Bioshock: a shockingly good FPS/RPG in the same vein as System Shock 2. (Bioshock (PC))

Member Name: The Duke

Product:	Bioshock (PC)
Date:	06/01/08 (138 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: FPS/RPG hybrid with plenty of depth and a great story.

Disadvantages: Vitachambers can reduce gameplay time. Final boss too easy.

After surviving a plane crash somewhere in the middle of the ocean in the very early 1960s, you seem to stumble across a rather splendid looking underground city, called Rapture. A bathysphere takes you deep underwater to the city where you suddenly realise that something is terribly wrong.

A man called 'Atlas' offers to be your guide via radio if you'll do him a favour and save his family, though as you step out of the bathysphere to see Rapture's amazing art-deco architecture in ruins and hear creepy noises in the distance, you start to have second thoughts. Still, you have to find a way to get home somehow and no-one else is going to help you!

While most people, even the developers on the game's box, are classifying Bioshock as a First Person Shooter (FPS), I personally think it owes more to games such as System Shock (1 and 2) and Deus Ex. Even with the first person view point, the game is not as fast-paced as traditional first person shooters and there is more emphasis on exploring and "powering up" as with traditional role-playing games.

What I really enjoyed, and is mirrored from other games mentioned above, is the atmosphere that's generated by the game using methods that are extremely similar to the excellent System Shock 2. Tension is racked up by your interactions with Atlas as you continue towards your goal of saving his family, plus audio recordings are littered around Rapture, that give you an idea of what exactly went wrong with the undersea utopia. Atmosphere and how much you believe in the game world can make the difference between my merely enjoying a game and really getting engrossed in the action.

With Bioshock, there are four main resources that you need to further your quest and these are introduced in a novel way. Two resources, ammunition for weapons and cash for spending at various vending machines, are the obvious ones. The other two, Adam and Eve take the game from the real world into the fantasy world. Adam is a biological agent that enables you to "install" various offensive and defensive attributes (called plasmids) like throwing lightning bolts or fireballs and Eve is the stuff that powers it.

So rather than just shoot your way through the game, there's lots of stuff you can do. Some you're forced in to (there is a limited supply of Adam, so you have to do a few tasks to get it) and others, such as hacking into vending machines is done purely to gain a small bonus. There's a bit of a strategic element in that you're limited to a finite number of plasmid slots (maximum of six), so carefully choosing your plasmids, at least in the early parts of the game, is advised. In one level, for example, you're required to search an area for, I think, a key but the entrance to the area is blocked by a huge piece of ice which requires the fireball plasmid to melt it. Other methods of clearing the ice, such as explosives, didn't seem to work. You can change your plasmids at various stations around Rapture though.

Graphically, the game was excellent. The art-deco world was very imaginative, especially in its ruined state and things trundled along nicely on my PC with top detail levels though admittedly, my PC specs are quite high. As you might guess, because the games takes place in an underwater city, most of the gameplay areas are enclosed, dark places filled with artificial light so it can seem a little samey in places, but unlike the original Halo, for example, this never becomes a problem.

Aurally, the game is up to scratch as you might expect with an A-list title such as Bioshock. The voice acting is great and the sound effects are superb with great attention to detail. Reloading the machine gun, for example, sounds clunky and you can hear the unlubricated metal pieces rub against each other. It's impossible not to mention the music too, which can be extremely eerie, despite being well-known tunes such as Bobby Darin's "Beyond the Sea". Placing such songs in this setting really helps with the atmosphere, though often they're used as misdirection and a jolly sounding song can be heard before something bad or scary happens.

Bioshock is not without flaws, though. While I found the game challenging enough on the middle setting, the final boss battle was just far too easy for me and I had it beat within a few minutes and on my third attempt which I found unsatisfying to a certain extent. There's also the somewhat pointless addition to gameplay of the 'Vitachambers' where you'll be transported if you die. These are liberally sprinkled around Rapture and bring you back to life with a bit of health and, importantly, all of your possessions. Everything else in the game remains as it was, so if you died battling an enemy, you simply trot round to where you were engaged in combat and start where you left off. In most cases, your enemy will not have run off to use the health machines and you can wear him down until he's dead. If you die, you go back to the Vitachamber, return to the scrap and continue on. This really reduces the game time and is unnecessary in a game when you can save whenever you choose.

Despite that, I still though I got value for money from the game (at £25 from Amazon at time of writing) and there is a certain amount of replay value too because of the higher difficulty rating and different ways to achieve your goals (mainly in terms of how you fight your fights... do you go in guns blazing or tempt people out to ambush them?) as well as different areas of the city to explore that are off the quest track.

I really enjoyed Bioshock. The slightly slower pace than other FPSs made a welcome change and provided a different challenge. It's a superb game, though I'd hardly say it was ground-breaking. I'd almost go so far as to say that it's System Shock 2 with a different story and brought up to speed on a technical level in the graphics and sound departments, just as Dungeon Keeper was reborn as Evil Genius, but when the core game is that good, this is not a bad thing! It's evolution than revolution though.

Bioshock's minimum specs:

CPU: 2.4 GHz single core processor or better
Memory: 1 GB or greater
Graphics card: GeForce 6600/ATI X1300 or better
Direct X 9.0c sound card
Internet connection for game activation

My system specs (where different from minimum):

CPU: Core 2 Duo 3 GHZ
Memory: 2GB
Graphics Card: GeForce 8800GT

Summary: An FPS/RPG hybrid akin to System Shock 2 with updated grapgics and sound.