In depth review for Bioshock.
After its initial release in August 2007, BioShock quickly established itself as one of the great games of all time. This one-time utopia was the brainchild of Andrew Ryan, a man who says things like, "It wasn't impossible to build Rapture at the bottom of the ocean. It was impossible to build it anywhere else." Via exploration and the occasional 1950s-style public service announcement, you learn that Rapture was built as a city where artists and scientists could flourish without censorship, and without what Ryan calls "petty morality." Scientists, without restrictions, fooled with genetic code. They developed something called plasmids, which alter a person's DNA. Think of it as plastic surgery for your double-helix. And like with plastic surgery, the citizens of Rapture began splicing their DNA to extremes, eventually turning themselves into genetic monsters. The city has since been overrun with these "splicers," creepy citizens who seem to have a penchant for wearing unsettling party masks and carrying firearms. The game opens with a plane crash. You survive. You swim to a nearby lighthouse. Inside the lighthouse, you take a submarine/elevator-type contraption to the bottom of the sea. There, you find a city called Rapture. You're guided through the game by the calming voice of Atlas, who communicates with you via a two way radio. Atlas speaks in an Irish accent, and asks you to help locate his wife and child. There are certainly moments in BioShock that echo the granddad of all first-person shooters. But those moments are far outnumbered by plenty of mad twists. You get your standard issue first person shooter arsenal, shotgun, machine gun, grenade launcher, etc, but you also get the chance to do a little plasmid splicing of your own. After only a few levels, you're able to send lightning shooting from the fingertips of your left hand, shoot flames, and pick up and toss items via telekinesis. In later levels, you'll be able to launch swarms of bees and even freeze enemies solid with ice. You'll spend most of the game getting into scrapes with splicers, but every now and then you'll have to square off with a Big Daddy, hulking beasts wearing what looks to be a diving suit straight out of a Jules Verne novel. A Big Daddy's job is to protect Little Sisters, zombie-like little girls who sap a substance called Adam from corpses scattered about Rapture. The Big Daddy and Little Sister won't bother you, as long as you don't bother them. But provoke either one of them -- which the game makes clear you absolutely need to do at a certain point -- and trust me, there is alot of hell to pay. My first Big Daddy fight, to put it mildly, did not go well. There was much running, much hiding and more than a little dying. I was attacked with a kind of viciousness unlike anything I had seen before. After limping my way through my first few Big Daddy battles, I got wise: I set traps for him, left a trail of landmines for him to follow, arranged turrets and attack bots to swarm him; and basically, very carefully, I learned how to defeat them. Taking down a Daddy always left me with a moral dilemma: What to do with the now-defenseless Little Sister? BioShock gave me two options: Rescue or Harvest. Rescue results in turning her back into a nice, normal, sweet little girl again, but getting only a small amount of Adam for your troubles. Harvest means getting much more Adam, but, that's right, killing the girl in the process. Guess which choice I made? Bioshock has a great gameplay system, with a good control system and easy to handle controls. The gameplay is smooth, realistic and much more confident that any Call Of Duty or Killzone game. The visuals in Bioshock are also superb, water effects are done nicely. It is really top notch stuff.
The Big Daddy battles function as non traditional boss battles in the game. Beyond that, whether the Big Daddy is angry and doing everything in his power to take you out, or, after having lost a Little Sister, lumbering about the level, looking lonely and bereft, these hulking creatures clearly are the spiritual heart and soul of BioShock. Varitity is the name of this game. Locations are stunning and pit hearth rohribbing, pulse pounding chases, fights and cut scenes at you. That's the ultimate magic trick at the core of BioShock, the thing that I never saw coming. No matter how hellish Rapture seems at times, with pipes bursting and water flooding in around you, and splicers and Big Daddies lurking at every turn, you can still clearly see what this place once was like -- what it must have looked like in its heyday, even in its current post-apocalyptic, blown-out form. You can see that it was once beautiful down at Rapture. Hell, it's still pretty damn beautiful down at Rapture. And, as nutty as Andrew Ryan seems, at the heart of the BioShock experience is a game that shines, in every form.
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Graphics: 5/5
Gameplay: 5/5
Characters: 5/5
Story: 5/5
Sound: 5/5
Length: 4/5
Replay Value: 4/5