EPT
(note : I will try as much as possible to put sensible things inside spoiler tags)
"Uncomfortable" you say ?
After dealing with the Securom problems (had to reboot twice, remove AVG... -_-; ), I was finally able to play the game. Minimal introduction, plane crash and voilà I am in the underwater city named Rapture.
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What's that giant lighthouse ?
The idea of an underwater city is original and very well made : no space station or stupid fences or invisible walls that put physical boundaries to the gamer, the limits are here perfectly understandable and having all this water around adds a little bit more pressure to the atmosphere. You're locked hundreds of meters underwater and it makes you nervous but it's just the beginning...
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This is what you see from the bathysphere that takes you down to Rapture
Actually, the moment you arrive in Rapture shows a poor guy being slaughtered by a mad woman equipped with butcher's claws. Ouch. Meet the splicers, original Rapture inhabitants who have lost their mind ! The levels are filled with barely lit rooms or flicking neons where disguised splicers crawl in search of a substance that lets them live so beware : they are angry, aggressive and armed.
Then you enter the second level, the "Medical Pavilion". That one is wicked. Mad plastic surgeons, failed experiments, angry dentists... you name it. This level is worse than a horror show and is a nightmare if you don't like hospitals
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OK, do I really have to go in there ?
Finally, you'll meet the Little Sisters : little girls under the control of a parasite sticked in their body and you'll have to either help them or kill them to help you go further in the game. Needless to say, you'll get more help by killing them than saving them... so what will prevail ? Your own morality or your desire to finish the game with more ease ?
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Make your choice
All these factors together combine to give a really unique experience to BioShock which makes you very uncomfortable and nervous. This is interesting because the horror does not from the single fact that aliens have invaded Earth/a spaceship and are ugly ; the horror deals with your own conception of morality and inner fears.
Plasmids
I must admit I was a bit disappointed with the introduction that does not give any information about who you are, what you are doing in an airplane, etc... + Show Spoiler +
This is perfectly normal as all of this is explained later in the game.
OK so in Rapture people have lost their minds because some genius inventor was able to find out how to make powerful gene modifications named "plasmids" using a recent discovery. These modifications were commercialized and as people used more and more of them, their soul was spliced (hence the name of "splicers") and they became overly aggressive and dependent to the substance needed to use plasmids : Adam.
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The Electro Bolt plasmid in action
In the very early stages of the game, you will obtain your first plasmid (which happens to be one of the most useful) and learn how to use it. As the game flows, you'll find other versions of plasmids and "gene tonics" that will boost your capacities a lot. In order to equip them, you'll have to obtain Adam which can only be made by finding Little Sisters and kill or save them. Problem is, Little Sisters are always protected by a Big Daddy...
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Say hello to the big fella
Yeah, it's kinda difficult to shoot them down, especially in the beginning of the game.
There are many different plasmids and gene tonics throughout the game. Some are really useful, other are mostly useless. You'll find out by yourself anyway.
My favourites :
+ Show Spoiler +
* Electro Bolt. Damages and stuns enemies and can occasionally instantly kill them when used on water. Who could ask for more ?
* Incinerate. Damn useful on Big Daddies, on gasoline spots or on splicers immune to bolt.
* Natural Camouflage. If you stand still for about 3 seconds, you become invisible to people who haven't spotted you or to security cameras. Great to trap splicers or take pictures of them with the Research Camera.
* EVE link. Having First Aid Kits give EVE as well as health is great.
* Booze Hound. Instead of losing EVE when drinking alcohol, you gain some. Given how many bottles you find throughout the game, this tonic is simply awesome.
* Scrounger. Looting corpses or containers is nice but sometimes disappointing. Scrounger gives you a second chance !
* Photographer's Eye. Make these researches go faster !
* Hacker's Delight. Yeah, gaining health and EVE every time you hack something is "not so bad". A must-have, of course.
Most of them can be gotten once you complete some researches with the Research Camera.
The good ideas
What I like about BioShock is that it's full of nice little features you don't see much in other games :
- back when they were still mentally fit, people living in Rapture have recorded their thoughts/impressions on tape. So you'll find tape recorders here and there in the city and you'll be able to understand what happened in Rapture. Some (most ?) of them are really creepy.
- hacking is a way of life. Rapture has many automatic machines : vending machines, security cameras, surveillance bots... and all of them can be hacked so they work for you ! The hacking system is a bit boring at times but really, this is useful 100% of the time.
- the research camera. You can take pictures of different things around you : splicers, Little Sisters, Big Daddies, defense turrets, security bots, etc... The more pictures you take (up to 3 for one single enemy), the more you know about them : this will allow you to get boosts or increase damage against them. Of course, you progress more slowly if the subject is dead or has already been taken so the idea is to take a picture of them in the middle of battles (you get bonus points for that) ^^
- inventing items is good. Some items/ammo just cannot be bought but you can make them using various pieces of junk you find here and there
Kinda funny, it lacks a bit of variety though.
Twist'n'plot
Ah, the scenario. At first, it looks simple but the more you get into the game, the more complex it gets. You bump into various subtleties as you progress that make the story more intricate as it seems.
While the first levels let you feel the atmosphere by introducing you to some "second plan" characters (a crazy plastic surgeon, meeting spider splicers in the port, a botanist, etc...), you try to get a picture of the whole thing by listening to recordings you find here and there. Getting these recordings and listening to them is important to understand what's going on in Rapture, they are key elements to the story. OK, you can skip them if you just want to say "hey, I beat BioShock under 10 hours !" but the only thing it shows is that BioShock wasn't made for you.
Anyway, once you get a grasp on how basic things are run in Rapture, there are still many topics that remain quite obscure. And this is where the game gets REALLY good : the clearer the story gets, the uglier it becomes. I remember reading at some recordings and thinking "man, this story was really well thought out and perfectly planned". Everything is explained carefully or at least doesn't sound too "magical" ; there's a good explanation for everything but you might not find it at first. So beware when exploring levels and try not to miss tape recorders.
+ Show Spoiler +
Like the "would you kindly..." thing. Man, I was blown away at the end of Hephaestus level. At some points in the game I was a bit suspicious and disappointed : when Atlas tells you to go get his family, you do it. When Atlas tells you to go kill Ryan, you do it. I was like "geez, this guy does everything as told, what a puppet". I couldn't have been closer to the truth :D
![[image loading]](http://img181.imageshack.us/my.php?image=wouldyoukindlyyi0.jpg)
The revelation
And this is why I love this game : nothing is left out and the story is very rich of details and explanations.
So ?
Conclusion time ! As you might have understood if you have gone through this whole article, I loved BioShock. Really. It's my second best FPS game so far, just behind Max Payne 2 (and MP2 is a third-player shooter, so...). Why second ? Well, there are some flaws in BioShock after all... so let's go for a pros/cons list and I'll explain below :
Pros
* great story
* great atmosphere
* the underwater city concept
* the plasmid/gene tonic system
* the good ideas (cf the appropriate paragraph)
* longevity (i'm a slow player so it took me like 30-40 hours to get to the end
)Cons
* too short and too abrupt ending
* Vita-Chambers
* somehow repetitive monsters
* player's size issues :D
* no level editor !
OK I hope you understood the Pros part, so I'll go deeper into the Cons part.
About the ending : yeah, the ending is nice and all but really...
+ Show Spoiler +
(I've only seen the "good ending")
30-second-long cinematic and then back to game menu ?!@# Come ooooonnnnnn... You've gone through hell and all you get is that ? How disappointing.
Vita-Chambers ruin the game's difficulty. I've used one once and thought it was way too easy so I decided not to use any until the end. I mean, you can already save your game at all times so what good are Vita-Chambers ? They shouldn't exist outside the Easy game mode.
Splicers are good. They're scary, well-designed, completely mad and have various abilities. OK. But you recognize the same faces too often and the different types of splicers are all seen after level 4 (Arcadia) which is kinda short. I would have appreciated a bit more diversity in all this, at least in the faces. But maybe this me being a bit picky.
I was amazed by the size your character is supposed to have. Sometimes, you have the feeling you're a 10-year-old boy because you can barely reach the top of a table or a door knob or some other thing in the environment. This is very weird and can be disturbing at times.
Finally, I would have loved making a few levels in Rapture and a level editor would have been awesome. Now I know it's a big task to release such a software but that would have extended BioShock's life a lot. Bah, that's not very important anyway.
Last words
All in all, BioShock is an awesome game for people who like games with good atmosphere and great scenario. Other who love online multiplayer games or simple deathmatch games can leave it behind with no remorse. But if you belong to the first category, go get BioShock this game is a gem.
