Game Review: Bioshock

Bioshock for Xbox 360, PC

In honor of labor day, a day spent honoring work (which sucks my ass) I am spending the day sitting on my ass. What better way to honor labor than by posting a new game review? My gaming time lately has been divided between killing minorities in Crackdown and being underwhelmed by Blue Dragon. Prior to those titles, I got the unbridled joy of finishing Bioshock, one of the best games I've ever played, period.

Welcome to Rapture, underwater utopia.

Bioshock is classified as a first person shooter. When I heard this I immediately lost interest until my friend Rob said that I should download the demo and give it a try. So download it I did, and it hooked me immediately. The graphics are gorgeous, and it's the most immersive game I've ever played. It's not one of those dumb FPS games where you're some highly trained member of insert-military-faction-here and you're sent to kill terrorists or non americans or whatever. You're a confused guy running around protecting yourself from gene-splicing junkies. I'd say it's a FPS/adventure hybrid. Having played Oblivion readied me for the gameplay here. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Bioshock takes place in 1960 in a ruined underwater city named Rapture. The city was founded by an idealist millionaire named Andrew Ryan. He wanted a society free from government and religious control, where everyone earned his own way. Scientists would be free to work on projects to better the world without being bogged down by the moral limitations placed upon the world we know. Ryan's utopian world was apparently not without flaws.

A Big Daddy watching over a Little Sister.

You arrive to find signs of anarchy and chaos, dead bodies, fires etc. There are party favors and "Happy New Year 1959" signs. There are also signs of rebellion, picket signs with phrases such as "Ryan doesn't own us" on them. It is a beautiful, broken world. The city is largely void of life, save for 3 groups: the splicers - twisted junkies hopelessly hooked on the genetic mutations devised by the city's scientists; Little Sisters - genetically altered little girls whose job it is to harvest resources from dead bodies for use in genetic modding; and Big Daddies - genetically modified humans in large, heavily armored diving suits whose sole job is to protect the little sisters. This is the world into which the player is thrust.

The story is teriffic, and that's about as much as I can say about it. The game has gotten some flak for the moral decisions the player is put into. In order to become strong enough to tackle the challenges in the game, you need to get ADAM (the stuff that makes the genetic alterations possible) from the Little Sisters. First, you have to kill the Big Daddies that guard them, then you must make the decision to either Rescue them (which provides you a small amount of ADAM and essentially cures the Little Sisters of their creepy ailment/modification) or you Harvest them (which kills them, but yields a much higher ADAM reward, ZOMG THIS GAME LETS U KILL LITTLE GIRLS CALL TEH SENATOR ZOMG!!!!1) It's a work of fiction, a brilliant one which to some degree makes the player examine their morals, which is a great thing to find in a game.

Drilled into a wall: this is what happens when a splicer goes after a Little Sister.

The enemy AI is pretty decent; the bad guys (who are crazed junkies after all) will often charge straight at you in a rage, but they will often fall back, duck for cover, run for health stations when injured, run for water if you set them on fire. And once they're in the water, you can zap them with lightning. They hate that. The environment they populate is incredibly detailed and well made. lights flicker, sparks rain down from severed wires, water leaks in through cracks and pours in through holes in the wall. The voice acting is equally well done, a trait crucial in bringing a game world to life. Again, I can't say too much about the story without ruining the plot, but suffice to say it's above most video game standards and on par with many Hollywood movies I've seen.

Game of the Year thus far? Hell yes.

All of the Game of the Year hype it's been getting is justified. Now, would you kindly pick up a copy of Bioshock and give it a go? You won't be sorry.