I've been playing: Bioshock (Xbox 360)

Old content

This post is from one of several previous incarnations of this site and probably doesn’t quite fit the current format. In a former life this was a group blog and a tumblelog before it became a static jekyll site. If anything looks broken or is worded oddly that could be why. Pardon the dust.

I've been playing: Bioshock (Xbox 360)

I put off getting this after downloading the demo from live and having a bad experience with it. If I remember correctly, they’d added a security camera into a room in the demo where there isn’t one in the final game, presumably to show off some of the extra interactions it brings. Unfortunately the room it was added to was largely lit in red making it hard to spot its field of vision. Consequently I found myself overwhelmed by multiple splicers and security bots at once, which is not something which suits my style of play. But what I found on making my way deeper into the game proper was that getting overwhelmed is all part of the fun.

What Bioshock introduces into the standard FPS recipe is a twist on the usual combat model. My normal approach would be to edge through levels an inch at a time picking off enemies one by one, safe in the knowledge that nothing is going to creep up behind me. In Rapture that’s not quite so effective. Enemies crawl out of walls, wander the corridors, and will think nothing of chasing you from room to room. The environments tend to be broad and intertwined rather than long and linear, and the route you take through them is rarely enforced.

But the most colour is added by the variety of ways in which any problem can be attacked. For any one entity in rapture there are a multitude of ways of dealing with it and turning it to your advantage (in contrast to the average FPS where there are things to kill and things to pick up, and not much more to speak of). It’s dizzying just to list what’s on offer:

Enemies which attack only when provoked, or which can be made to attack each other, or which can be made to protect you.
Weapons which can be upgraded and which take several types of ammo, some of which can be made by collecting materials.
“Plasmids” which are effectively magical powers which add even more complexity to the interactions.
“Tonics” which are effectively skills or physical enhancements.
Security cameras, bots and turrets all of which can be hacked to protect you or destroyed for pick-ups.
Vending machines and health stations which can also be hacked for price reductions or destroyed for pick-ups.
The hacking itself which is performed via a pipe-mania style puzzle game but which can be circumvented with auto-hack tools or bought out.
Researching enemies by taking their photograph for various bonuses.
Environmental hazards like oil which can be set on fire and water which can be electrified.

If you multiply everything together to find the number of available combinations implicit in that list you’ll find that it yields a pretty impressive realm of possibility. Which leads to the fun in being overwhelmed which I mentioned earlier, sparking some of these interactions and standing back to see what happens can be pretty entertaining.

There are some odd bugs and some iffy UI decisions, and there’s the failure of nerve in the final portion of the game that’s been discussed elsewhere. But take the web of interactions I’ve talked about above and add to this some beautiful graphics, a great storyline, fantastic voice acting (spoilers) and you end up with a really great game, deservedly topping the metacritic charts. There’s also enough tiny little fun scripted moments and bits modelled into the environment to show that the development team were enjoying themselves too. Something which always puts the cherry on the cake for me.