Pace Paw Print

BioShock was announced a few years back and immediately piqued interest in consumers everywhere thanks to its then unheard of premise of an underwater city filled with monsters. Now the game has arrived and has managed to live up to the expectations it garnered over the years.

BioShock takes place in the underwater city of Rapture, a supposed futuristic utopia where anyone could live without fear of being pressured by outside influences like religion or government that was built sometime after World War Two and isolated from the rest of the world. The player arrives in Rapture after surviving a plane crash and notices immediately that something is wrong. It is up to the player to find out what happened to Rapture while tracking down the creator of the city, Andrew Ryan.

The basic gameplay consists of going from area to area, collecting weapons, and killing mutants. Along the way the player is given missions by radio from other survivors in Rapture.

The player, in addition to using weapons such as revolvers and Tommy guns, gains various powers throughout the game. These powers can be boring but necessary, like improved armor and telekinesis, but some are useless, such as the power to summon a swarm of bees.

The challenge in acquiring these powers is that they have to be bought from a machine using a substance called ADAM as currency. To obtain the ADAM, the player has to harvest it from little girls known as Little Sisters that are found running around Rapture. To get to the Little Sisters, the player has to go through their bodyguards, giant hulking monsters in diving suits equipped with the strongest weapons in the game.

The harvesting of ADAM also provides the player with the game's moral choice. The player can either save the girl from the mind control she is under and gain some ADAM, or kill the little girl and gain more ADAM.

The game's biggest draw is the disturbing setting. Rapture's design evokes 1950s science fiction style with tall buildings, circular windows, lots of neon, and pneumatic tubes, but in a state of decay. The developers of BioShock worked really hard to make it look like Rapture was once an actual working city that was hit with a terrible calamity. Rooms that look like actual stores and bars and dentist offices are filled with graffiti, fires, upturned furniture, and mutilated bodies.

The game is scary to some degree. It's not really "jump out of the shadows" scary, but more "the horrors that humanity can sink to" kind of scary. During the game the player, in addition to seeing the hideous mutants and the destroyed city, collects the audio journals of various citizens of Rapture that explain the back-story. Through these the player learns of all the disturbing activities committed by Andrew Ryan and his cohorts. It makes the entire atmosphere much more chilling knowing, in detail, exactly what went wrong.

The only real problem with the game is that the all of the really interesting ideas in the game are all used at the beginning with nothing new to build upon them as the game progresses. At the beginning of the game Rapture is big and mysterious, the mutants are dangerous and frightening, and the clues that reveal what happened to Rapture are disturbing. But by the third level, the different areas of Rapture lose some of their majesty and look less like the scene of some horrific disaster and more like a dump. The mutants are still there but by this time the player has figured out exactly what they are which makes them lose there "unknown terror" quality.

The back-story and its main characters are pretty much explained by level four taking all the mystery out of the game. All that is left is the big plot twist that happens in the middle of the game which ends up making the game less about exploring a giant exercise in individualism gone horribly wrong and more about revenge and getting the bad guy, further ruining the feeling of being overwhelmed by nature of Rapture. Also there appears to be a bug in the game that causes the game to pause every couple of seconds in the latter part of the game. It does not happen to every game, but it happens to some games.

BioShock is a game that has a lot of really good and fun ideas that unfortunately are used up near the beginning leaving the player with redundant tasks to complete. Still, the overall novelty of the game coupled with the first couple of hours of exploring are more then enough to warrant buying the game. And the repetitive nature of going through levels and dispatching mutants never becomes too boring thanks to the large number of powers and weapons that can be used on them. It's a satisfying experience overall, but it is not perfect. 4/5 paws.

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