It's violent, but BioShock has been designed for mature gamers who like to be challenged and tested
The Little Sisters (below) are a creepy way of increasing your ADAM, and you can use electricity (above) to kill
Incinerating enemies is cruel but fun
The other night I was treating myself to a bath.
There I was in the tub, having a few brews, exfoliating, cleansing, spilling my drink, and
soon my eyes became a little heavy and before I knew it I was in another world...
Transported to a familiar-yet-different time and
place, I was in an underwater city of the likes never seen before. It
called to me, telling me it's name: Rapture...
BioShock is set in an alternate history in the
1960s. You're a survivor of a plane crash, and
it's your quest to explore the underwater city of Rapture and discover it's fate.
Now the city of Rapture is one hell of a creepy
place, which is evidenced by the mutated beings and deadly mechanical drones
that populate it.
BioShock does a good job at mixing role-playing
and survival horror (think Resident Evil crossed with Fallout 3) and
keeps the gamer immersed in a rich and colourful gameworld where you
can choose to save people and be kind and do the
“moral” thing, or the opposite where you hurt
others for your gain.
Like any game that's been cleverly put together,
it's this theme of 'choice' that makes the game so involving.
For a first-person shooter BioShock offers a great
deal of character customisation through the use of plasmids.
These curious liquids give you special powers such
as the ability to incinerate, freeze or electrocute foes from your very
own hands, and they look super cool when you drink them as you can see
the veins in your arms glow momentarily.
These arcane abilities are ace to use because if
you sneak up behind a foe or even from a distance you can simply set
them on fire by the click of the fingers (one of my favorites) and they
run around screaming and gasping only to fall in a charred mess on the
ground. The attention to detail is amazing.
Also throughout the game you will come across
health, ammo, DNA and Gatherers Gardens vending machines just
to name a few of the other pick-ups.
Now the health and ammo machines can be hacked,
which sees you initiating a minigame where you try and change
curtain interchangeable pipes to connect one side of the screen to the
other.
Failing to do so results in either damage taken
or killer bots being deployed, neither outcomes being particularly
desirable.
After you've spent some time exploring and getting
used to the controls and dispatching a few baddies, you'll learn of
the three main resources in the game, ADAM, EVE, and
money.
Money lets you purchase ammo and health from
various vending machines throughout each level, as mentioned.
ADAM allows you to genetically modify your
character and can be used to purchase plasmids.
EVE is the stuff that lets you play magician,
kind of like mana. It's a light blue substance which is injected into
your body, fueling your abilities.
The whole 'injection' theme makes me wonder if
perhaps one of the game's lead developers had syringe nightmares as a
child?
So EVE and other genetic specialties can
be acquired at Gatherers Gardens vending machines, however
ADAM can be obtained in a manner of different ways, most prominently by
the harvesting of "Little Sisters".
These enemies are not to be taken lightly however.
To get to these energy-providing beings into your grasp, you'll have to
defeat their bodyguards, the "Big Daddies".
These walking goliaths are heavily
armored and take quite a bit of ammo to take down, but there are other,
more creative ways to achieve this, and that's part of the fun -
discovering new strategies and using the environment around you to
outsmart those who seek to hurt you.
Character customisation can be broken down into
four categories:
Combat Engineering Active Physical
You start out with two slots to each category,
where you interchange your skills according to what you need until
later on in the game where you can purchase up to four slots.
This means that you have to mix and match skills
in order to get the best outcome for specific challenges, and like
almost everything else in this game you'll need to use your brain quite
a bit to suss out the various puzzles in the game.
While roaming through the city of Rapture you'll
need some protection besides your special abilities, and you can pick
certain weapons to tonk enemies, such as a monkey wrench, or shoot them
with, like a .38 caliber pistol, tommy gun, shotgun and a
rocket/grenade luncher.
It may not sound like a lot of weapons, but this
game doesn't need to rely on including 37 pistols and 12 sub
machine guns because it's such a well put together game.
I must say however that I had the most fun using
the shotgun. Pumping lead into dismembered and mutated beings was a lot
of fun and also the only way to stay alive at certain points.
You can also upgrade weapons via
the Power to the People machines.
Depending on what you want you can make weapons
hold larger magazines, consume ammunition at a slower rate, or cause
more damage.
On top of all this each weapon has three types of
ammo: normal, anti-personnel, and armor-piercing all of which are
ideally suited to different enemies and situations, and figuring this
out is part of the hugely immersive and atmospheric
underwater ride that I've been loathe to give up.
When you begin unravelling the eerie mysteries of
Rapture, you'll get to use more powerful abilities and gadgets, which
makes the game even more dynamic to play.
You can resolve any situation in a number of ways,
and some of them will boggle your mind.
Before long I came to after hearing the angry
shouting of my brother who was by this time knee deep in water, but
mainly because the bath water had gone cold.
It was then I realised I didn't drift off to the
city of Rapture, but in fact was just making a mess in the tub.
BioShock is a fantastic first-person
shooter/thriller that rewards the sneaky and inventive players,
and there's plenty of cool customisation options to please the
micro-management fans.
It's a game that can scare you with ease and suck
you into its fictional world with deadly efficiency thanks to the
impressive Unreal 3 graphics engine, but it's also the sound effects
and way the levels are designed that help draw you in.
If you're expecting run-and-gun, you won't find it
here but what you
will find is an intense experience that's difficult to describe. With a
profoundly intelligent story, it makes you question your ethics and
values at times, but you
really need to play it to see what I mean.
It may have been out on the PC and Xbox 360 for a
while, but now PS3 owners can now see just how deep this game is.
Kudos to the developers: this is gold medal gaming
that's original and innovative. I absolutely cannot wait for the sequel!
If you're a bath man like me, do yourself a
flavour and check it out.
Game: BioShock System: Playstation 3
Players: 1 Online: No Developer: 2K
Boston/Australia
Distributor: 2K Games
Combat
