Tuesday 5 January 2010

Flashback Review: BioShock

Bioshock released way back in August 2007, selling a whopping 3 million copies as of July 2009 (According to notorious Take-Two sex symbol Strauss Zelnick anyway). With Bioshock 2 a mere month away from public release we’re here to take you back through time and reminisce on memories past. Hit the jump to see the reason that you’ll be picking up a copy of the sequel on the 9th.

If you haven’t played the demo already (which you probably have considering it became the fist demo on the Xbox Live marketplace to reach one million downloads) then you’re probably wondering what all the fuss is about. The demo features the first five or so minutes of the game. It’s one of the most incredible video game introductions. Set in 1960, Jack (the character you will play as) is a passenger on a plane that crashes in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. After swimming to the surface you will see a lighthouse. Why would someone put a lighthouse in the middle of the ocean you ask? Well, that’s one of the questions that will keep you playing.

To explain a few things about the crazy city of Rapture: Andrew Ryan created Rapture as a place where there would be no political, economic and religious authority, essentially a place with no laws or restrictions. Everyone in Rapture wants ADAM, a chemical that can rewrite human genetics, and give incredible powers to the user. Little girls called ‘little sisters’ [or as our Editor Tom likes to refer to them as: "Potential Victims"] are capable of extracting ADAM from dead people; therefore they hold a lot of ADAM. However, Little sisters are protected by Big Daddies, the hardest enemies to kill in the game.

The introduction to the city of Rapture is almost like a safari; you are taken down to the bottom of the ocean in a bathysphere and shown the city of Rapture. It looks incredible. The visuals in the game are stunning, as is the sheer scale of Rapture, you will feel compelled to explore every corner of the city. Rapture can be very unsettling and scary at times, but this all adds to the atmosphere.

Strictly speaking, BioShock’s a first person shooter, but guns aren’t your only weapon in this game. The first weapon you’ll get is a wrench; this will be your melee weapon for the duration of the game. Shortly after you’ll get a pistol and then a machine gun. Later on in the game you get more powerful weapons, all of which can be upgraded too with more firepower/range etc. So, aside from standard weapons, you can also use plasmids which by far the best thing about the combat in the game. The first plasmid you get is the ‘Electro Bolt’, where you can fire a jolt of electricity to electrocute an opponent. At first you have a limited number of plasmid slots but with more ADAM you can unlock more slots and equip more plasmids. There are a lot of plasmids, all with different advantages; my personal favourites have to be ‘Incinerate!’ ‘Telekinesis’, ‘Hypnotize Big Daddy’ and one you may have seen in the trailer, ‘Insect Swarm’. The plasmids that you wish to use will depend on your style of gameplay, but there are plenty to choose from! You can also change what plasmids you have equipped at gene banks to adapt to the different situations you’ll experience.

The main enemies in the game that you will face are Splicers, there are many different types of Splicers, and they are people that have become dependant on ADAM due to their abuse of the substance. As the game progresses, these Splicers become harder to defeat. You will also want to kill, or attempt to kill, Big Daddies to get ADAM from Little Sisters. Again these get harder as the game goes on but your plasmids and weapons also get more powerful, so with a good combination of plasmids and weapons these Big Daddies won’t cause you too much trouble. After you’ve killed a Big Daddy BioShock forces the player to make a very strong moral choice with the Little Sisters. You can either harvest or rescue them. Harvesting gives you the most amount of ADAM but kills the Little Sister. Rescuing them gives you less ADAM but but the Little Sister gets to live.

One thing that makes BioShock such a good game is its originality; it’s a game like no other in so many senses. Firstly, it is strictly classed at a first person shooter, but it does feature elements of role-playing and survival. BioShock takes you on an adventure like no other with plot twist after plot turn; it has the strongest narrative that I have ever experienced in a game.

The dystopian back-story to how Rapture was made and developed can be discovered through audio diaries, which you can collect. They also give background to pretty much everything that has happened in Rapture in the past. There are 122 to find in total and collecting them all won’t just give you an Xbox Achievement, but also a huge understanding of Rapture and how perfectly this game has been put together.

There are few complaints about this game if I were really nitpicking; the game doesn’t really give the opportunity to explore Rapture as much as I would like it to. Sure you can explore Rapture but you’re not really encouraged to because the gameplay is quite linear, and your objectives and direction are pointed out by an arrow at the top of the screen. Another problem is that there’s no penalty for dying, if you die fighting an enemy, you respawn in a Vita-Chamber and your enemy will be in the same condition they were in when you died. However 2K rectified this by releasing free downloadable content for the game that adds an option to disable Vita-Chambers (along with a few new plasmids as well).

Now those are just small setbacks and at the end of the day BioShock is just an over-whelmingly fun game to play. 2k will actually make you feel like you are immersed in Rapture, everyone that plays BioShock will have a different gaming experience. Would you kindly go and buy a copy of this already, before the Sequel comes out next month!

95%

2 comments:

Chris Horrie said...

good blog generally but not much HCJ reading evident. Can you please add a link to the winchester journalism coursesite - http://journalism.winchester.ac.uk - because that really does help.

Paul Carrett said...

Thankyou Chris.
Sorry that there is not HCJ posts, i did start writing up notes in a word document and so will finish writing them and upload them today.
Will add that link now too!