BioShock Review
Aug 20, 2007
Roll over, Half-Life. BioShock is the best single-player shooter out there. It's one of those rare games that comes along every five or ten years, sucks you in, knocks your socks off, and haunts you for years after you've played it.
Granted, it's hard not to get carried away by the breathless enthusiasm you'll feel as and after you play BioShock. This is, after all, only a game. More specifically, it's a shooter built from the Unreal engine. It unfolds a mostly predetermined story, letting you play in a variety of combat sandboxes along the way, forcing you to make some tough choices as you go. Which powers do you want? Which weapons will you use? How will you get around that security camera? Do you choose the door on the right, or the door on the left? As far as the basics of game design, this isn't anything that hasn't been done before.
But what sets BioShock apart is how it flows from a story. There is virtually nothing about this game that doesn't feel like it grew from the narrative, which is the rise and mysterious fall of Andrew Ryan, a man who got fed up with the world and built his own undersea utopia. His ideas and the people who joined him are a constant part of the game. The technology he created, the aesthetic of his time, and the natural progression of his philosophy are BioShock's game bible.
The fallen city of Rapture, crumbling and leaking, is as grand and memorable a place as you'll ever go in a video game. You literally come crashing into this drowning Shangri-La, adorned with the trappings of the '40s and '50s: music, architecture, clothes, advertisements, transportation, dialogue, and even the weapons. Nearly every square inch of BioShock feels as if it's been lovingly crafted by a storyteller with a keen keen eye for production design. Everything feels like it was put there for a reason. There are almost no instances of something there because it would look cool. If you take the time to look -- and in a place such as this, how could you not take the time to look? -- you'll find a hundred vignettes, told through tableau, recordings, invisible narrators, or even written in blood.
The battles that punctuate your discoveries are a heady mix of fancy powers, weapons with personality, gorgeous locations, and thoroughly believable AI, all interacting with each other in new and surprising ways. A variety of "plasmids" (active powers) and "tonics" (passive powers) let you build your character without bothering with numbers or statistics. Even your guns can be customized. The settings are littered with important interactive bits and the enemies know how to use them. Every gunfight plays out according to what you do, and how you do it. These battles are your doing, and not the game designer's.
This is not a "reload when you die" game. You only really have to save when you're quitting for the day, which will most likely be far later than you intended. You can, however, save anywhere and you can adjust the difficulty level as you play. This is an eminently accessible game, built so as not to frustrate even the most casual player. Maps are always available, locations are believably labeled in the game, and a helpful arrow will often point the way. If that's not enough, there are hints available that spell out exactly where you have to go and what you have to do.
Not that BioShock is ever confusing. It's not even interested in puzzles. There's not a single "puzzle" in the entire game. There are a few four-digit keycodes to look out for (including the single best instance we've ever seen of this gimmick!), but BioShock is built to move, move, move as much as you want it to. You set the pace, not the game designer.
Unfortunately, the final hour of BioShock is its weakest. In terms of the story, the ending is great. But in terms of gameplay, it's entirely conventional and doesn't do justice to one of BioShock's coolest twists. There are also some curious interface oversights. It's impossible to get certain information about your character unless you're standing at the right dispenser, for instance. This is probably an attempt to streamline the gameplay, but it ends up muddying it instead.
The most salient fact about BioShock is that it's different. If it doesn't sell well, perhaps it's time to abandon hope and resign ourselves to the eternal recurrence of space dungeons and World War II. Games like BioShock are what we need. They are what we deserve. This is one of the best examples of where we should go. It's silly to argue whether games are art, which doesn't matter one whit, when you can simply point to BioShock and say: "Games are this."