Bioshock « Walking Amongst Dark Shadows

Video/Audio

Bioshock uses the superb Unreal 3 Engine from Epic. We all know how capable the engine is after seeing Gears of War on the 360. With a good amount of effort you can produce incredible environments that are very detailed and lifelike not to mention beautiful. The Irrational team have done an incredible job at designing and bringing Rapture to life. The art-deco and its 1940′s architecture give you the feeling of being back in the past in a steam-punk era. Every object looks like it belongs in Rapture thanks to its superb surroundings.

I ask you not to stare at the water in awe for the first time. There were so many gamers who first downloaded the demo and then sat there as jack surfaces from the depths of the sea, surrounded by a ring of fire. We all continued to think that it was a cut scene until we grabbed the controller!

The intro alone visually looks amazing, and as you climb out of the sea onto the steps of the spire just turn around to see the water dissipating behind you. Of course the most impressive bit is a few moments later in the game when you almost get flooded to ‘death’. Suffice to say that Irrational games have done a magnificent job on the water for Bioshock, and they had a separate team dedicated to producing the most realistic water gamers will ever see. They have raised the bar for how water should look in a game, and game houses will be trying to better Bioshock’s water for years to come now.

On the Audio side of things Bioshock isn’t no slouch and in most respects I would say that the audio is its strongest feature. The soundtrack to Bioshock is haunting, very fitting and memorable. The voice-overs for the cast and the audio diaries are very well done, with only one slight problem. If you play games with subtitles switched on like me, you’ll notice that this feature in Bioshock requires some work as they are either too fast or two slow when they appear on-screen. So they are in essence quite pointless to even use.

The vocals of Andrew Ryan and Atlas are simply brilliant and I loved listening to them throughout the entire game right up until the end. The scripting for the dialogue is simply superb in its own right.

Ambience is very important in today’s games and is the key feature I look for in every game that I look at nowadays. If a game hasn’t the ambience designed to draw me in, I don’t really wish to know about it. Bioshock oozes ambience. You can sometimes hear splicers in a conversation if you creep up to them, and you can hear and feel Big Daddy’s approaching from a mile away. General machinery sounds are all present to help you slip into this lovingly brought together world.

Multiplayer

HALT! There isn’t any. Despite the Bioshock box carrying an XBox Live logo (shirley a mistak?) there is no multiplayer on this title. However there is soon to be downloadable content, rumoured to be yet more Plasmids. Great, just what we really need – yet more plasmids!

Conclusion

Now I have been rather cynical in my review of Bioshock. You see my first trip through the game was hugely memorable, but towards the end I was getting bored. I am at present going through the game a second time for achievements and I am close to committing suicide. I never feel this way about most games that I buy….aside from Prey I guess. There just doesn’t seem to be much replay value after your initial run through the whole game.

On the positive side, the game has a brilliantly executed plotline and I do mean that. The ending is superb and really well done. I can’t say any more than that or I’d be giving away spoilers but Bioshock’s saving grace is its brilliant plot.

Bioshock could have been a lot better had the game been actually hard and challenging. Due to the fact that there is ammo and supplies by the bucketload everywhere you end up with max ammo for every firearm you have before you even get to the halfway stage of the game. Hacking is just useless and you end up bribing machines instead of actually using the hacking pipegame and death is pointless.

I can’t help feel that Irrational Games dumbed down Bioshock for console gamers, but I refuse to believe that as I have yet to see a 360 game dumbed down to such an extent. Visually and Audio wise Bioshock is superb and very hard to beat. On the gameplay front it is a mixed bag. Lastly I should state this – this game is BIG, it’s extremely hard for me to talk about various things without ruining them for a potential purchaser. There is a lot to do in the world of Rapture and a lot of good things that I haven’t mentioned due to time constraints and the fact that I don’t want to kill my readers from boredom…