BioShock Review (X360)

Enemies

The final piece to the gameplay puzzle is the enemies. All of the enemies are the former inhabitants of Rapture which have been mutated and corrupted by the Plasmids. They are known as Splicers now, and there are several different types. Some can crawl around on the ceilings, others use guns, and others can teleport and throw fireballs. Recognizing what you are dealing with and taking them out as quickly and efficiently as possible is important.

The Splicers don’t really pose that much of a threat unless there are a lot of them, so your main foes in the game are the hulking behemoths known as Big Daddies. The job of a Big Daddy is to protect a little girl known as a Little Sister as they scour the city in search of a precious commodity known as Adam that they collect from the dead bodies scattered around. If you leave them alone, Big Daddies won’t attack you, but threaten a Little Sister and you are in for a fight. A main aspect of the story is deciding whether to kill or save these Little Sisters but, of course, to do that you have to get through their Big Daddy first, which is easier said than done. They are basically bullet sponges, and it takes everything you’ve got to take one down. There aren’t any real boss fights in BioShock until the end, but you get to fight 2-3 Big Daddies on each level, which sort of makes up for it. A nice touch is that when you take care of all of the Little Sisters on each level, Big Daddies will still wander around, and you can use special Plasmids to make them fight on your side. Very cool.

Why It All Works

All of these various aspects of the gameplay as well as the storytelling come together to create a game that is simply amazing. Everything has been created to immerse you into the experience and not let you go, and around pretty much every corner there is something that makes you go “Wow”. From the architecture and overall artistic style, to the 50’s era music that plays on scratchy record players and broken jukeboxes, to the Splicers that are still human, but too crazy or desperate to survive to really care to do anything other than attack, to the other survivors that are just flat out insane, to the overall story – everything here draws you into the game world and makes you think. Nothing is what it seems and there is solid reasoning for even the most horrible things that are happening. It is a world of great horror, but mostly of great sadness. Even the Big Daddies, which are your biggest threat, it is actually a sad moment when they die. Or when you hypnotize one into fighting for you, you become attached to them and care about them. I can’t think of another game that produces such a range of emotions in the player, and that is where BioShock really succeeds. It makes you care about what is going on, and it makes you see things in shades of gray rather than black and white, so it isn’t just all “Aargh! I hate these freaks and want to kill them,” it is more like “I pity these people and want to help them.”

Graphics and Sound

The graphics and sound are what will really hook you initially, and the presentation overall is just excellent. The design of the levels and enemies is just amazing, and the special effects are incredibly well done. An interesting menu option is that you can choose to “Maximize Framerate”, which turns the V-Sync off. V-Sync is a smoothing tool that controls how the image is drawn on your TV. With it on, everything looks nice and smooth, but with it off the image will look like it is tearing, particularly when looking rapidly up and down. In BioShock, turning it off definitely does give a dramatic boost to the framerate, but the tearing is rather distracting and only serves to draw you out of the experience when the whole point of the game is to immerse you. So, I’d suggest sacrificing framerate in exchange for more immersion by turning leaving the maximize framerate option off. It isn’t as if the framerate ever bogs down anyway.

The sound is also very noteworthy. The voice acting is just about perfect, which really adds a lot to the story. Also, the music, which plays only in certain rooms when there is a source in the environment rather than just playing on top of everything like in most games, is really great not only for how it is used but for the songs that were chosen. It is eerie to enter a city so full of horror, and yet hear such happy music. The sound effects, particularly for the Big Daddies, are also just spectacular.

Bottom Line

Overall, BioShock is one of the best games ever made. It is easily the best game I have had the privilege of covering in the three years I have been covering the Xbox and Xbox 360, which really says something because there have been a lot of truly excellent games for both systems. Every single aspect of the game is incredibly polished to a level that few other games can match. The story keeps you moving forward, but you are also constantly rewarded with new weapons and items and areas to explore which makes for a very addictive and satisfying experience overall. The game takes about 12-15 hours to play through your first time, even if you are very thorough, but since there are some different choices you can make, and so many different ways to approach each situation, it is well worth playing through multiple times. The lack of multiplayer, or even better co-op, is somewhat of a letdown, but telling the story and immersing you into the game world is the focus here, so the lack of multiplayer isn’t that big of a deal. The key here is the story and the varied gameplay, and not many games can put the whole package together better than BioShock. I highly recommend it for a purchase.