Game Review: Bioshock

I recently played through the original Bioshock for the first time (yeah, I’m way behind on the times), so I thought I’d try and write up my thoughts on the matter. After I’d finished playing, I found myself thinking something along the lines of “pretty good, but it’s no Half Life 2,” Half Life 2 being the game that I essentially use as a quality benchmark for all games. The next day, while slaving mindlessly away at work, I found myself wondering exactly why I felt this way. After all, both games are First Person Shooters, meaning the vast majority of the time is spent using bullets to try and make enemies stop being alive. Naturally, this should mean that whichever game deals with the shooting best should be the better game. And at first glance, it would seem that Bioshock should win this contest by a landslide.
Half Life 2 has the Gravity Gun, and the usual assortment of typical shooter armaments. Bioshock has a wide variety of weaponry, each with not one but 3 types of alternative fire, and doesn’t stick to just conventional weaponry. The grenade launcher, chemical thrower, and crossbow are all notably absent from the “standard” 1st Person Shooter selection of weaponry, though it can’t really get too much credit for the crossbow since Half Life did it first. In addition to guns, Bioshock also has a wide selection of what are essentially magic spells, all of which do something other than simply make people dead. With all of these unique, innovative abilities, Bioshock seems like it should pull easily ahead of Half Life 2 in quality. So I’m going to try and figure out exactly why I found Bioshock lacking. The first thing I noticed was that things that make Half Life 2 so great and Bioshock less great are certainly not the sort of things you’d ever see mentioned on the back of the box. I’ve certainly never seen a game that advertises itself as having Great Pacing, Less Irritation, and Less Monotony!

Pacing:
It’s almost a misnomer to call Half Life 2 a First Person Shooter. It’s certainly 1st Person, and you do a lot of Shooting, but that’s hardly what Half Life 2 is all about. Just as a quick example, in the original Half Life 2, you start out weaponless, exploring an immersive, story driven area, are quickly thrown into an extended chase sequence, must solve puzzles, pilot a boat while being chased by a helicopter, shoot down said helicopter, more story, navigate a zombie infested area killing them with clever traps and improvised weapons, explore a wide, varied area with a vehicle you can get in and out of at will, lead an army of unlimited monsters into a heavily guarded prison, solve more puzzles, lead squads of not-unlimited soldiers through a social revolution, solve puzzles, then lose all of your weapons except for a supercharged, ultra-powerful Gravity Gun, then mow down hordes of enemies while solving puzzles. So, in other words, Half Life 2 is an extremely varied gaming experience, with each level having numerous changes in gameplay to ensure you never get bored.
In Bioshock, you kill people. Then you kill more people, find new and interesting ways to kill more people, then you kill some more people then you kill the cover art of Atlas Shrugged. This is probably the biggest problem with Bioshock. It doesn’t matter how much fun any one given action is, if you repeat it over and over for hours it will eventually lose it charm. Now, the developers were obviously aware of this problem, taking care to develop a wide variety of methods for killing people to mix up the combat and making sure to throw in a lot of (optional) hacking into the mix, but this is let down by some other flaws. After awhile, I noticed that I was having the most fun whenever I wasn’t killing people, and was able to just explore the area and take in all of the wonderful attention-to-detail and level design.

Enemy Variance:



While Bioshock definitely gets a passing grade for making sure they’re weapons are varied, they failed spectacularly with the enemies. In Bioshock, there are supposedly 4 or 5 types of enemies, but I only noticed 2: Splicers and Big Daddies. Now, I’m well aware that the Splicers can have a differing variety of equipment and abilities, but the problem is that they all look roughly the same. 90% of the time, I’d kill every Splicer in the room and only learn what kind of Splicer they were from the little text-display while I looted they’re bodies. Not only that, but the game seemed somehow reluctant to throw the rarer sort of enemies at me. I’d often go for more than an hour or so before I ran into another Houdini Splicer or Nitro Splicer, which are by far the most interesting to fight. Also, one should try not to make enemies different for no reason. Sure, the Spider Splicers can run around on the walls and ceilings and do crazy acrobatics, but in reality this simply meant they made themselves incredibly easy targets while they spent 5 seconds straight doing slow cartwheels while I poured entire clips of machine gun ammo into they’re stupid ballerina faces.
To contrast, Half Life 2 also has a very limited amount of enemies, which is certainly one of it’s weaknesses, but they are much more interesting than Bioshock’s binary enemy selection. Half Life 2 doesn’t just have multiple enemies, it has multiple factions, meaning you can go for an hour or so just facing one type of enemy and then switch to an entirely different type of enemy, which comes with an entirely different kind of gameplay. And most importantly, you can pit these factions against each other and just watch while they waste they’re resources fighting each other. I think three-way combat is one of the absolute most fun things you can have in a 1st Person Shooter, and Bioshock for the most part steers away from this. Sure, you occasionally find Splicers trying to kill a Big Daddy, but unless you decide to get involved the final outcome of such a fight is already decided. What’s worse is that Bioshock’s story, with Ryan vs. Fontaine and Tenenbaum on the sidelines, makes such a multi-sided conflict not only possible but likely.

Immersion/Believability:
I’m not really sure how to title this so I’ll give you an example to show you what I mean.
In Fallout 3, there’s this little segment that pops up whenever you use the game’s auto-attacking V.A.T.S. System that suddenly throws the game into slow motion, switches to a dramatic camera angle, and zooms in as you fire. It’s pretty cool (although it does get repetitive), but the problem arises when you fail to kill whatever your shooting. When the game zooms in and slows down to show me fire a hi-powered assault shotgun at point blank into someone’s face three times, only to have the keep on running and shooting, it makes me do a double take. Guns are pretty deadly, lethal things, and any game that decides to treat them like slingshots quickly loses immersion factor. I eventually found the only way to have fun with Fallout 3 was to max out my gun skill, keep my hp low, and ramp the difficulty up to the top. This made it so that every enemy died in one or two satisfying shots, but still did enough damage to keep the game challenging.
In Half Life 2, the game is rarely “hard.” After all, killing you requires you to submit to a flow-breaking, irritating loading screen, so the best way to keep a game fun is to avoid killing you while constantly making it feel as if you might die, and Half Life 2 does this pretty well. The enemies can do seriously large amounts of damage, but they still die as fast as you’d expect when you pump two barrels of buckshot into them at point blank. It’s a very good balance.
Bioshock, sadly, get’s the worst of both worlds.
The game starts out ridiculously easy, with most enemies dying from a single bullet to the toe. Quite often in the early game, I’d be prowling some dingy ruined room looking for glowy bits when suddenly a gibbering Splicer would jump out like one of those guys in a Halloween haunted house. I’d usually be so surprised that I’d instinctively squeeze the trigger button… and the enemy would drop dead before I’d even realized what it was. This even happened when I was faced with multiple enemies. I remember when I first picked up the shotgun and 4 Splicers ran into the room, I accidentally killed them all with the machinegun before I could remember how to switch to my new shotgun. And of course, if the enemies do manage to hit you (which they seem kind of reluctant to do, maybe they’re all squeamish or something) it barely fazes you and you can just scarf down one of the nearly unlimited Health Packs your lugging around.
“Okay, then.” says Bioshock. “You think my enemies are too easy? Well how about if I take the exact same enemies and occasionally give one of them around 9001 HP so that it can take an entire 40 Round magazine of machine gun bullets to the face without dying. That’ll learn ya. And for good measure, I’ll just make EVERY enemy for the last half of the game like that.”
Well, no, see this doesn’t really help. For one thing, it doesn’t actually make the game any harder. I killed these ridiculous bullet-proof psychopaths just as easily as I did the little hemophilic morons at the beginning of the game- it just took longer. In addition, it had the probably unintended effect of making every Plasmid-the game’s coolest and most notable feature- completely useless. Sure, it’s cool to be able to snap your fingers and set a guy on fire, but it sort of loses it’s charm once you realize you can kill him quicker by pelting him to death with stuffed animals. See, the game’s Plasmids can to a lot of cool stuff, but all of them boil down to Rpg Status Effects of some sort, meaning you still have to switch over to your gun if you actually want them dead. After awhile I just cut out the middle man and started using nothing but the machinegun.
That’s all for now, I’ve already written so much no one’s ever likely to actually read all this. I have some suggestions for how Bioshock could have been a much better game, but I’ll save those for a different post. Oh, and I’d like to make the disclaimer that Bioshock is by no means a bad game. It’s a good game, quite fun, atmospheric, and engaging and all that stuff. It’s just disappointing in that it was very close to becoming a Great game, but ended up bogged down by so many little problems along the way.