I got a rather emotional in a discussion the other day where a fellow gamer argued that the FPS genre was dead.  He felt that there was no development in FPS games compared to the early pioneers, basically that a new FPS game is now the same old game with new graphics.  Bioshock is one of the reasons why I think he is wrong.

Coming from one of the most consistently innovative and exciting developers out there: Irrational Games (now 2K Boston), Bioshock is, on the face of it, a conventional shooter.  Compared to games like STALKER with its A-Life AI and open-ended structure, Bioshock's confined environments and set-pieces might look old fashioned and tired.  You might also consider the 5 or 6 distinct enemy types boring and a bit stingy.  With most shooters you'd be right, but Bioshock transcends all of these concerns by being the most compellingly immersive shooter since HL2.

“I chose Rapture!”

For starters, the undersea world of Rapture is breathtaking.  From the moment your plane crashes and you claw your way to an ocean surface coated in burning oil you will be amazed at the visuals and art direction.  The graphics engine is usually stunning, with great use of lighting, convincing textures and detailed environments (it's just a shame that the blood looks like thick gloss paint!).  For a game that's been set underwater, it's perhaps no surprise that the water has been simulated so well, the refraction of still pools is convincing enough, but the way it flows over surfaces and sprays from leaks is sometimes amazing.  In fact, because the water effects are so convincing, it's a disappointment when you realise you can't interact with it, well apart from a wonderful effect if you walk through cascading water and it drains down your eyeballs. 

The biggest question here is obviously which game version looks the best. On the console front the graphics are simply amazing; they really show what the 360 can do.  This puts quite a lot of games to shame with its great use of lighting and textures and spectacular water effects.  Some of the best water effects I have seen, they really set the mood of the game and help with its otherworld appearance. While the polygon count isn't earth shattering you won’t be noticing it as you will be too engrossed in what is happening. You can spend hours just wandering around looking at all the rich detail that the designers have put into the world, you really feel part of the city.

The best part? The PC version looks just as good, even in DX9 mode. There are virtually no differences between the two platforms, which is a nice change from the usually half-assed PC ports. All you GeForce 8800 owners ache to see what DX10 has in store for you? Not much unfortunately. The differences between DX9 and DX10 are very difficult to spot and are mostly limited to water that dynamically reacts to your movements and such. It does look better, but unless you are hunting for it you’ll be hard pressed to see any real improvement. That said, you better have a hefty rig ready for this game, as even in “old-gen” mode the game requires some serious horsepower. Surprisingly enough the 360 version not only runs at a steady 30fps, but you can actually unlock the framerate and play at a fairly constant 60fps.

It's not just the engine that makes your jaw drop though; so much attention has been paid to making a complete world that the illusion is hardly ever broken.  There's a huge variety in the parts of the city that you fight through, from the tawdry glitz of entertainment districts, through the grimy underbelly to vast industrial edifices.  Each district feels emotionally different, through clever use of lighting, pacing and musical cues.  In each case, the 'feel' of the level reflects the past and current events in that area.  You'll be alternately on edge, sombre, freaked out and keen to find out what's around the corner.  It's the little details like the convincing period artwork, home-made weaponry (grenades made out of food cans!), creaking of the structure and architecture that really make you feel like you're stranded in a believable world.

The coherent world is why the lack of 'enemy types' isn't such a big deal: the vast majority of your opposition is the human populace of Rapture.  This city was built with the purpose of furthering humanity through unfettered scientific progress, industry and arts.  The cream of society was brought together in a utopia where no government would interfere, and the population could express themselves.  It is never that easy.  Now Rapture is populated by tortured souls, each twisted by the events in the underwater city, pursuing their own ends or driven mad.  The evidence of this is everywhere: in the ramblings of unseen assailants, in the recorded diaries, painted on the walls.  It is this humanity (or lack of it in some cases) and personality that is one of Bioshock's strengths.  The chief protagonists are not aliens, demons or fantastical monsters, but people.  Flawed (and occasionally nuts), but people nonetheless.  There is no distinction made between right and wrong, in fact how you feel about the actions and philosophies of the characters you encounter will be coloured by your own point of view.  How often can you say that about a game?

You are manipulated by the game in a number of ways, some directly by getting you to do things, often unwillingly, or by giving you choices (you need some genetic material, it's held by a little girl, do you kill her to get it?).  One particularly notable example of this is a key character manipulating you into dancing a macabre ballet.  But with guns.  And blood.  This is where the 'old-fashioned' use of set-pieces is utterly justified.  Without the developers knowing where you are going, they can't script the jaw-dropping events and vistas you experience.  That doesn't mean it's a simplistic 'on-rails' corridor shooter though.  Where the Doom 3's of this world are content to push you through identikit corridors with baddies spawning in predictably scary locations, Bioshock's thrills are always unexpected, always different and executed with impeccable timing.  The sad thing is, the really jaw dropping stuff is exactly the stuff I can't write about so as not to give anything away!

Cor blimey would you Adam and Eve it

In the game everything revolves around Eve. Eve is what lets you use Plasmids, genetic programs which give abilities similar to what the X-Men use. Being able to set things on fire, telekinesis, you know – that kind of stuff.  The rippers (the guys you’ll be facing most of the time) can and usually do run away when on fire and try to find a body of water to put themselves out.  Pretty smart, but you can use another plasmid electrocute them while they are at it. To keep things interesting the various bad guys are susceptible to different plasmids and are sometimes virtually immune to some of them.

As the players body doesn’t have a natural amount of Eve in it, you have to sneak around searching for more. It gets used up rather quickly so it’s not possible to use the plasmids as the sole source of destruction.  To gain new plasmid powers you can find or buy them or even make them at certain points. To purchase a plasmid you need Adam. Adam is what makes the city of Rapture continue to exist, the blood that flows and keeps the heart of the economy beating. So where does this Adam come from? Ah this is where the game sneaks something on the unsuspecting. At the heart of this game is a touching and disturbing relationship between a Guardian figure and a little female child.  This father aka 'Big Daddy' protects one of the little girls as she goes around the underwater city of Rapture. The moral implications come into play because you need the Adam they collect for yourself if you are to survive and the only way to get it is via these little girls. The Big Daddy would die for his little charge in order to protect her and she loves her guardian who she affectionately calls 'Mr Bubbles'.

The choice must be made between saving them from their fate and killing them. That would be an easy choice on the face of it but saving them rather than killing them yields you less Adam which in turn makes acquiring new abilities harder. The game doesn’t show their deaths in graphic detail so there’s not going to be any manhunt 2 type backlash with this game, although usually most games don’t get away with the theme of killing children. But as Atlas (your friend in the game) explains, they aren’t really children anymore since they have been genetically altered to be almost indestructible and to be able to extract Adam from the dead.  I should mention that the moral dilemma comes into play after you can get past the Big Daddies, which can be quite a challenge as they are pretty tough and don’t mess around when protecting their little charges.

When speaking of weapons it should be noted that each (except for the wrench) use 3 different types of ammo.  Half the fun is finding the next weapon to use so I will skate over exactly which ones are findable.  Later on you even find upgrade machines which let you install various upgrades to your weapons, keeping even the weakest weapons fresh.  The various ammo types also add some strategy into the mix as you only get a low amount of the special ammo (anti-personnel, armour piercing, etc.).

Money is required for the various vending machines which contain ammo, health and extra eve. These machines are scattered around the sections of the city, but mirroring the capitalist nature of the underwater heaven, nothing in Rapture is free - everyone is expected to work to provide for themselves. You can (and should) however hack the vending machines to get things cheaper which certainly helps the bank balance. Vending machines aren’t the only devices that will get hacked, as turrets, cameras and security bots share a similar fate quite often.  Hacking starts a little mini game where the object is to guide liquid through a pipe system without it hitting anything dangerous or overflowing.  Basically a cut down version of a game called 'Pipemania' which is pretty old but reasonably fun for a while.  The hacking can be done automatically as it does get tiresome after a while, but this has a monetary cost attached. You can use one of the hacking tools to do it for free, but they are rather rare and hard to come by.  If you research the security measures it’s possible to get better at hacking them to the point that they are hacked automatically, which saves a lot of time and trouble.

Controlling the shenanigans

As we know the 360 joypad is pretty well designed for First Person Shooter type games and this game is no exception to that rule.  The right Trigger activates whatever weapon you have equipped, which you select via the right shoulder button.  The left trigger activates whichever plasmid you have selected and again the left shoulder button lets you select from a set of them.  The A button is the action button used for searching objects and anything else really, X uses a first aid kit to heal you, Y is jump, Holding down A will play the last found audio log.  B reloads your gun.  As usual the analog sticks are for moving and looking around, the D-pad is for selecting what type of ammo you want to use in your gun.

On the PC, things are standard fare as well. The more reliable controls bring some issues with them however.  Using the accuracy of the mouse and keyboard control method means that anything but the hard difficulty level is too easy for your average gamer (this does mean it is more forgiving to the new gamer – get your mum playing!).  Additionally, and most crucially, death has no sting!  If you die, you respawn in a handy machine, with some health intact.  This can mean that it is sometimes tactically appropriate to start a fight, and use the death/respawn routine to kill the enemy without using up your finite resources.  The game has also been dogged with technical issues (your field of view is distorted on widescreen screens, you can currently only install the game twice before it is locked forever, and the DX10 graphics knock 20fps from the framerate on ATI hardware).  But that's about it.  It is reassuring that, (armed with a finger that avoids the quicksave) the only major problems can be patched out.

Conclusion

This game has a story to tell and it is a story well worth exploring. Everything in the game gels together, so seemingly disparate gaming elements combine into a fluid whole.  This game will suck you in, you will start like we did at 8pm and then notice that the birds are tweeting outside and you have to get up in 3 hours for work.  There are some jaw-on-the-floor moments in the plot so the developers certainly know what they are doing in that respect. The game isn’t hugely long with a playtime of around 20 hours for a first go through, but there are multiple endings depending on choices you make so you get more replayability.  The game should be a new benchmark for how games involve a player and how to make it look like your world has real life inhabitants with their own goals and agendas. We would have liked to see the game a bit longer but perhaps that’s just us being greedy for more, as games of this quality rarely come along.  The infinite lives mentioned earlier in the review also shorten the lifespan of the game making it easier to finish which is both a help and a hindrance.

We could carry on writing this review for ever, such is the richness of this game, the sheer amount of stuff to see, the hacking of security systems, the touching interplay between Big Daddies and Little Sisters, the list just goes on.  No, instead imagine a game with the wit and believable characters of Half Life 2, the moral choices and weapon/skill pallet of Deus Ex and the unique and complete universe of STALKER.  Imagine a game that is greater than the sum of all those parts, and you have Bioshock!