Richard's Online Journal

[27/08/07] Bioshock

(Note: There’s no overt spoilers in this one, but be warned, they’re everywhere right now. There’s even one at our local branch of Game - a £35 pack of spoilers so comprehensive it takes about 10 hours to work your way through. It’s got the word ‘Bioshock’ on the front. Avoid it if you want to keep the mysteries fully intact. If you’re done, don’t forget to check out Bioshock: The Secret Ending. Or breakfast. It’s important.)

...what could possibly go wrong?

In a nutshell, if Bioshock isn’t Game of the Year, odds are good that we atheists are going to look a little silly at having to explain God showing up to make a new Monkey Island. It’s the best FPS since Half-Life 2. It’s the closest thing to System Shock 2 since Shock 2. And if there’s any justice in the world, everyone responsible for the miserable pile of arse that was Doom 3 is out there right now, slashing their wrists with the retail CDs and sobbing to sleep on unsold expansion packs.

I’m not going to go into much detail here. Much of Bioshock rests on discovery; its set-pieces are intended to catch you unawares and while there are several I’d love to talk about, I don’t want to ruin them. Bioshock’s the kind of game where the only truly safe explanations are the simplest of things, like what button you press to use the vending machines. Knowing that the reclusive genius at the heart of the city is really a time-slipped alien from Tau Ceti would ruin everything. So I won’t say that…

The joy of exploration is almost entirely down to the amazing level design. As anyone who’s picked up a games mag lately knows, Bioshock is set in a failed underwater utopia, Rapture.  Wonderful as its spiritual ancestor System Shock was, there’s just no comparison between its gunmetal corridors and these lush, beautiful, art-deco environments and jazzy background music. Hell, if it wasn’t for the marauding zombie splicers, psychopaths, environmental hazards, and risk of being drowned, burned, or electrocuted every two steps, you’d want to live here.

Even with them, you’ll want to enquire about time-share. 

Bioshock has the most gorgeous FPS environment ever made. Everything has its purpose. Everywhere has its own feel. The most wonderful bits of architecture reach out and shake you by the throat - the constant pressure from enemies almost infuriating as you dig into the nooks and crannies, see the aching ambition that personifies the city, and dig up its darker history. Irrational repeatedly comes up with some of the best FPS design - just look at SWAT 4 - and this is their magnum opus. It’s glorious work.

Our father, who art in Boston. Irrational used to be thy name. Spare us this day our tiresome hacking mini-game and deliver us to Level 2…

Sadly, not everything can hit the same level, and by far the most disappointing part of Bioshock is its narrative. It’s not bad, far from it. The writing is mostly good, and it knocks hell’s bells out of almost any other shooter you care to name. It’s just all over the place in terms of content, too happy to resort to schlock and poor quality characterisation, and nowhere near the standard of the level design or shooty bits. That’s the most disappointing part of the whole thing for me, especially after Shock 2 and Tribes.

Not least of the problems is dealing with Rapture not as a collection of levels, but as the city that never was. Architecturally astounding as it is, it never feels real enough - and that’s entirely the fault of the scripting. Instead of building a city and then destroying it, Irrational clearly built a destroyed city and poured on a story. The audio diaries that tell the backstory tend to be from after things went to hell, and unremittingly negative.

Aside from making it feel like the city had an active population of about seven (I’m still curious to know if the stripper was an electrical engineering genius or similar), none of them - even Rapture’s creator - really seem on-board with The Vision.

Nowhere is there that spark of belief that it ever stood tall.

(The frankly silly Shock style ghosts in particular would probably have been better replaced with simple video footage of the city in its prime. Or interactive flashbacks. Or even an Undying style scrye device capable of gazing into the past. Something to convince us that the world’s elite would actually be part of this underwater folly.)

As for the diaries and characters rattling on at you over the radio, they vary in quality, but none even come close to SHODAN level perfection. Obviously. How could they, when none of them star my One True Love? I’m not planning to write any self-insertion fanfic about Andrew Ryan, put it…

...ahem. Disregard that sentence. And let’s all just agree never to Google the phrase: “‘Ah,’ sighed my viridian vixen of virtual space. ‘My children never interfaced like that with my IDE port. Now I feel all SCSI. And I like it...”

Okay? Moving swiftly on…

All that said, the real catch is that for a world so heavily built on vision and ideology, there’s precious little of it tied up in your quest. Rapture failed not because of its inherent conceptual flaws, but because it was run by idiots, mostly obsessed with other idiots. Ryan in particular is a potentially fascinating character, reduced to barking ineffectual threats over the radio for most of the game. As for the other relatively sane citizens of Rapture, too often they come across like squabbling school-children.

For all the talk of philosophy and personal choices, they play surprisingly little part in things. Your linear path is determined primarily by physical obstacles and the need to simply survive, driven by the villains’ incompetence and paranoia more than anything else. Which is philosophical in its way, true. But it could have been so much more.

None of this detracts the many wonderful moments, such as [SPOILER], and [SPOILER], and the bit with [SPOILER] in Fort Frolic (hands down the best designed area, even if it’s one of the many sequences that serves pretty much zero point in the grand scheme of things). In those sequences, everything about Bioshock just shines like its own shimmering walls. The ambition is met. The game is elevated to a level that would make it special even if it had been set in a concrete factory in Milton Keynes.

And in a heartbeat, things are awesome once again.

If the game was as philosophical as it seemed at the start, you’d be able to take out the Big Daddy by quoting Wittgenstein at it. On second thoughts, I’ll keep the big gun.

The trouble is, I can’t talk about those without ruining them. Or the bad bits, for the same reason. So, keeping things as vague as possible: where Bioshock’s story fails, it’s by not being as smart as its premise sets it up for, even though Irrational itself is. It comes in the use of some very stock characters, and our limited access often rendering them hypocritical or ineffectual. It’s in the generic quest design; a psychopath tourist’s guide to Rapture instead of really diving into the unique possibilities offered by its setting. It’s in the use of respawning enemies as the main challenge, with little to test your brain except basic observational skills. And ugh, it’s in some horrible FedEx quests.

And then there’s That Bit. By far the most divisive moment in the game; the Inevitable Plot Twist, bouncing straight from a moment of genuine, unquestionable brilliance… straight to a piss-poor attempt at pulling a Metal Gear Solid.

It’s not the basic idea that’s the problem so much as how it’s handled. Out of the blue, Irrational suddenly feels the urge to pull down its pants and start mooning you through the screen with a bit of bizarre meta-gaming nonsense. And I’m not sure why.

Not only does the attempt to score points off the player come across as insufferably smug rather than clever, it’s a real Pyrrhic victory - ripping holes in much of the story, and replacing large sections of Bioshock’s premise (and promise) with something much more akin to standard FPS stuff for the final stretch. With a couple of fantastic exceptions, it’s also the start of a real downhill slide to some bizarrely poor quality levels, disappointing gameplay shifts, a final, ridiculous, boss Foozle, and in my case, a completely incoherent ending that utterly ignored how I’d been playing the game.

But anyway. Back to Bioshock’s well-appointed flat in scenic Game Of The Yearville…

The right way to level up: picking the exact flavour of awesome you want to be, safe in the knowledge that all of them will be good.

Even with all the other stuff stripped out, this is a great FPS. The action is almost entirely linear, but that’s fine. The fun is in building up your character however you like. In my case, anyone trying to sneak up behind me quickly found that the security systems were on my side (a tribute to my aforementioned One True Love) and that laying a finger on my person meant instant electric death. Play with guns, play with stealth, play with magic, however you play, you’re cooking with gas.

The enemies don’t disappoint either. There aren’t many different types, the majority being mutated humans, but the individual flavours keep things fresh. The much talked about Big Daddies - giant diver guys - are usually the toughest, but ironically, the least exciting. Unlike the regular guys, who respawn all over the place, Big Daddies just stamp around the place, leaving you alone unless you engage them. If they kill you, it’s no big deal. You respawn a short distance away, while they don’t regenerate lost health.

The second you realise you can take them out by simple attrition, they’re target practice. Impressive target practice, and intimidating as hell the first couple of times you fight them… but no big deal for about 80% of the game.

For very similar reasons, the regular guys quickly become an ammo-sucking nuisance more than a threat, and little to jump in fear at. Outside a few fun quick-scare set-pieces, for which Irrational is very, very evil indeed. In a good way.

Also on the plus side: no spiders! Hurrah!

Only the cruellest, most vicious of bastards could Harvest the Little Sisters instead of saving them. I’m not sure what that says about 9/10 of my colleagues. But I tried to be nice. Operative word: Tried.

As for their charges though, they leave nothing to be desired. The Little Sisters - tiny barefoot girls who process Rapture’s dead - are absolute masterpieces. They’re adorable, yet creepy, singing little songs and breaking your heart on a regular basis. Far from the now tiresome Scary Little Girls who’ve been infesting games of late (Fahrenheit, FEAR, and other games that don’t start with the letter F too), they’re tragic figures that only become more viciously horrible the more you deal with them and learn about how they came to exist. Only the level design is more successful, which is high praise indeed.

In short, there’s so much good about Bioshock, you almost have to focus on the bad just to be fair to other games. It’s not perfect, but it is one of the few games that- more or less - lives up to its own incredible hype. Buy it. Play it. If you’re religious and poor, consider stealing it. If your deity of choice isn’t likely to understand, convert.

But whatever the situation, be sure you play it. It’s great.

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