loved to block out these repeated sounds of cackling and whatever else, which seemed completely random and unrelated to the scenery, I couldn’t, because anytime I allowed myself to indulge in a little mental white noise I would be missing valuable audio elements which are vital to progress in the game.

I would be remiss if I didn’t bring up the element of Bioshock which departs from the normal see-shoot-kill mentality of first person shooter games. If you’re a long suffering academic, or a tortured intellectual perhaps, then this element of the game is something you quite likely play video games to get away from: I am of course talking about Research! This aspect of the game was momentarily interesting in Dead Rising, and that’s where it belongs! In Bioshock it brings an added challenge to the now more or less routine altercations with Splicers and the like. However, much like the endless hacks and the many cartooney-villain voices with which the soundtrack is infested, taking pictures of about a thousand screeching Splicers and their subsequently bloodied corpses grows old. Much like you will whilst you try and capture their essence!

And by the time I’m finished doing  Atlas’ dirty work and I’m on my way to kill Ryan and get the big reveal about Atlas being the real bad guy– and by the way, if anyone hadn’t called it by the midpoint of the game, then I’m convinced their mommy must have played through Bioshock for them. Which is a sacrifice not a lot of mothers would make, to be honest – where was I? Atlas is bad, my mother doesn’t love me, oh god where does that accent come from anyways?

By this point in the game I’m only sticking around because I’m sure it has to be over soon and I’m expecting a big fat whopping payoff after everything I’ve put up with to get as far as I have. And honestly, I could forgive all of the problems with the game if 2K/Irrational Games had only managed to put some effort into the ending. For a game that started off with a magnificent bang, Bioshock truly goes out with a sniveling whimper. I know I’m not the only one who could recite the remarkably uncreative narration of the closing sequence right along with Tenenbaum. I got the good ending, which as far as I recall consisted of a university diploma, a wedding ring, and my character dying in a sanitary hospital bed.