The first-person shooter genre is
easily one of the most popular styles of video games, and to look back over
the past several years, some of the biggest titles of all time and "game of
the year" awards have been for games of the FPS genre. Half Life, HALO, Half
Life 2, F.E.A.R., Deus Ex, HALO 2, all have been critically lauded and made
tons and tons of money. Not only because they are fun as all get out to play,
but each one of these games has managed to raise the bar in one way or another
for the genre. Half Life for its movie-like approach to gaming, Deus Ex for
the added RPG elements, HALO for its heavy sci-fi storyline and engrossing
character. Well, Bioshock is going to be one of those games that will sell
really well because it, too, adds new depth to a genre many felt would be
stagnant a couple of years ago and it is really a pleasure to play.
The time to be an Xbox 360 owner
is now. And this is the perfect start to what will be a very popular 3rd and
4th quarter for 360 owners. Like Steven Hopper says in his article
http://wii.gamezone.com/news/08_15_07_03_14PM.htm games heat up as summer
winds down. In fact, with this title, Blue Dragon and HALO 3 all coming out in
Aug. and Sept. the other systems will be hard pressed to match the kind of
numbers that I suspect are going to be happening for the 360. Quite simply,
this one, two, three punch are going to move some systems this season.
"Have a little electrically charged
buckshot, pal!"
Ok, so enough pandering, what is
so great about this game? Alright, so in the game (and I promise not to ruin
any of the surprises of the game) you play as a man on an airplane that just
happens to crash in the ocean during flight. As the sole survivor, you are
treading water, pretty much swimming in flames from the wreckage when you spot
a tower protruding from the murky depths. Swimming to it, you discover an
elevator and since you have no other course of action, you ride it all the way
down. As your ride comes to an end, the proverbial hornets nest is effectively
beaten open. And as completely amazed you are you are disturbed that much too,
because before you lies the city of Rapture, complete with underwater
skyscrapers and a completely functioning city. But before you can even get
your wits about you, a strange attack occurs and you quickly discover that all
is not well beneath the sea.
Big Daddies, little sisters,
mutated citizens, Adam, eve, psychopathic geniuses, a disturbed megalomaniac,
nature defying abilities, strange mechanical devices and lots and lots of
water are only some of the things you will encounter while trying to escape
the city. Bioshock is a full blown, in-your-face gaming experience that will
have you testing your own mettle and challenging you to look at video games in
a different way. One, because the game truly provides you with options on how
to approach the game, and two, this is a thinking person’s action title.
"There is something really wrong with
that girl."
The look and sound of the game has
a very retro look to it, since the game takes place in the past, and Rapture
was created for a large group of forward-thinking individuals (think
scientists, doctors, artists, geniuses) the devices and other objects are
things that simply never existed, but if they had, then this is what they
would look like given the look of technology from the period. The visuals are
incredibly detailed and totally in place, electrical tubing and pipes have
that brushed copper look to them, fat rivets keep the city from being crushed
in on itself and sea creatures swim away when you walk up to the glass to get
a better look. The majority of the population in Rapture has embraced the
genetic improvements that have been made available to them and are now paying
the price. Think of this game as much a survival horror game as any other you
may have played, but instead of zombies, the primary baddie you face are
called splicers, people who let the vanity of increased beauty and power
betray them and now wear masks to hide their disfigured faces. But they aren’t
your garden-variety baddie; remember the city is filled with pretty smart
people who wanted to make a better life for themselves, these are intelligent
creatures, who’s minds have been as disfigured as their bodies, and they want
you dead.
The game’s graphics seem to really
make you feel like you are in a slowly decaying city. The water effects are
incredibly fluid, and I know, water graphics have been good for a while, but
the water is as an important a character as anyone else in this game. It
shimmies in the dark and flows off of staircases forming impromptu waterfalls.
Walk under it and your vision blurs like it would in real life. A character
gets knocked down in it and the water splashes with correct physics, it’s
absolutely breathtaking. The same goes for the lighting effects, flames dance
around as if it were video recorded and not programmed. Flames lick at the oil
on the floor igniting a splicer and encasing them in pure light. This being a
thinking individual, they run around trying to put out the fire. A huge,
hulking, iron-encased man picks up enemies and throws them with insane
strength, the body slumps against the wall with a sickening bend and then
walks over to the already dead man and begins drilling into him with an
industrial boring drill, blood splays everywhere. A little girl repeatedly
stabs a downed man with a weirdo looking syringe, pulls it out to examine its
contents, and then sticks him again. The game has visuals that are both
beautiful and terrifying and all the while, you can’t stop looking. The
architecture of the city itself and the intricacies of mechanical devices that
both help and hurt you, all incredible.
"And in this corner, weighing in at 485
pounds, BIG DADDY!"
Now since the game is a
first-person shooter, you will be happy to know that it controls very well.
The game nudges you a tad for some auto aiming but not so much that it takes
away from the challenge. The use of both bumper buttons to toggle through the
weapons and unnatural abilities you acquire is a pretty good innovation. The
jump button isn’t used as much as in other games of this type, so it’s placed
a bit out of the wheelhouse on the "Y" button. Of course, the triggers fire
the weapons. Now, I know this has happened in other games, but you can hack
the steampunk-esque devices and turn them to your advantage. The citizens of
Rapture have money and when you frag them, you can loot their bodies for items
and cash. The cash is used at the vending machines scattered around the city,
hacking these machines enables you to buy items you may not have otherwise
been able to purchase and makes items cheaper for purchase as well. The
hacking aspect of the game is actually a mini-game that involves you moving
pieces of pipe so that slowly (or fast) moving fluid will go from point "A" to
point "B". It’s pretty clever and depending on how difficult the hack is, the
fluid moves at different rates of speed. You can hack plenty of items too,
turrets, cameras, health stations, making them yours helps you and hurts your
enemies.
Bioshock’s real meat and potatoes
deals with a chemical injection called plasmids, plasmids are a creation of
Rapture and quite frankly it scares you because injecting them repeatedly
makes you wonder if you aren’t slowly mutating yourself into one of the
splicers. These plasmids are mysterious and ugly in their application;
however, they enable you to do some pretty fantastic things. Use the electric
plasmid and you can shock your enemies with the flick of a wrist and then
whack em’ with your pipe wrench. Use the fire plasmid and ignite that group of
splicers standing in the puddle of oil or unleash a swarm of bees from your
veins to attack your foes (really kind of sick). The point is, you can begin
to experiment on yourself with the injectable creations found in Rapture.
Injecting yourself looks pretty gross and I’m sure feels none too good as
well. Doing these experiments allows you to really get into the game as much
or as little as you want. Sure, you could play the game like a standard
shooter and pretty much blast your way through the game, but that really isn’t
embracing all of the nuances that the title has to offer. Coming up with new
and innovative ways to dispatch your foes is really a wide-open decision. And
with the sheer amount of weapons, upgrades, injectable powers, and
combinations of all, you could literally take out an enemy 15 different ways
in the same situations. You can even enrage your enemies so bad that they kill
one another. Or hotwire a flying turret to act as your bodyguard while you
roam the halls. The game is limited to your own imagination and you can play
it several times trying things so wildly different that it feels new and fresh
each time.
"Where’s the bat signal?"
The audio portion of the title is
also something to behold. When you communicate with other citizens via
shortwave radio, the crackling and starchy sound of the voice is so authentic
sounding you would swear they were really talking to you. Of course, it helps
that this is a perfect example of what good voice work sounds like. The city’s
founder and king of the loony’s is a man named Andrew Ryan, a man frustrated
by the constraints of conventional thinking he went off an made his utopia,
which is disintegrating much like his sanity. His honest-to-goodness paranoid
character sounds like he’s already past his breaking point and he’s holding it
all together by sheer will. An exceptional job of character development, and
of course, credit must go to a really unique plot that keeps you wondering
just what the dickens is happening. Other voices are also top notch, but it’s
not only the voices, it’s how they are projected. Sneaking around the medical
wing, you can hear the echoes of a demented surgeon barking out orders of a
botched surgery, so creepy, so good. The ambient noises also bring so much to
the game, the creaking of an unimaginable weight bearing down on the
structure, the skittering of splicers scavenging corpses that are lying
everywhere, heck, even the little creepy girls working in tandem with their
massive protectors, it’s so natural sounding and really fills out the game.
Those players with a big surround system can really become enveloped in the
sounds by really cranking it up.
While wandering the rooms and
hallways, you are indeed trying to accomplish a goal; granted it’s a goal that
changes on the fly and your decisions on how to handle some of the obstacles
also makes the game ripe for replaying. The folks at 2K made things their way
and it works. Instead of save stations, all you need to do is walk past a
vita-chamber and it steals a sample of your DNA. Then if you die, a clone of
yourself picks up where you left off. Meaning, if you are fighting a
particularly tough baddie, you may die a couple of times to defeat him, all
while he never replenishes health, since the entire fight and cloning are in
real time (this isn’t explained so much as it is implied). And when you fight
you will, like I said, use all sorts of supernatural, injectable abilities,
but don’t forget the Tommy guns, the shotguns and other modern weapons. Sure
it’s nice to freeze a bad guy and then shatter them with the wrench, but
sometime a head shot with a machine gun is what is best. But keep an eye on
all your stats; your health, your plasmid ability and ammo is essential for
survival. You find lots of first aid kits and syringes lying around or on a
dead body, but I remember turning to my brother-in-law about two hours into
the game and exclaiming "I bet I have missed a ton of stuff," and I was right.
Referring to the map helps, but more often then not, opening that desk or
looking around a dead-end corner will result in something found. Either way,
the game has so much to find I honestly think it’s impossible to see and
find it all in three attempts.
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Gameplay: 9.8
Smooth controls, a hint of
assistance with the aim, a combination of thinking and action, the game could
quite honestly become it’s own genre, the TPS, thinking-person shooter.
Graphics: 9.6
Second only to Gears of War, and a
close second at that. The intricacies of the machinations, the character
models, the really freaky-looking locations, blood scrawled on the wall,
bodies floating in the water, it is a freaky filled work of art. This is my
favorite 360 game, and I have a lot of 360 games.
Sound: 10
You simply will not find a game
with finer audio. From the murky and creepy background noises to the spot-on
voice work, there simply is no better game on any system in any genre that
sounds better then this.
Difficulty: Medium/Hard
You have your work cut out for you
if you play it on the hard setting, and even if you try it on the medium
setting. The game really forces you to think, and to think fast. Whether it’s
how do I stop these five lunatics from cutting me up and using my body for
their own use or hacking a security system so it will help me gain access to
another part of the level, the game throws curveballs at you left and right,
it’s fantastic.
Concept: 9.9
For a FPS, this one is pretty far
out there. I’m serious, I didn’t ruin any of the "holy cow, I can’t believe
that just happened" moments that you will experience. And I say experience,
because this game is an experience. Cool plot and original ideas are plentiful
here.
Overall: 9.8
I am really tripping out right now, I didn’t know what I was getting
into when I popped this into my 360. Folks, if you need another reason to buy
an Xbox 360, then consider this the best reason to do so. Easily the best game
I have played on any of the newest generation of systems. If this isn’t game
of the year, I will be shocked.
