Military.com Game Review: Bioshock

Valerie Gorchinski - Military.com

Jan 02, 2008

"Bioshock" for PC and Xbox 360

Since its release in October of 2007, Bioshock has received more than its fair share of attention. After posting more than one outside review of the hugely successful game from 2k Games, we here at Military.com decided to sit down and see what the hubbub was all about.

I put the disc in to my Xbox 360 and readied myself for some shoot-'em-up action in a surreal underwater world. The opening movie tells you next to nothing about what is going to transpire in the actual game and leaves you thinking ... HUH? And then you find yourself litterally thrown into the flaming waters. Your only option is to swim straight for a huge, dark, ominous building on an island barely big enough to hold it. Well, I suppose that you have a second option of swimming into flaming wreckage of what used to be your airplane... but that really isn't much of an option, now is it?

Things get creepy as soon as you walk through the unsettlingly open door of the dark, ominous building. The art direction and sound design are designed to keep you on the edge of your seat and moving forward. I highly recommend playing with good stereo sound or quality headphones for maximum "creep you out" factor. The time it takes to get into the meat of the game was blissfully short, and you're shooting lightning from your left hand and in the thick of a battle for your life against an army of mutants running around the underwater city of Rapture in around 15 minutes. The art-deco steam punk quality of everything around you can fully ruin one's ability to suspend disbelief in the crazy world you find yourself in- after all, how does a steam-powered gun turret know to shoot you and not the mutants, little girls, or big daddies running around?

Splicers -- the aforementioned mutants, who used to be human but apparently went overboard on the gene altering chemicals and now have one main goal in life, to kill you. They’re not especially difficult to kill but do make the game difficult because there are about a thousand of them in every room. They also have a habit of appearing out of nowhere as soon as the door you need to go through to continue the game becomes locked, which happens so often it stops being a surprise and starts becoming routine. This could all be something of a roadblock if it weren't for the fact that you never really die-- you just re-spawn, and there is enough health, food, and ammo to be found on the floor that I started to wonder if coffee and bullets really grow out of cement.

One of the more interesting aspects of Bioshock is that there is an element of choice in the game. Your actions throughout the game dramatically impact the ending. Should you choose to kill the Little Sisters-- young girls who harbor a substance called "Adam" that you can harvest for more power, your ending will differ from the ending you’ll see should you decide to tough it out and play nice with the evil little girls and their Big Daddies (who are basically big giant guys in big giant metal diving suits who are about as easy to eliminate as a nagging mother-in-law.)

On your side through all of it are numerous plasmids and weapons. Robots which would otherwise try to kill you will become your allies after you hack them. Plasmids are the chemicals that enable you to do things like shoot lightning from your hand and by the end of the game you’ll find that there are so many you're not sure what all of them do anymore.

For all of its faults, Bioshock is still easily the one of the best games to be released in 2007. It's well written, well designed, well drawn and well scored. It also achieved the improbable by getting me to play and truly enjoy something which, at its core, is a first person shooter; a genre that I generally play only begrudgingly with very few exceptions. I'm definitely looking forward to what’s next from 2K Boston. And in the meantime, I might give Bioshock another run to try for a different ending.

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