You-A-Shock!
If you were to ask anyone for a list of the greatest games of all time, they’d definitely include Disco Elysium. Then somewhere else they’d put Bioshock, I guess. This is one of the most praised games in existence. It’s not like those dumb, kiddie games where you jump around, get a high score and have fun. No no no. This is an atmospheric, cinematic experience for adults. This finally proves that games are ART. You hear me, dad? I’m not wasting time playing Xbox. I’m engaging with art.
Now it’s time for me to make like Andrew Ryan and commit an ideological heresy: I did not care for Bioshock. I don’t like the gameplay. I think it’s a boring shooter with some good ideas held back by some lackluster execution. The story is just okay, again held back in its execution. Speaking of execution, I expect to be getting one for saying that Bioshock is just kind of boring.
Read on if you want to find out why I think that, and watch me lose what little credibility I had in real-time.
Gameplay
Bioshock (2007) is an FPS (First-person Plumbing Simulator). You play as Jack, the plumber, and you go into Rapture, a city that sprung a massive leak. Armed with your trusty wrench, you use your elite plumbing skills to solve hundreds of pipe puzzles and save Rapture from flooding. Along the way you’ll meet a cast of colorful characters who will bark orders at you, and complain that their dishwasher shouldn’t cost that much to repair. It’s an action-packed peek into the real world struggles every plumber faces.
When you’re not fixing pipes, you’ll be fighting for your life against Rapture’s denizens: crackheads. Every square inch of Rapture features at least two crackheads, which is impressive, but it’s still less than Detroit. These sickos are high on plasmids, a type of drug derived from sea slugs that gives you super powers and turns you into a gibbering husk that was once human. They want nothing more than to steal your tools, to sell for more of that undersea fent. Luckily for you, Rapture is a stand your ground state, so if they try to nick your plunger, you’re well within your constitutional right to put them down.
After seeing the effects plasmids have on people, your best bet would be to avoid them at all costs. Which is why Jack’s first instinct is to mainline these plasmids like he’s going into anaphylactic shock, and the syringes are epipens. With his newfound powers he can do amazing things like shoot fent lightning, lift things with the power of his mind and set things on fire. If you’ve ever been to downtown Spokane, you’ll know that crackheads can already do all three, so seeing Jack do it isn’t all that impressive.
Aside from doing drugs and fixing pipes, the other half of the game is spent reloading. You need to reload your guns and your plasmids. Constantly. All the time. Shoot a few shots? Gotta reload. Moved a propane tank with your mind? Shit, lemme take another hit of them plasmids. Every time you take out your constitutional carry, you’ll have to reload it. It got to the point where I thought it was a side effect of plasmid abuse, but it’s not. It’s a part of the game that someone programmed into it and thought it was okay, which is scarier than any of the jump scares in Five Nights At Ryan’s.
Now that you have a taste of what life is like in Rapture, we can get into the meat of the gameplay.
Pipe Puzzles
This revolutionary new entry into the genre of work simulators gives us a raw, gritty look into the real lives of plumbers. Their trials, tribulations, and all the pipe puzzles they have to solve to earn a living. Every few steps you take in Bioshock lead you to a new pipe puzzle. You walk into a room. There’s a camera in the corner. To a normal person, that’s just a security device, but to an experienced plumber, that’s a pipe puzzle. You walk up to it and “hack” it, which triggers a pipe puzzle. Walk into the next room, there’s a turret ready to turn you into ground beef. You run up to it and it gifts you with another pipe puzzle. That turret was protecting a safe. To get into the safe, you must solve a pipe puzzle. After that much excitement you need a break. You walk down to the vending machine to get some plasmids. The vending machine doesn’t sell plasmids unless you “hack” it. Yup. It’s pipe puzzle time.
In these puzzles you have to connect pipes to get the green ooze from one end to the other. At first you know the start and end point, with every other segment hidden under a tile. You click on the tiles to reveal the secret pipe segments underneath. Then you rearrange the pipes so that one end connects to the other. There’s a time limit, so you’d best hurry or the green ooze will leak out and shock you. That’s where the shock in Bioshock comes in.
To more accurately represent the act of plumbing, there are also bad pipe segments called Evil Pipe. If you connect the pipes to these, the green ooze will flow into them and they’ll trigger an alarm or explode. I tried to fix a leak in my sink once and accidentally routed the pipes into the Evil Pipe. It triggered an alarm and an entire SWAT team breached my bathroom and shot my dog.
It’s a good thing this is a plumbing simulator and not something like a shooter, because if it were I’d be pissed. These pipe puzzles happen so often, and they take up so much of your play time that I’d have to assume they were the main point of the game. If I were, say, exploring an underwater city, with a gun in hand, and I had to solve one of these puzzles every 40 seconds or so, I’d be really angry. Despite the fact that these are all about restoring flow, they would ironically break the flow of anything else I’d be doing. I can’t imagine that happening.
You can just ignore all the pipe puzzles, sure, but why would you? You’re playing a plumbing sim, that’s the whole point of the game. If you don’t solve these puzzles, you’ll be missing out on the core gameplay loop. Plus you’ll have to deal with the dozens of automated turrets and security cameras that plague Rapture, which will make getting to your next objective a complete nightmare.
Speaking of automated turrets.
Enemy design
Throughout your time fixing Rapture’s various leaks, you’ll have to deal with all sorts of weirdos and obstacles. The entire city is flooded (pun very much intended) with crazed psychos high on plasmids. The game calls them Splicers. They’re just people with guns. Sometimes they have knives. Their entire modus operandi is to scream like a banshee and run at you. That’s pretty much it.
The melee ones will run at you and try to hit you with whatever it is they have on hand. You can dodge out of their way when they swing and hit them back. They’re not particularly impressive, but I like the fact that you can actually dodge them by moving around them. No need for a dedicated dodge, i-frames or a parry. Their attacks don’t magnetize to you, either. These are fun to fight.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are the leadhead splicers. These shoot at you with guns. Their guns are hit scan, meaning they can hit you if they see you and you can’t really dodge. They, too, will scream and run at you, but these are packing heat, so they can and will kill you in a few shots.
There are also special splicers. There’s a souped-up melee guy with hooks for hands that will do acrobatics and slash at you. Not much of a threat.
Then there’s the Houdini Splicer. These are real pieces of work. They throw fire and teleport in and out of reality. Heavy emphasis on the OUT part. You’ll shoot at them and they’ll vanish somewhere else. You can either chase them like an idiot or ignore them. If you choose to ignore them, they’ll teleport behind you when you least expect it, shout “nothing personnel, kid” and shove a fireball down the back of your shirt. If you decide to go after them, they’ll teleport away again. I hate enemies that teleport away, and these are real stinkers.
Besides these there are others that throw grenades. They throw grenades. That’s it. That’s the enemy roster. They’re guys that scream and run at you. Good thing this isn’t a shooter, or else this roster would be pitiful. They don’t act different from one another, and they’re all vulnerable to the same things. Some are tougher, like the hook-handed spider splicers, which take more shots to kill, but honestly they all take more shots to kill than you’d expect, so there isn’t much difference there.
Besides the locals, you’ll have to contend with the security systems. For some reason, the people who called you to fix their plumbing forgot to turn off their Ring cameras. These are steampunk cameras powered by pneumatics and green ooze, but they can somehow differentiate between friend and foe, and you’ve been designated as a foe. There are cameras in almost every room, and where there isn’t one, there’s a turret, and they all want you dead right now. Shouldn’t have charged them so much for patching a leak.
The turrets are a real pain the neck. They can lock on to you in less than a second and start firing with pin-point accuracy. If they catch a single millimeter of you in their range, they’ll start unloading like that SWAT team did to my dog. You’d think you could maneuver around them, but they’re placed in strategic positions where they cover the entire room. Some are pointed down long hallways. There was one rocket turret in one area that kept trying to fire at me from another room… with a wall in between.
These overzealous hunks of metallic death are littered all over rapture. You can shoot them down, but they’re very durable and you’ll run out of ammo before they run out of existence. Destroying them is a bad idea, too. You’re better off hacking them. It takes much less resources, makes them shoot at other enemies and, most importantly, it gives you a cool pipe puzzle to solve.
Along with the turrets, there are also security bots, which are flying turrets. These things are even more bloodthirsty than the stationary turrets. When an alarm is triggered, they’ll come out of the wood works and hunt you down with the kind of single-minded ferocity you only see from Pokemon card scalpers.
They have a nasty habit of appearing right behind you, and like the other turrets, they fire hitscan machine guns with perfect accuracy, meaning that if they can see you, they can kill you.
You can, and should, shoot these down. You can’t hack them, which means you’re not missing out on any juicy pipe action. Be mindful if you do end up shooting them, though. They explode on death. They zip around shooting a machine gun at point blank range and if you have the audacity to defend yourself they explode, killing you.
Last but not least there’s the Big Daddy. These are giant, hulking monstrosities that roam around Rapture making weird groaning noises. They protect little girls called Little Sisters, who go around collecting Adam from corpses. Adam is plasmids. The fact that this enemy is huge, spends most of its time with little girls and insists on being called Daddy leads me to believe that they’re just moderators from Reddit or Discord.
These Big Daddies are passive most of the time. They will walk around with their Discord kitten, watching her get drugs from dead bodies, and not do much else. If you shoot them, it’s gonna hurt. Hurt you, that is. At any sign of aggression, the Big Daddy goes into “Kitten protection mode” and shows you what years and years of watching Naruto has taught him about martial arts. They will run at you unnaturally fast, shoot you with weapons, stun you, and cause mayhem, all while you try to plink at it with your little pea shooters. It’s like trying to fight an elephant using a nail clipper.
Since they only attack in self-defense, you can ignore them. They’re the big, bad scary flagship enemy and the most iconic thing about the game, and they can be ignored. I’ve spent several minutes just staring at them, watching to see what they do. They stop being scary after a while, and they almost look kind of cute in a weird way.
If you defeat them, you free the Little Sister. Since this game is from a time where binary moral choices were all the rage, you get to pick between saving the little sister or killing her with your bare hands. Killing them gives you more Adam. Saving them gives you less of the resource, but it gives you Reddit Karma, and if you save enough of the Sisters, they’ll award you with Reddit Gold for your efforts. Saving them also turns them back into regular little girls, which are somehow ten times creepier than their demonic zombified version.
This groundbreaking morality system says a lot about society. The game is telling us, in a very subtle and nuanced way, that you always have the choice to kill a child and not kill a child, and the only thing preventing us from killing children, is choosing not to. Heavy themes.
The enemies in this game are pretty terrible. There’s very little variety to them, and they don’t do much in gameplay terms. There aren’t interesting enemy combinations and they don’t have specific functions. They all sort of run at you. The only ones that don’t are the grenade guys, which, in a mind-bending example of gameplay innovation, run away from you. They don’t hold key positions or serve as real obstacles. They’re more of an inconvenience than anything, making you waste resources to kill them and offering very little in return. They’re not even fun to shoot, which would be a bad thing if Bioshock were a shooter, but it’s not.
The absolute worst of these are the turrets. Turrets are always a pain in the ass to fight in any game. They’re stationary and they usually serve to cut off large parts of an area. If done poorly, they can make the levels feel small and cramped, leaving you with little room to maneuver around them. The ones in Bioshock are that type. They have a habit of blasting you the instant your nose peeks out from behind a corner. There isn’t much in the way of interesting counterplay to them. If you see one, shock it with a plasmid and hack it.
I’ve been talking a lot about Adam and plasmids. I think it’s time to actually explain what that is.
Powers
Adam is the juice of a sea slug. It gets turned into EVE, which powers Plasmids. This mess of proper nouns is a convoluted way of saying that you can use superpowers and there’s a mana bar.
These plasmids give you the ability to do many miraculous things, such as shoot lightning from your hands like a Sith Lord, shoot fire from your hand, shoot bugs from your hand. Basically you’ll be shooting stuff from your hands a lot.
That’s a bit reductive, since these powers are the second most interesting thing about Bioshock, after the pipe puzzles, of course. They interact with the environment in rudimentary but interesting ways. If you use the electricity on water, it shocks the water and anyone standing in it. If you set a puddle of gas on fire, it uh- it catches fire. Okay that’s not as cool as I thought it would be. Telekinesis lets you throw propane tanks. That’s always fun. It’s way more effective than the guns.
These plasmids are great and all, but you need to reload them to use them. In most games where you have magic (plasmids are basically a magic system), you use the spell until you run out of mana and that’s it. The limiting factor is how much mana you have. In Bioshock, they decided that more limiting factors means more fun, so you have a tiny mana pool that you have to replenish after using your powers two or three times. This means that after a few activations, you have to jam a needle into your arm and go through a lengthy reload animation just to keep shooting lightning from your hands.
I keep mentioning the lightning because it’s the first and most useful power you get. You can shock enemies with it, which stuns them, and you can affect an entire crowd if you shoot it at water. If you hadn’t noticed, Rapture is underwater, meaning there are puddles everywhere. The shock also lets you disable turrets and security cameras from far away, letting you hack them for that sweet, sweet pipe puzzle.
Like I said, the powers are a lot more useful than the guns, and more fun to use. They let you do cool stuff, they actually kill enemies and mana is more abundant than ammunition. The problem is having to do that stupid reload every few seconds. The people of Rapture didn’t go crazy from the side effects of plasmid. I think they just went insane from having to inject themselves every two seconds to do anything with them.
Reloading
The other way you interact with this game’s world is through reloading. You have a gun in your hand and you might think it’s for shooting, but that’s like a TV show. You see, when you watch TV, you might think that the show you’re watching gets interrupted by the commercials, but in reality it’s the other way around. Networks put shows on TV so they can profit off commercials, so their ads are getting interrupted by your shows. The same thing happens in Bioshock. You might think that you want to shoot your guns, but their real purpose is to be reloaded.
Every gun has a magazine size that would put a pamphlet to shame. The revolver has six shots, which is to be expected of a six-shooter. You unload into someone then you have to wait two seconds to do it again. The shotgun has four shots before it has to be reloaded over three business days. The machine gun spits out all its ammo in the blink of an eye, just so you can get to that sweet, sweet reload faster. The biggest offender of this is the Napalm gun, which takes around six full seconds to reload.
The tiny magazine sizes combined with how tanky some of the enemies get lead me to moments where I unloaded into a target, then had to reload, so I switched to another gun, which also had to be reloaded, so I decided to use magic, which also had to be reloaded. So I’m fumbling around with my empty guns while a crazed crackhead is trying to give me an unlicensed root canal. It’s infuriating.
In order to reload a gun, you first have to empty it, and to do that, you shoot it. Preferably at something that wants to kill you.
The guns in Bioshock are underwhelming. Pitiful. Disappointing. They’re about as satisfying as erectile dysfunction. Every pull of the trigger is like waking up on Christmas morning and finding an empty tree.
The shotgun, my personal favorite type of gun in games, is a complete letdown in every sense. It does very little damage, it doesn’t have a satisfying kick and it sounds like a coughing baby. It also only has four shots before needing to reload, as I mentioned previously. I judge shooters by their shotguns. If they can’t get that right, there’s a good chance they won’t get anything else right, and Bioshock fails the shotgun test. It also fails every other gun test.
Even if the guns were fun to use, you’d still have to wrestle with the lack of ammo. It’s scarce and highly valuable. Shooters generally restrict your ammo to make you use it wisely and add a layer of depth and strategy to the proceedings, but Bioshock is a spooky horror game, so it has to restrict it even further, so it’s scarier. Every bullet you have is a precious gift from God, and He’s not feeling very generous today, so make your six shots count.
Shooting at anything has to be a calculated risk, and the result of that math equation is usually “not worth it”. It takes six or more revolver shots to take down a regular splicer, and they hardly return any ammo when you loot them. It’s to the point where shooting anything is a net detriment.
Presentation
The game looks great, at least. The art direction is fantastic. Every inch of Rapture is lovingly detailed, dripping with atmosphere. The art deco style gives the setting a unique flair. Every part of the non-gameplay visual design is very strong.
The game is dark and moody, but not so dark that you can’t see what you’re doing. There is always enough light for you to find your way around, while still leaving a few shadows for things to hide in. There’s usually an eerie, green glow coming from the windows, or a flickering light casting weird shadows.
I can’t say much about the sound design. The PC port of the game has some glaring audio issues that made playing it a chore. Sound would cut off at random, if there were more than a few sounds going on at once one would completely disappear. The guns already sound bad, but they also had a chance of having their sound cut off halfway through when firing. Enemies sometimes made a noise when hit, sometimes they didn’t. Once I was standing in a spotlight and the alarm was going off but I couldn’t hear it because the game was playing the sound of a turret in another room and it overrode the sound of the alarm, so it went off without me noticing and I was suddenly swarmed by drones (which were also silent).
From what I did hear, the sound design was pretty good. The voice acting from the main characters and the enemies is impressive. They all give great performances, and the splicers that roam around are interesting to listen to with their fancy SAT vocabulary mixed with the insane ramblings of a tweaker.
The Big Daddies have a lot of auditory identity, too, with their weird moans and groans. They sound like a massive, creaky deep sea animal. Alien and somewhat familiar at the same time.
What I didn’t like about the sound was how constant and loud it is. For a supposedly atmospheric and pensive game, Bioshock never shuts up. There’s always either someone yapping in my ear telling me what to do as if it mattered, something exploding off in the distance, alarms going off, turrets firing, splicers screaming and rambling, big daddies moaning, little sisters talking to themselves. Not to mention the vending machines playing ear-grating circus music and screaming at me to come join THE CIRCUS OF VALUE! There’s never a quiet moment where I can sit there and soak things in. Soak in. Another moisture pun.
Story
What? A Load Last Save review discussing a game’s story? It’s odd indeed, but Bioshock prides itself in its story, so I have to mention it.
It’s considered one of the shining examples of videogame stories. This isn’t a dumb game for kids, it explores themes and ideas, it has literary references. It has all those things going on…
...and it stinks.
I don’t like the story here at all. For starters, you have nothing to do with the story. The entire thing is presented to you in the cheesiest way possible. Every time something happens, you see it happen off in the distance like a stage play. Any important story beat happens behind a glass with you as a hapless spectator. The story doesn’t happen to you, you watch it happen. It makes it hard for me to care about any of it.
Then there’s the fact that the story starts and you sort of just bumble your way through it. You land in rapture after a plane crash and then just sort of go along with anything and everything some voice in your head tells you to do. It doesn’t have anything to do with you. You’re in the middle of some conflict that was going on without you, and judging from what’s going on, it could keep going without you doing anything.
Then there’s the big twist, which was so cheesy it made me lactose intolerant. Apparently your character, Jack, is a secret assassin who was created in Rapture, then given false memories and sent into the outside world, where he would then eventually get in a plane, crash it for some reason and come back to Rapture to kill Ryan, who is your secret dad. Amazing. False memories, brainwashing, secret assassins AND a secret father reveal. The worst, laziest, hackiest writing cliches thrown at you at a mile a minute. Apparently Fontaine wanted to take over Rapture. Why should I care if he wants to take over a city populated by mutated junkies at the bottom of the ocean? He can have it.
The secret family member trope is one of my least favorite in writing. It barely ever affects the plot in any real way. Ryan is Jack’s dad. Wow. “But that means you have to kill your own father!” is what the story says. As if just appending a blood relation on a character makes the story any different. The only time I can remember a secret father changing things was in Star Wars. Not because Darth Vader was Luke’s dad and a statement on how you can change your destiny, but because that means he’s related to Leia, and now his whole world is crashing down because his whole quest was because he had the hots for his sister. They even kissed. That’s a shocking twist.
The entire reveal about the secret assassin plot is incredibly dumb, yes, but it’s also boring. All that stuff had nothing to do with the game. All the interesting stuff happened before the game. Who cares about Jack’s story, if he never does anything interesting in the game?
Then there’s the whole thing about how the story subverts your expectations by making the guy giving you all the orders the bad guy. Wow. Amazing. Incredible. This is a cheesy trope games of that era liked, where they told you to do something then they went “See! You did the thing I told you to do, but it’s a BAD thing! Don’t you feel silly now?”. I don’t feel silly, game. Well, I feel silly for playing Bioshock in the first place, but you didn’t give me an option. You plopped me into Rapture and then told me to do things, and there was never a secret, hidden option to not do the thing and break free. This, like many other game stories, completely ignores the fact that gaming is an interactive medium, and opts to present a static story.
That’s one thing I like about Far Cry 4. You can play the game as intended, or you can wait a while like the antagonist tells you to, and you achieve your goal without doing anything. It shows, via gameplay (yes I know that not doing anything is not gameplay), that there was an option. I don’t think every game should have a story that lets you opt out of it, but if your whole thing is about choice and being clever about it, why not actually implement some choice in your story?
Immersive Sim
Bioshock is not an immersive sim. Sure, it has the -shock suffix, implying it’s part of the same family as the System Shock games, and it has pretentions of being an immersive sim, but it’s not. The fact that you have to scrounge through crates for things and can choose to hack a turret or shoot it down doesn’t make it an immersive sim. There aren’t nearly enough ways to approach situations, the levels are linear, exploration lacks any sort of nuance or verticality, and you don’t have any tools to “play your way”. You can’t even stack boxes, and if you can’t do that, can you call yourself an immersive sim? Postal 2 is more of an immersive sim than Bioshock.
Miscellaneous Nitpicks
The movement is terrible. Jack moves at a glacial pace, which feels inadequate for most encounters. This combined with the constant hitscan enemies means your best bet for survival isn’t skilled play, but chugging first aid kits and tanking damage.
Moving around the environments is also a hassle thanks to all the clutter everywhere. I found myself bumping into things and getting snagged on random geometry. It’s like the walls were made of velcro. I would back up while running away from something only to bump into a wall or a coffee table or a conveniently placed stool.
Maneuvering Jack is cumbersome. My personal headcannon is that Jack has a massive ass that keeps bumping into things and makes him really slow. He tries to squeeze through a hallways but his massive dumpy catches onto some crates and he can’t continue. With how bad his guns are I think he’d be better off using his bakery to fight the big daddies. He could turn around and twerk once and the force of his glutes clapping would flatten the big daddy’s head instantly.
I hated how this game felt like a theme park ride, in the worst way possible. The way everything happens and how people are constantly talking to you through a radio reminds me of those intro sequences you see in the line at Disney World. You’re standing in line watching little scenes play out in the distance, and someone’s telling you about how important it is that you get on that ride because it will help Spider-Man take down Thanos or something, but you’re not doing anything. That’s exactly how Bioshock felt. I’d walk a few steps, the lights would go down and Atlas would start yapping at me, and I’d watch through a glass as he played out his little scene that had absolutely nothing to do with me. I could watch splicers clawing at a window in front of me and Atlas screaming at me to run away, and nothing would happen. I could stare at them for hours as they were just about to break the window and rip by guts out. Riveting stuff.
Then there’s the jumpscares. This is a serious, mature game that shows that games are art, but it still needs the cheesy jumpscares. There was one that tried to jumpscare me with a sepia-toned picture of an old man and an old woman. Grandparent jumpscare. It was so cheesy that it made me laugh and cry out “Oh come on!” audibly. With the story events happening behind the safety of glass, to the cheap jumpscares, this game really isn’t beating the haunted house allegations. I was half-expecting to see Scooby and Shaggy running around.
Like zoinks, Scoob! Do you think this Adam stuff would taste good on a sandwich?
Reehehehe Raggy! Ris ran rot rentitled roo rhe rweat rof rhis rown row? Reeheeheehee
I don’t know what you just said, Scoob, but this plasmid high lasts like two seconds. I need to reload!
Then Fred is in a corner solving a pipe puzzle and he looks at Daphne and says “When you said I’d be laying pipe, I didn’t think you meant this”.
And Fontaine turns into a big monster but he takes off the mask to reveal the true enemy was Libertarianism or something. This is stupid.
Conclusion
I am Roger Renfro, and I’m here to ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to a fun videogame? No! Says the man in the writer’s room. It must be meaningful. No! Says the reviewer at IGN, it should be cinematic. No! Says the layman, it should be immersive. I rejected those answers. Instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose… to play anything else.
I don’t like Bioshock. I think it’s a mediocre first person shooter, and fans of the game who I’ve talked to have told me something similar. The gameplay is nothing special, it’s just a shooter. They don’t go as far as saying it’s a bad shooter, which I think it is, but they admit that the true “Bioshock” experience isn’t the shooting itself. I don’t accept that cope. You can have a good, atmospheric shooter that delivers both on ambience and gameplay. It’s called Quake. It came out over a decade before Bioshock.
But Bioshock isn’t really about the shooting. It's the story and the atmosphere. Two things I don’t put much stock into when playing a game. Then the story is a series of haunted house vignettes where I have no input. It just sort of happens while I watch like some perverted voyeur.
What about the atmosphere? I sat in my room, lights off, headphones on just making my way through Rapture. Being trapped in an underwater city set off my claustrophobia. Every hallway you’d go down was flooded due to massive leaks and unnerving cracked windows barely holding back an entire ocean. Then there’s the Big Daddies. Those hulking metal monstrosities that patrolled the hallways. They were harmless until provoked, then they were unstoppable killing machines that I couldn’t even stop with my guns. They were a source of constant dread.
I decided to take one down, just to see what would happen. I readied my shotgun and took a shot ready to get absolutely demolished for my insolence, which was exactly what happened. In a few seconds I was reduced to a smear of tomato paste on the floor and a few stains on his drill. Harrowing stuff. I respawned and promised never to do that again. Then I turned the corner and saw him again.
Oh woe is me! Even death isn’t an escape from this walking, metallic nightmare. Fight or flight kicked in, and my brain went “Dude, fight it would be so epic and funny, bro lol” so I shot at him, ready to get dismantled again… only to realize it was still damaged from our last fight.
Any illusion of fear and dread was dispelled, like looking behind the curtain at a magic show and catching the Great Magini stuffing rabbits into his hat. A Big Daddy’s not a massive, eldritch hurdle I have to overcome, it’s a glorified bullet sponge. I can just throw myself at it until it dies. There is no consequence, tension or fear. I can suffocate it under a pile of my cloned corpses.
Gameplay can, and often does, do a great disservice to story, which is why I think games should focus on gameplay before the story.
If I didn’t lose subscribers for my entire negative review of the game, I will surely lose them here: Bioshock is a game for people who don’t play games. It’s a very toned down version of things that came before it. It’s a mediocre shooter, worse than any that precedes it. Quake has better gunplay, even Deus Ex, which isn’t technically a shooter, has better shooting. It’s a terrible immersive sim, again worse than any before it. It pales in comparison to Thief or Deus Ex. It doesn’t have anything from the System Shock series from where it gets its name. Its story isn’t impressive, and its thrills are fake and manufactured, but if you don’t really play games, you’d be impressed by this. If you didn’t know what a real immersive sim was like, you’d think that electrocuting water is the most groundbreaking interaction in a videogame. Bioshock is incredibly cinematic, for the type of people that think that if a game is like a movie, it’s good. It’s not like those other games that go bleep bloop. You don’t go for a high score, you don’t save the princess. It’s about morality, and it’s a critique of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (which I haven’t read but have strong opinions on anyways). It’s a game for intellectuals who don’t play games.
If that’s true, and this is considered to be one of the greatest games of all time, then I’m happy to be called an ignorant moron. I’ll happily sit here in the mud playing Mario, or Pizza Tower, and having fun and kicking my little feet.
Ironic how Bioshock isn’t like those kiddie Mario games, but you still play as a plumber.
If you want a good, spooky shooter, play Quake. If you want an immersive sim, try Deus Ex or Thief. They are way older than Bioshock, and they did things better. If you want a more modern take on the Bioshock formula, try Prey 2016. It has a lot of the same elements from Bioshock, but improved on in every conceivable way. It’s more tense, scarier, you have multiple ways of approaching situations, better stealth and a better story that actually involves the player and their choices.
I don’t recommend Bioshock, but you already know if you like it or not.
Now, would you kindly subscribe?
If you still want to hear my terrible opinions on games from that era, I reviewed the beloved Scott Pilgrim vs The World game and roasted it on an open fire.
If you want to see a positive review of a console game, check out my review for Sunset Overdrive. I also recommend that game over Bioshock.
Wait till you get a load of Bioshock Infinite. Or maybe a whiff rather, that thing is rancid.