Bioshock returns...

Bioshock returns...
1st Feb 2010 - 13:18	by jansic
As much as I disliked it I couldn't just leave Bioshock there unfinished. This weekend I put a little time aside to complete it, which I did. Overall it took about 12 hours of total play time, I saw pretty much everything and achieved the 'good' ending. A little back-track-reloading also allowed me to get the bad ending but it really wasn't worth the extra effort. Overall, Bioshock is much less of an innovative modern game than its hype portrayed. Design-wise it's decidedly average, reeking of late 90's level layout & mission structure, especially towards the end - the level where you lose control of your plasmids is lame and the penultimate 'escort' level is wholly frustrating and annoying. Story-wise it plays out a lot like SS2, in fact, pretty much exactly like SS2, so there's no innovation there either. Often I don't really care about the quality of audio in games and I tend not to notice the difference between average audio and very good audio. Bioshock is one of those rare games with sub-standard audio, not in terms of quality but in terms of its use. Bioshock is an incredibly noisy game. Everything in it makes a sound and the volume levels are set in such a way that they screw with the positional audio cues; something as simple as reloading your gun can pull your attention to the left - when your gun and the enemy are both on your right. Nowhere are the volume levels worse than with the dialogue; especially the audio diaries and the radio comms. Frequently you'll turn a new corner, trigger the next bit of exposition and end up in frantic fight which blots out things you needed to hear. The inventory system is also gripe-worthy. You have an inventory but you can't view it, so you can't tell what ingredients you're holding (for the U-invent machines). When you loot things (like bodies, desks and bins) the loot might contain undesirable items along with desirable ones. Since there's no way to filter out the ones you want and there's no way of seeing how much of an ingredient you have, you end up always taking everything - just in case. By this reasoning looting really should be automatic. As an aside there's a 'search again' tonic that lets you optionally look harder in containers to find more stuff - the problem is, if you do 'search again' you lose the original stuff. Mechanically you know it's just done another dice-roll but from a realism point of view it makes no sense... I could pull it apart all day but now it's finished and really can move on to a better game.

Replies: |1-10|

3rd Feb 2010 - 11:08	by Ding
The exposition-covered-by-gunfire thing annoyed me too. Whereas overall I enjoyed Bioshock, I...couldn't really see what all the fuss was about either! I guess if you've never seen anything like it before, it's something special, but then, you can say that about anything!