The "spiritual sequel" to System Shock 2 is an artistic and gameplay triumph that raises the bar for every game that follows it.
[Editor's Note: This is a spoiler-free review.]
Every human endeavor has those moments when the bar gets raised for every creator that follows it. It's the filmgoer watching Citizen Kane sitting back and saying "I didn't even realize film was capable of that." It's watching Tiger Woods play golf or Frank Sinatra in concert and realizing that, yes, human beings are capable of creating transcendent experiences. It's also what happened to us when we finished playing BioShock, the "spiritual sequel" to the brilliant System Shock 2 that simply outdoes the previous title -- and, really almost every other game to date -- in every way. Playing BioShock is like flying for a moment with Michael Jordan just as he's about to slam the rock home.
Welcome to Rapture
BioShock tells its story through the eyes of a passenger on an ill-fated plane flying over the Atlantic Ocean in 1960. In the opening segment of the game, the plane crashes and the player wakes up floating in the ocean surrounded by burning wreckage. The only land in sight is a mysterious lighthouse that houses a bathysphere.
Upon entering it, the bathysphere launches and the player is treated to a propaganda film narrated by one Andrew Ryan. Ryan outlines the tenets of his Objectivist-style philosophy that caused him to reject the surface world in favor of an undersea nirvana where "The artist need not fear the censor, the scientist need not be bound by morality and the strong would not be held back by the weak." Unfortunately, after a stunning voyage through the exterior of Ryan's underwater city, the bathysphere lands and the player finds that things have gone horribly wrong in his utopia.
It's this storyline and the player's experience of it that mark BioShock's greatest strength. Initially, it seems like the cliched "kill the big bad guy" plot that's supported almost every FPS ever created. But the storyline runs much deeper in its observations of Objectivism and its implications: laissez faire capitalism, Romantic Realism in the arts, the elevation of the self, the denigration of the weak and the deification of selfishness. Even "Andrew Ryan" is a riff on author Ayn Rand, the founder of Objectivism and whose "Atlas Shrugged" is referenced throughout the game, if not directly, than at least in theme.
As the player progresses through the game, reversal follows upon reversal in a twisty maze of plot points until what started as a mere political allegory becomes a searing exploration of the true nature of evil that's guaranteed to keep players guessing until the end. It's no coincidence that the game's creators begged people who have finished the game to not reveal spoilers. The game acquires massive replay value simply from the desire to go through it again and track all those moments that take on new significance with the knowledge gleaned from finishing it.
Art Deco and Metal Fatigue
The true brilliance of the game's story lies in how it's delivered, particularly the sound design. While there are a few non-interactive cutscenes, by and large the player will piece together the history of Rapture through audio diaries left behind by the city's inhabitants. The voice acting in these recordings is exceptional, and since there's no break in the action, the diaries act as a sort of running soundtrack underscoring the game's brilliant art design. There were so many times when what was heard made the actions on-screen take on more significance.
The sad, insane mutated "splicers" who constitute the player's main enemy add to the story by babbling to themselves when they're not fighting. While not necessary to complete the game, listening to the well-acted voice clips presents a lot of insight into the philosophical underpinnings that caused Rapture's creation and made its fall inevitable. My favorite was one upper-class splicer voice that sounded like Katherine Hepburn who continually complains about the poor quality of a steak she had been served a long time ago and how she micromanaged her daughter's wedding. Other comments like "I wore it for you, Father," and "We followed your commandments but turned away from the light," (often spoken just before the Splicer leaps for the player's throat) continually underscore the current horror that is the crumbling city.
The storyline also comes through in the game's extraordinary art design. Visually, BioShock is simply gorgeous. According to an exhibit in the city's Welcome Center, Rapture was dedicated in 1946 and has been out of contact with the surface ever since. The result is a world designed to look like a science fiction story from the heyday of Isaac Asimov -- all vacuum tubes, brass pipes, Bunsen burners and sensual, rounded shapes. Rapture is an absolute masterpiece of Art Deco design, all brown and gold faux-Egyptian styling mixed with brass-colored accents and oak, teak and other rich, dark woods. The splicers (the mutated residents of Rapture) are clothed in slightly updated 1940's suits and dresses -- up to and including fedora hats on many of the men and female splicers in World War II "Rosie the Riveter" outfits. Even the advertisements that festoon the walls perfectly capture the pre-Pop Art organic style of the time. One can almost imagine that this was the world of Fallout before the nukes started flying.
Hunting Big Daddies
Of course, all the storytelling and art design in the world mean nothing without fun stuff to do in between listening to diaries and watching the windows leak. Deep inside BioShock beats the heart of an FPS, but, like so many of the characters that inhabit the game, the gameplay's been tweaked and augmented in so many ways that it would be a disservice to slap a simple FPS tag on it.
To start, the game sports a nice array of standard first-person shooter weaponry including pistols, shotguns, rocket launchers and flame-throwers, which you can use against the countless splicers roaming the halls of Rapture. The player can also develop their character via a series of "plasmids" that alter their DNA and offer a variety of special abilities ranging from electric and fire blasts to freezing enemies and shattering them with a wrench. As the player progresses, enemies get tougher and become immune to certain types of attacks, but no weapon ever becomes useless.
And while having two sets of traditional and plasmid weapons would normally be more than enough to keep most players interested, Irrational -- err, now 2K Boston -- just piles it on. Weapons have multiple ammo types that are more or less effective against different enemies. The environment is loaded with items that you can use to your advantage, like explosive barrels that you can hurl at enemies using a Telekinesis plasmid (giving the game a bit of Half-Life 2 flavor) or you can hack security turrets and cameras and put them to work for you. Tonics scattered throughout the game act as passive plasmids, giving bonuses like increased maximum health or shocking enemies that touch you, and you can scrounge dead bodies for spare parts that can then be turned into special ammo or other gadgets. You can take pictures of enemies to research weaknesses and get combat bonuses. While it's true that the game follows a fairly linear path in deference to the storyline, much of the combat has a freeform feel to it, and already we're seeing players sharing stories of how they got through certain fights in completely different ways.
Nowhere is this more true than the encounters with the "Little Sisters" and "Big Daddies" that roam Rapture. Without giving too much away, the Little Sisters' job is to extract "Adam" from the corpses that litter Rapture. Adam is a key ingredient in upgrading your plasmids, so you're forced to confront them throughout the game -- or, more precisely, the hulking Big Daddies that protect them. They'll ignore you until you attack, so you're free to clear areas or set traps until you're ready to fight. At one point we set up an entire corridor full of trip wires and proximity mines with an RPG emplacement at the end and watched in awe as a Big Daddy proceeded to charge through only to get felled with a last electric buckshot blast from my shotgun.
It's worth noting that (especially for hard-core shooter fans) even at their toughest, the game's fights simply aren't that difficult. That seems to be by design, though. While players can bull their way through the game using traditional FPS combat tactics, half the fun comes from finding novel and interesting ways to interact with the environment. Even dying isn't a problem as frequently spaced "Vita-chambers" will resurrect the player and any damage done to an enemy remains unless said foe manages to find a First Aid station.
Unfortunately, for all the brilliance of the game's design, a few technical issues with the PC version of BioShock may mar the experience for some gamers. There was some initial outrage over the difference between the game's implementation of widescreen and traditional 4:3 resolutions: the game uses the same field-of-view (FOV) settings in both cases, and as a result, playing on a 4:3 resolution shows a little more on the top and the bottom. There have also been reports of an audio bug in DirectX 10 set-ups that causes all the sound to cut out as soon as the opening cut-scene ends. As of this writing, 2K games has issued a statement that an official patch to address the widescreen issue is the works.
More problematic is 2K's use of SecureRom piracy prevention technology. This is a protection scheme that forces the player to not only have the DVD-ROM in the drive in order to play, but also to transmit an activation code over the Internet in order to play the game. There was a short period right after release when the verification servers went down, leaving gamers with legitimate copies of the game unable to activate it. The game also came with a two-install limit on each serial code (since raised to five by 2K), which places a cap on how many times gamers with legitimate copies can install the game. Even worse, the uninstall program doesn't reactivate the owner's code on the servers; for that, owners will have to download a "revocation application" that will reset their serial code in order to uninstall and re-install. Don't try calling the customer service number in the game's manual, either. Thanks to a misprint, the wrong number was put in. We're just surprised the game's box doesn't have a "Are You Sure You Don't Want The 360 Version?" sticker next to the Games for Windows logo.
Aside from this silliness, BioShock ran splendidly on our two test machines: a custom machine running Windows Vista and a GeForce 8800, and a Voodoo machine running Windows XP and a GeForce 8800. In both cases, we cranked the resolution up to 1920x1200 and didn't notice a single framerate stutter. Controls on the PC are arguably superior to those of the Xbox 360 version, not only for mouse and keyboard support, but also for having additional hotkeys which allow you to access weapons and plasmids with a single keystroke. While the art design is as amazing as it gets, some of the character models and texture work feels a little crude in spots (which, incidentally, was an issue with System Shock 2 as well), so it doesn't feel like there'd be much reason for any choppiness.
The one exception to that would be the game's water. The BioShock team had one member whose entire job was working on different ways of displaying water and the results really show. Water is basically a supporting character in Rapture through puddles on the ground, tiny leaks in glass windows, waterfalls that cascade down staircases or just sheets that pour down walls. It's a constant reminder that Rapture is dying, a tiny bubble six miles below the surface of the Atlantic waiting for enough metal fatigue in the beams or the cracks in the windows to grow wide enough that the millions of tons of water pressure outside the city can finally reclaim it. Rarely has a game imparted such a sense of oppressive isolation and the feeling of fighting inside a tomb.
Enraptured
Those few PC quibbles aside, BioShock is a triumph, an absolute masterpiece that needs to be played by anyone with the slightest interest in gaming. It's a high-water mark not just for the FPS genre, but for the hobby in general. Since it's set at the bottom of the sea, it's perhaps ironic to say that it's the kind of game you want to soak in from start to finish and then play all over again. In the world of videogames, there's nothing to be more proud of.
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