Repeated shock, horror optional.

Repeated shock, horror optional.
26th Jan 2010 - 13:27	by jansic
I recently borrowed Bioshock from a friend. Eager to see what all the fuss was all about I installed it and started playing pretty much immediately. Bioshock has a bit of a retro look in terms of its graphics but also a very retro feel to its gameplay. It's set in an underwater city, but it could just as well have been set in space. Hang on, I've played Bioshock before - in 1998, except back then it was called System Shock 2! BioShock is a different game to SS2 (well, it tries), the graphics and audio are better (if you like shrink-wrapped-plastic lighting, flakey positional audio and out-of-sync subtitles), the story's different (well, they renamed the characters) and the gameplay mechanic is new and innovative - okay, I definitely lied about that one - guns are still 'guns', psi powers are 'plasmids', cybermodules are 'adam', psi-hypos are 'eve' and hacking is, err, 'pipemania'. I suspect that if I hadn't played System Shock 2 through two, three maybe even 4 times, then Bioshock would be groundbreaking. As it is Bioshock is a retrograde step in modern gaming. If it was a carbon copy of SS2 it might have stood a chance, but stripping out parts that added depth (like an inventory and ambient research) and keeping the parts that detracted from SS2 isn't really the way to do it. Spawing enemies into empty rooms was lame back in '98 and it didn't get any less lame in 2007. Oh, there is one thing, Bioshock tricks you with a pseudo-moral dilemma - do you kill or cure to get your cybermodules. While there's a minor (numeric) penalty for being good, there's no concept of moral-alignment and because there are no NPCs there's no point caring about the choice you make. So what was the point, really? I'm 6 hours in and I really can't be bothered to continue. The story is so full of holes it'd let water into the city. The challenge is an arduous crawl, death is an inconvenience and overall the rewards aren't worth wasting time on. I have some Fallout 3 DLC to play somewhere...

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