steve kwan user experience designer

Review: BioShock

(August 24th, 2007 - 2:24PM)

(3.5 / 5 stars)

One sentence summary: Succeeds as art, but fails as a shooter.

Things I liked about BioShock:

• The environment.

  The underwater city of Rapture, and particularly the water effects, are positively stunning.

  Although the environments are beautiful, the visual effects are a bit lacking. I've been playing Lost Planet recently, and that game blows BioShock away in terms of visuals. However, that doesn't detract from BioShock's brilliant art design.

• The premise.

  The game takes place inside Rapture, an underwater city. It was built by objectivists looking to create a pinnacle of human perfection, and went horribly wrong. I like games that propose an interesting story, and BioShock's is intriguing.

• The ambient sound.

  The ambient noises, such as the flowing of water and whispering in the background, create great atmosphere.

• The voice acting.

  The dialogue is incredibly well written and spoken. Even the dialogue from the Splicers, your recurring enemies, is rarely repeated.

• The Big Daddies.

  Big Daddies, big lumbering freaks in scuba suits, are the staple enemies in BioShock. They're brilliantly conceived, gorgeously rendered, and fun to fight. Every game should have an enemy like the Big Daddies.

• The tapes.

  The story of Rapture is told by taped recordings. This mechanic worked in Doom 3, and it works here.

Things I disliked about BioShock:

• Installation issues.

  I've taken off a half star from my rating because of BioShock's installation issues alone. A quick Google will reveal all sorts of technical problems with BioShock.

  I bought BioShock on Steam. The first time I tried installing, it would bring up a black screen and go no further. I reinstalled and started getting an invalid key error. After consulting the forums I was able to get it working.

  Once you get the game going, it's a pretty seamless experience and doesn't seem to crash.

• Uninteresting combat.

  The gunfights are incredibly uninteresting. BioShock's supporters will defend it by saying that this game is about art and story, not about shooting. There may be some truth to that, but if I'm expected to spend 20 hours of my life playing a first-person game with guns, I'm going to expect the gunfights to be fun.

  Just because your game is artistic and story-driven doesn't mean the gunfights have to be boring. Half-Life 2 created a fantastic environment, had a great story, and the combat was still great.

• It's impossible to die.

  Much like Prey, in BioShock it's impossible to die. If you do run out of health, you'll respawn nearby with all your items. Any enemies that you've injured, however, remain injured.

  Once you get your head around this, it greatly changes the way you play the game. The developers of BioShock tout the game's openness and variety, and brag that there are many different ways to defeat an enemy. That may be true, but the most effective technique against hard enemies is running headlong into them, with total disregard for your health. Why should I bother setting up elaborate in-game traps to defeat my enemies when I can just wear them down by respawning every time they kill me?

  I know what the developers are trying to achieve. They're acknowledging that death in video games isn't really death, because you can always reload your last save point. So they're just trying to simplify the game and prevent load times by making it impossible to die. I appreciate the effort, but removing any threat of death takes any challenge out of the game and makes most of the cool combat strategies pointless.

• Widescreen problems.

  BioShock has a widely known widescreen limitation. Instead of rendering a true widescreen display, the game renders a 4:3 image and clips it to fit a widescreen display. This results in a claustrophobic close-up view.

• Plasmids.

  The whole Plasmid system, BioShock's equivalent of magic, is a disappointment. The developers have said that Plasmids provide many different methods to solve the same problem, but in reality these "methods" are repetitive.

  It reminds me a bit of Deus Ex. That game was touted as being totally open, with many different ways to solve the same problem. However, in reality, there were a few fixed routes you could take (head on combat, crawl through a pipe, hack a computer). Rather than being truly open, there were a variety of fixed routes to choose from.

  BioShock has the same problem. There are a handful of different tactics you can use - for example, electrocute a guy when he's standing in water - but all of these tactics feel programmed, and get repetitive.

  The only FPS I've played that felt truly open was FarCry. It felt that way because the developers didn't program a bunch of creative "options" for beating your enemies. Instead, they gave you some basic weapons, and generated a huge map for you to play in. It was up to you to find a way past your enemies. This, I think, is the right approach for openness.

• The stupid hacking minigame.

  Throughout the game, you can hack turrets, vending machines, and other electronics. First, let's put aside the problem of hacking in a game that takes place in the 1960s. The real problem is that the way you hack is stupid.

  When you try to hack a turret, the gameplay is paused while you play a little minigame of Pipe Dream. That's right: you have to set up a series of tubes so that water can flow through them. That's how you hack a mechanical turret in BioShock.

  In addition to breaking the action by pulling you out of the game (one of the FPS problems I mentioned in my 10 suggestions for making a first-person shooter), Pipe Dream is a totally inappropriate way to hack a system. It's entirely lame and I'm surprised that other reviewers weren't bothered by it.