As I have stated, I’ve never played the System Shock series before so I was initially expecting Bioshock to be rather scary. After playing the demo I remember saying that this could be as scary as Condemned. I couldn’t have been more wrong. I can recall just two moments in Bioshock that actually made me move back in my chair. Bioshock has plenty of moments to scare the player but it never really comes. There’s one moment where you can open a series of lockers in search of supplies and suddenly a dead human falls out of it. Oh, wait a minute; I’ve seen that already done like 20 times!
Security cameras, bots, turrets, safes, vending machine can all be hacked and this is where once again Bioshock just fails to get anywhere. Hacking a machine in Bioshock results in a Pipe Mania style game appearing where you have to redirect the flow of water (don’t ask) to the other end of a erm pipe thing. Maybe this represents the flow of electricity within the device, I didn’t know Safe doors had electronic locks but that’s how it goes! The downer here is that if you wish to hack a device you can either do it the hard way, or you can simply just pay and bribe the machine with an X amount of credits and hey presto it’s hacked! What is the point? By the half way stage of the game, the player will have max credits as Jack’s wallet can hold only 500 credits so you end up just buying yourself hacking opportunities. Oh, and if you don’t have any money, then just use a Auto-Hack Tool that you can find or simply invent.
So let’s just recap here. Death has no meaning, money has no meaning, ammo/supplies are everywhere, hacking isn’t hard because you can ‘bribe’ the object to be hacked so who needs ADAM let alone Plasmids? Bioshock has 3 difficulty levels of Easy, Medium and Hard. I initially played through on Medium but found that a little too easy. I do admit that I found Bioshock rather difficult at one point because I somehow led an angry Big Daddy to the very Vita-Chamber that I was respawning in. So the moment I stepped out, he’d hit me and I would die. It took me 20 minutes to wrench him to death as I had used up all my money/ammo trying to kill him since I was trapped.
As if this slew of in-game annoyances wasn’t enough dead bodies should stay DEAD i.e. not move! Corpses seem to begin moving erratically on the floor half the time and it can be quite unsettling to see the foot of a dead female trembling from side to side as you pass her by. On another occasion a dead Big Daddy had died and bent over as he was on his last legs, except his right hand was shaking horribly. It just ruins a very polished game. Lastly (yes lastly) the Camera is the most pointless feature ever. At some point in the game you’ll have to find and equip the camera, which turns out to be almost as important as your offensive weapon. You’re required to take snaps of various enemies so you can somehow learn about their weaknesses and gain bonuses for attacking that class of enemy. Can someone explain how I can learn to kill a big daddy a lot faster by taking a photo of its arse?
If it sounds like I am slating the game here, then don’t get me wrong. I love Bioshock and hugely enjoyed playing through one of the most stunningly designed worlds I have ever seen in a game. You don’t begin to see its flaws until you play it a second time round. A lot of reviews have given this title top marks and as a result it is a strong contender for Game of The Year according to many gamers. I just think that the gameplay isn’t as deep as it could be.
Once again Bioshock is cited as an FPS/RPG. Now I see the FPS side of things very clearly but RPG? Oblivion is an RPG as I can make key choices and I actually have one of those Inventory things. I mean, Jack can pick up thousands of misc supplies and store them in his infinite capacity pockets, yet he can’t store food that you can pick up for later consumption. Instead it gets consumed the moment you pick it up. Another poorly implemented feature if you ask me.
On the whole, Bioshock is very enjoyable but the replay factor isn’t as high as it really should be. I am currently going through it a second time now for the good ending and I’m feeling rather bored…