A couple of reviews for your perusal. First up, Bioshock.
Prepare for an intriguing adventure into the deep. Bioshock opens in 1960 with you as a passenger on a plane, which crashes into the ocean. Nearby happens to be an entry point to a vast underwater city. Soon after entering you find a radio, and are contacted by Atlas, who informs you that you have entered the realm of Rapture, a utopia imagined by one Andrew Ryan. Like all supposed utopias, things have gone awry, and the majority of residents have become mentally unstable due to genetic modification and splicing, and the city itself has become somewhat dilapidated.
Amid the city's history is experimentation with genetic changes, and the discovery of ADAM and EVE which are substances that assist this process. Throughout the game you will find audio diaries from various citizens of Rapture, which fill you in on the development of ADAM and EVE, the history of Rapture, and even common citizens remarking on the upper echelon of Rapture - comments they certainly wouldn't make to their face. Andrew Ryan also contacts you via your radio, and let's you know he isn't too happy with your actions.
Atlas first tasks you with helping to find his family, whom he can't reach from his current position. Soon you encounter your first splicer, one of the citizens of Rapture who has been sent a little crazy. In fact, there are rarely any sane people you meet in Rapture, and most will attack you on sight. You get equipped with a wrench if you want to deal with splicers up close and personal, and collect other weapons through the game. These are mostly olden versions of first-person shooter standbys, but you can collect multiple ammo types for each one that are useful against different enemies. For example, a few of the ballistic weapons have anti-personnel bullets that are much more effective against splicers, and anti-armour for use against turrets and Big Daddies (more on those soon).
In addition to more conventional weapons, you are also introduced to Plasmids. These are genetic powers awarded to you, a few by pick-ups, but mostly through purchases (again, more on that soon). Electroshock is your first required plasmid, allowing you shock your enemies, and is used to momentarily disable turrets and cameras. Using your plasmids uses up your EVE, which you can collect while searching through Rapture. These aren't all direct attacks, and there are other useful abilities such as deploying target dummies, or enraging enemies so they attack each other. There are also a variety of Tonics you can collect, in three categories; physical, engineering and xxx. At the outset of the game, you have two available slots for plasmids and for each type of tonic, but you can unlock more as the game progresses. Tonics are permanent abilities, such as getting improvements to hacking, bonuses to your wrench wielding skills, or resistances to certain types of damage, and they don't use up any EVE.
While there is a decent amount of action in the game, it heavily favours exploration of the environments; there are plenty of rooms in Rapture that you will never need to visit, but you will feel compelled to do so. Many objects like storage crates, desks, fridges and corpses can be searched to uncover ammo, food/first aid kits, money, and a large variety of other items. Money is used to buy items at vending machines which are located throughout the game, and they do not always carry the same items.
There are security cameras in Rapture, and if they catch sight of you, they will send flying security bots after you. You can either wait until the alarm finishes, or run to a Bot Shutdown station to turn them off. Similarly, if a turret catches sight of you, it will begin firing at you. If you can evade the security cameras and get underneath them, or shock the turrets and approach them, they can be hacked and turned to your own uses, and will trigger from your enemies. Other items like vending machines can also be hacked to make items cheaper. When hacking an item, a grid of hidden tiles is displayed, which need to be turned face up to reveal pipe pieces. Liquid begins flowing from one pipe on the edge of the grid, and you will need to place pieces so that the flow can reach a pipe on the other side. It's a fun diversion, though some of the harder ones can be almost unfair. You can equip Tonics that assist you in hacking, and you can use Automatic Hack Tools if you have them to automatically pass those you don't want to attempt. Another mechanic of the game is to take photos of your enemies. Taking photos usually puts you in harms way, but if you take enough photos of a particular enemy type, you will be awarded a bonus for doing the research. Usually this is more damage to that particular type, but there are other bonuses as well.
There are a variety of splicers wandering around doing their own thing until they catch sight of you. Some will attempt to crush your skull with a lead pipe, while others will have firearms. Others have been further genetically modified, such as the Spider Splicer who crawls on the ceiling, and Houdini Splicers who fling fireballs at you, then disappear and reappear elsewhere. For the most part the enemies behave with some degree of intelligence. If you set them on fire, they often scream and run to the nearest patch of water to douse themselves... where you can then electroshock them for major damage. There were a few ignited enemies that continued to taunt me while they burned to death. There was also an occasion where I set a splicer on fire, who then ran past a Big Daddy I was not prepared for; as I was the original source of the fire, the Big Daddy attacked me when it would not have been logical to do so. These lapses of intelligence or logic are few and far between and don't break up the experience too much.
Big Daddies are the enemies that will take the most planning to deal with. Basically, these guys are tough, and are huge bulking behemoths that look like men dressed in diving equipment of the time. Luckily they are the only enemies that won't attack you on sight, and their sole duty is to protect the Little Sisters. Little Sisters look like haunted young girls, and they have been 'programmed' to extract ADAM from corpses. If you approach a Little Sister, the Big Daddy will become aggravated and warn you away. Once you attack, the Big Daddy will respond with force. Unarmed ones will charge you and smack you about with their drill-arms for massive damage, and these attacks are hard to avoid, while those with firearms will shoot you with powerful weapons from afar. They take a huge amount of damage, but you will need to defeat them to interact with the Little Sister.
Once you have taken out a Little Sisters protector, you will have a choice; save them, or harvest them. Killing them nets you more ADAM, but saving them curries favour with one of the still-sane citizens of Rapture, and can lead to other benefits, plus a difference to the game ending. ADAM is used at a 'Gatherers Garden', which is a vending machine for plasmids, tonics, and to unlock more slots. Early in the game it creates quite a conundrum, whether to unlock more slots so you have more abilities at your disposal, or to try out new ones. Plasmids and tonics can only be swapped when acquiring them, or at Gene Banks. It is annoying that you can't check which tonics you have equipped unless you go to a Gene Bank, but this is minor.
The controls are smooth, and while you will end up with a large range of weapons and plasmids at your disposal, holding a bumper pauses the action and brings up a radial menu, allowing you to quickly combo your weapons and plasmids. You can hold up to 9 EVE injections and first aid kits, as well as consuming edibles. This is supported by the vitachambers, which are like a checkpoint system. If you don't heal yourself in time and you die, you are revitalised at a vitachamber. Everything in the level stays persistant, including damage you have already done to enemies. Purists might complain that this makes the game easy, but it will reduce frustration. Players who do not like this system can still save the game anywhere, and reload if they die, so everyone is catered for. My personal experience was to use health kits any time I was low, but continued from a vitachamber if I did find myself forgetting to heal in the heat of battle.
The real star of the show is the environment itself. Rapture is fully realised, and feels like a place that might actually have existed. No two rooms feel the same, and the level design is superb. While you will usually have a specific task to perform at all times, there is plenty of room to explore and often more than one way to reach a certain destination. You will also travel through clear tubes that connect the major buildings, and the background shows the grand scale of Rapture. The distortion effect here as you look out at the ocean, and the way your vision blurs when walking through cascading water and when drinking too much alcohol in a short period, are all done convincingly. While you could point out that the water in the game is done extremely well, so is everything else.
If the stunning environments don't urge you to explore Rapture, then the story will. What happened to Rapture and it's citizens will slowly be uncovered as you learn from the recorded diaries, and you will often find these off the beaten path. You will also meet some fleshed out characters face to face that give you their personal history. These people are not your standard sort of crazy; they are just left of centre, with a deluded view of the world and an elevated sense of their own worth. Their words are often poetic, yet also dripping with a venomous condescending tone. The writers, directors and actors should all be commended for delivering such superb voice work. The sounds in Rapture are equally impressive, from the sounds of water flowing, to the effectiveness of the guns, the various plasmid sounds, and the unmistakable thuds of the footsteps of a nearby Big Daddy.
Bioshock can not be recommended enough to anyone who wants a strong story-driven first person shooter. It has multiple gameplay elements which all merge together seamlessly. From it's art direction, great use of sound, and great pacing, Biosock excels in every area, and is a must play game.
Final Score 9.5
And for dessert, PixelJunk Monsters.
PixelJunk Monsters is a tower defense game that gives your brain a workout as it lulls you with its sweet charm. For anyone who doesn't know what a tower defense game is, here is a breakdown of the basics of this strategy subgenre. Waves of enemies pour through the level, trying to reach a certain destination, and always follow the same path or paths. It is your job to build towers along the sides of those paths that will attack the enemies when they come into range. Each successfully defeated wave awards you with some form of currency so that you can build more towers or upgrade them so you have enough firepower for upcoming waves. Enemies may be weak or resistant to certain towers, so the strategy comes from building the right tower in the right place at the right time.
PixelJunk Monsters builds on the basics of the genre nicely. One original addition that really affects the way you play the game is that you are not some unearthly being watching the action from up high; instead you are in control of a native that moves around the level. Thus, if you want to build a tower, you need to run across the map to do so, and you can only build where there are trees. Enemies will follow their set path trying to reach your base. If they reach it, one of your babies is lost; lose them all and you will have to restart the map. When an enemy is destroyed, it drops currency, and you will also need to run around collecting it. Make sure you avoid touching the enemies though; if you do, you will drop some of your coin.
The early levels introduce you to 4 basic enemies that highlight the uses of your 3 basic towers. You are going to need the splash damage of cannons to take out the tightly packed little bugs because arrows will be too slow to take out the numbers they throw out you, and arrows will plink off the armoured fellows. While those cannons will do some splash damage to spiders as they race through, you will need accurate arrows to clean them up. And those arrows might be able to hit flying units, but you will need to use the much more efficient anti-air if you want to defeat an entire wave of the flying tops. Towers can be upgraded 4 times, and the levels take incrementally longer to upgrade. Upgrades are usually more damage, but can also include range increases as well depending on the tower. Towers earn points for each kill they make, and once their bar is full, they go to the next level. You can also stand in front of a tower and dance, which will also increase the bar. Thirdly, you can instantly upgrade a tower with gems.
How you use your gems, which are dropped occasionally by monsters, is all part of the strategy. While it costs a gem for early tower upgrades, a final one costs 3 gems. Gems are also how you unlock new towers. By running back to your base and pressing the action button, it brings up a menu of all the available towers, and how many gems it costs to unlock. Using your gems early to upgrade existing towers often means not unlocking some of the more powerful towers. You won't need these towers in the easy levels, but they will be required later. For example, you will need a Laser Tower when you face the flying enemies that are resistant to your anti-air guns.
Once a level starts, you won't have long to build your first few towers with your starting money before the first wave arrives. A bar at the bottom of the screen shows the progress of the waves. The left side of the bar has a picture of the current wave, another picture slides along the bar to show what and how long until the next wave begins, and a picture on the right side of the bar shows which wave will be following. Thus you will have advance notice of which waves are coming, and can build appropriate towers and dance in front of them to upgrade them in preparation. Each level is capped by a boss, but these usually aren't too threatening; if your defenses were sufficient to get you to the boss, they are probably enough to deal with it.
You never have to deal with reacting enemy AI in this game; each time you play a level, waves will happen in exactly the same way every time. Nevertheless, if you want the opportunity to play all the levels, this game is hard. There is plenty of trial and error as you attempt to figure out the exact numbers of each towers you need, how they need to be spaced to be most effective, and upgrading which towers will lead to more overall damage, and even which ones you need to sell so that you can build a more effective tower in its place. In later levels it does throw you some curveballs, such as after several waves from one direction, they start coming from another direction or multiple directions. Because you didn't know about it, there are mad scurries to build defenses in the correct places, and often lead to restarts so you can build with this knowledge in mind. The more you play each level, the further you get as you understand what you have to build ahead for.
The game begins on an overland map, and you progress through the easy levels, with some branches or side paths on the map. Some roadblocks are blocking certain areas of the map, even if you have completed the preceding map. Should you try to cross the roadblock, it will let you know how many rainbows are required to unlock it. If you complete a level perfectly - not allowing any enemies to get to your base - you earn a rainbow for that level. This is where the game earns its title of hard. Getting through most of the levels is not too tough once you know the waves, but getting a perfect is. In later levels it requires an extremely precise strategy, and it seems apparent there must be only one way to complete it with very little variation from a predetermined build path set down by the developers. Nevertheless, a solution exists, and it is up to you to solve the intricate puzzle.
Another quirk afforded by the fact that you control a character is the opportunity for 2 players. As best I can tell, the levels do not change and the game becomes somewhat easier, as two players can cover the ground better, and both can be upgrading towers. This is a game that deserves the moniker of co-op. Players will need to communicate, work on a plan together, and determine whether they want to save gems to unlock more towers or use them now for upgrades. If you aren't talking to each other, you are probably going to lose. Players each have their own cash, but gems are shared. This means you will also have to discuss who is doing the 'money run' after each wave, especially if you are saving for a more powerful tower; it's no good if both players have 300 gold each and you need a tower that costs 400. This is one of the most rewarding co-op experiences I've played.
The visuals and sounds are of the cutesy variety, and everything feels cohesive. Everything is 2D sprites and look like pastels, and the sound when you squish little bugs is satisfying indeed. The various sounds let you know which of your weapons is firing, and a distinct 'tink' lets you know when enemies are resistant to the weapon that just fired on them. When standing in front of a tower, your characters stops to do a little jig, to help speed up the levelling process. It's all very simple, but it does the job.
Realistically, a level of PixelJunk Monsters is a big maths puzzle that you start trying to solve before you know the whole question. If you don't mind the trial and error aspect, it is a great brain teaser as you try to account for all the known variables, especially with a friend. There is enough variety in the level designs and the wave sequences to keep you interested for the long haul. It's only drawback is that the rainbow system might lock out the less astute players from being able to reach the hard maps, though you can always look up video walkthroughs if you are really struggling with a level.
Final Score 8.5
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Bioshock was obviously great. I chucked the game on Easy last night for my second playthrough to get the different ending (saved the Little Sisters, what a poignant ending, it actually brought a tear to my eye), intending to play through using mainly the wrench. Wowsers, what a change in difficulty compared to Normal. I only had to use 1 first aid kid while whacking away at my first Big Daddy, and I think I lost about half a bar of health while clubbing Steinman, while he riddled me with bullets. If you haven't played this game yet and intend to, definitely don't play it on Easy (although I'm also wondering whether wrenching might actually be more effective in any difficulty).
Fave moment would have to be setting a splicer on fire, watching him take a few strides towards the nearest pool of water and land on a proximity mine left by a Big Daddy about an hour earlier, and soar offscreen. One of those "oh snap!" moments that had me sit up involuntarily and guffaw at the screen.