Reviews// BioShock - Played To Death

This is made up for by the hacking segments… wait, a digression: hands up if you remember System Shock… anybody? Well, that classic is the precursor to BioShock, hence the hacking elements. The reaction to the game I am currently reviewing must make BioShock’s Ken Levine cackle with righteous joy in the light of the tepid consumer reception to System Shock… right, digression over).

This is made up for by the hacking segments in which have you play a timed puzzle for success, and which at least give you a sense of accomplishment.

Hacking’s challenge is that instead of just pressing a button, you are actually presented with a meter that indicates the difficulty of the hack. This means that you can try to break in, try to buy it off with cash (!), or try to use an auto-hack tool… or you can just forget it.

As the items you can hack (for example, security cameras that call drones; or little flying drones themselves with machine guns and grenade launching turrets ) have varying levels of utility, they all have varying degrees of difficulty when being hacked.

A point to note while on the topic of the drones, and the hacking thereof, is the impressive path-finding ability they have been bestowed with. Unlike most follower AI you’ve ever encountered, usually in the guise of an escort mission, the drones are vary adept at following you around all manner of corners, up stairs and down; even into crawl spaces. This is made all the more impressive by the way they sputter about and bump into things as you would expect a makeshift helicopter machine gun to do. It lends a real sense of credibility to the assertion that, since guns are not supposed to be in Rapture, all these things are homemade

Hacking itself comes in the form of a rather old computer puzzle game (Pipe Mania comes to mind) wherein you have to flow liquid successfully through a set of pipes. The varying difficulty comes from the size of the grid, the amount of blocks and alarms hidden throughout, and the speed at which the liquid itself moves. One of the cleverest uses of your stockpile of abilities is that you can freeze all of the above listed with the appropriate plasmid before attempting the hack. This slows down the liquid, making it a good deal easier.

All of the vending machines and medical stations throughout the game can be hacked but, in a curious decision, they operate in the same way as the turrets and drones (except they cannot be frozen ahead of time). While I understand the need to freeze a vending machine is nonexistent outside of the need to hack it, the inconsistency of the effect is a bit odd.

Another minor issue with the hacking is that there are only two ways of disabling the turrets and other items throughout the game: shocking or freezing them. So, unless you have no interest in hacking at all, you pretty much have to have at least one of those two plasmids equipped at all times. Early on, when your plasmids slots are very limited – and therefore limit the scope of your experimentation - this can be quite daunting. Thankfully it doesn’t take too long before the opportunity to increase your slots is presented and it becomes much less of an issue.

Not Just A Game
Throughout this review I have touched on many issues/failings that the game has but, for the most part, these are problems inherent in games per se. BioShock is not just a game. It strives to be something more and succeeds better than anything that has come before it. I’ve spent days moving crates in Shenmue and killed harmless majestic beasts for my own selfish ends in Shadow of the Colossus so that I can experience the story therein, but never before have I had these gamey delights presented in such a spectacular way. It truly feels more like living though a fantastic novel than just playing a game. This is why the issues outlined above bother me so greatly.

If I were not so involved with the story, the characters and the world around me, then I don’t think I would mind the usual video game issues.