Reviews// BioShock - Played To Death

One of the things most often talked about in the lead up to this game's release was the difficult decisions players would be faced with of “Saving” or “Harvesting” (which requires killing) the little girls. When every one of them not only sounds but looks exactly like the others, and there is an average of three per level, it’s hard to care.

This in itself brings up a question regarding the other fad with game designers/publishers who are attempting to introduce a moral or ethical ambiguity into gaming. Similar ‘moral decision making’ game dilemmas (that never cropped up in Doom III, where you killed or you died) are being used in Fallout 3 and Mass Effect for example. Either this provides ‘plausible deniability’ for publishers in the face of mounting political pressure (a ‘Bad Thing’), or it’s harking back to games such as Ultima IV (a ‘Good Thing’).

So, to harvest or to slaughter little, syringe toting, drug sucking girls? Well, I’d suggest doing both – at least this gives you the opportunity to play the game over twice, and that’s quite definitely a very good thing indeed.

Colour It Imperfect
In a world where scary has to equal brown and all battle scenes are grey, this game dared to scare me and challenge me with intense fights against multiple enemies, all with the saturation cranked to 100. This is a game with a ‘Wow!’ factor the likes of which I haven’t seen since Myst was first released longer ago that I care to admit remembering (1995, in fact).

Unlike Myst, BioShock’s technology isn’t anything worlds beyond what other companies are currently doing, but what it is doing is undeniably brilliant. For example, the use of darkness is impeccable. At no point did I ever feel the frustration I did the first time through Doom III. Certainly there are the occasional blind spots, but they are mixed in with many other clever tricks and aren’t the defining characteristic of the entire game.

Keeping with the Doom III comparisons, it should be said that BioShock is a ‘corridor shooter’ in the most basic sense. This isn’t a castigation however, because at no point in the game did I ever feel unnecessarily restrained. I did feel contained and weighed down by the ever-looming ocean that threatened to smother me at any moment. Unlike the vastness of space (which is, let’s face it, a whole bunch of ‘nothing’) water can be seen and heard and felt. Being able to see bulkheads buckle and leaks burst open right in front of you, in real time, leads to a sense of insecurity that ‘nothing’ never could.

The graphics are superb, with a level of fidelity to match the best around. Again, the choice of location not only lends itself to the tension of the game but it also allows for an incredible level of detail and variety. By confining you to a rather small - as in 'no giant open battlefields' – area, the artists are able to craft a world that feels more real and alive than any other post-apocalyptic dystopia (there, I said it) I’ve ever had the joy to explore.

On the other hand, the relative lack of variety to the enemy models is a bit disappointing considering the relatively low number of enemies there are in any given area. In a game like Halo where you kill probably thousands of the same few enemies over and over, it’s expected to see a fair amount of repetition, but in a confined world like this, where every one-on-one fight is supposed to be unique, it’s a bit disappointing to see the same (or very similar) characters over and over.