Bioshockage for the Morning
I really liked Bioshock. Hands down, it's one of the finest, most well-crafted experiences currently available in gaming. There's just a thick layer of polish surrounding the controls and feel of the weapons, the environments and how engrossing they are, the quests and storyline and the depth of the game. It's just rich, finely tuned and scrubbed to a white hot sheen of awesomeness.
It's perhaps a sad state of affairs when one of things that first jumped out at me about the game and stuck with me for the duration is the inventory management...or perhaps it's more accurate to say the lack thereof. Games like STALKER have completely turned me off with their ridiculous system of bullet, health pack and random trinket management. Bioshock could have easily fallen into that category, especially when their feature list includes inventing, a handful of different guns, health packs, eve packs (essentially mana), hacking tools, cash and more. But they didn't! Hit A to search a corpse or object. Once it's empty, the option is removed (quite annoying in Oblivion to accidentally search and research rooms full of crates). There's no weight to the items and the only restriction is that you can carry only so many. Very slick, very fast and it really kept the gameplay moving along.
I also enjoyed the RPG upgrades. Instead of allocating experience points or something like that, you simply choose to make something better. The only real decision is what to improve. So refreshing. I think the best comparison is Gran Turismo to Need for Speed. I don't care about tire pressure, how much my muffler will reduce statistic X, etc. I just want something that makes me go faster. Need for Speed does this and in the realm of RPGs or RPG like games, Bioshock nailed it.
Level design and pacing were fantastic. I love games where I can enter a room, blow everything away, then toot around at my own pace exploring and digging through stuff. I love seeing all the details that the developers poured into each and every room and how you could see just how nuts the current antagonist was by their surroundings (what was up with Cohen?).
Enemy design was top notch -- fighting splicers and big daddies were just a blast. The player is given such a huge assortment of weapons and plasmid abilities to fight them with, not to mention turrets and some environment interactivity. Every battle, according to the devs, had the potential to end differently, but unfortunately I found that this wasn't really the case. I know I may be asking too much, but I wanted more splicer types. I also wanted to see an additional big daddy type or two and definitely more big daddy battles.
The game isn't a short one (thank you devs for respecting our money and sense of value!) and by the end I found myself hacking cameras, turrets and vending machines (again), wasting a ton of splicers (again) and hosing the big daddies with the best weapon combos I'd discovered. It got a bit redundant, though not so much do to the awesome environments and great story. Such fantastic characters!
I think 2K Games said something about turning it into a franchise. I'm not really sure where they can take the story, but I know what I'd love to see in a sequel. More unit types (like I mentioned above) would be cool. Vehicles, like submersibles or even diving suits would also be really fun if done well. More environmental interactivity (like ice putting out fire!) would be slick and if at all possible, multiplayer. I think the devs could take their awesome take on weapons, plasmids and upgrades to turn it into a fantastic multiplayer experience. Objective based, persistent unlocks -- gives me tingles.
(posted by grant at 10/03/2007)
