Leveling Down

The Little Sister and Big Daddy pair, a scary combination of a ghastly girl and her genetically enhanced bodyguard.

The ride of gaming bliss that is BioShock has finally ended for me. After spending whatever time I could last week, most of the weekend, and Monday night, I’ve completed it. It’s crazy how excited I was to play the game when I first picked it up on Tuesday, but one week later I’m already mentally preparing to move onto Blue Dragon. Still, BioShock is one of the best games I’ve ever played on the 360. Reviewers love this game, but the question now is how much this reviewer loves the game. Do I love it enough to give it a perfect score?

Intro
BioShock is a first person shooter game with RPG and survival horror elements from Irrational Games, the developers behind System Shock 2. Many people have been waiting for BioShock, due to how much they enjoyed System Shock 2. It was not surprising why System Shock 2 had a strong cult following, as it was also a well-done survival horror first person shooter game with RPG elements on the PC that didn’t have much an equal. The main difference in premise between the two games was that System Shock 2 took place on board a starship while BioShock takes place underwater.

Originally, BioShock had a very had time securing a publisher. Most publishing companies blew it off as another FPS game like everything else on the 360 and PC. Eventually, 2KGames picked the title up, giving the development team complete freedom in what they wanted to make. It looked like the development studio Irrational Games was happy with their 2KGames publishers, and vice versa, as 2KGames went on to acquire Irrational Games and changed their name to 2K Boston/2K Australia.

It looks like 2KGames made a good choice, as BioShock was released to critical acclaim on the Xbox 360 and PC, running on a modified Unreal Engine 3. It has already been hailed as the front runner for the 2007 Game of the Year by several magazines and 360 fans, due to its “total package” of gameplay, storyline, and presentation. The creator of the game, Ken Levine, said that he drew a lot of inspiration for BioShock’s storyline from utopian and dystopian authors such as Ayn Rand and George Orwell. He also wanted to highlight the moral issues around stem cell research, a controversial issue we are tackling with today.

A Little Sister prepares her syringe for ADAM extraction from a corpse while the Big Daddy protects her.

Storyline and Premise of the Game
The storyline to BioShock is one of the best ones I’ve experienced, as it seems to be more out of a literary work instead of pop culture. As Jack, you are on a plane that crashes out in the middle of the ocean and discovers the world of Rapture in 1960. Throughout this world, we discover the results of how everything went wrong by audio logs and journals.

The world of Rapture was created by Andrew Ryan to serve as a utopia of the best people in the world, but due to an unforeseen scientific discovery, chaos ensued. The scientific discovery of genetic modification in Rapture became very successful, but very deadly. Genetic modification was only possible due to pure stem cells which were soon called ADAM. Citizens of Rapture became crazy and started killing each other, looking for ADAM like animals looking for food.

The scientist who discovered ADAM and genetic modification also created the Little Sisters. The Little Sisters were female children mentally conditioned to harvest ADAM from dead bodies through the use of a hypodermic syringe. Because the Little Sisters were carrying ADAM around and were easy targets, they were accompanied by Big Daddies, genetically modified humans in large diving suits that protected the Little Sisters from any harm.

Not knowing anything upon stepping foot into the world of Rapture, you are guided through radio by a mysterious man named Atlas, who wants you to help rescue his wife and child. Andrew Ryan, the creator of Rapture, is aware of your presence in Rapture and has his security measures in place to deal with your intrusion. Besides dealing with Ryan’s security, you have to deal with the crazy inhabitants and eventually the Little Sisters and Big Daddies as well.

Due to the advancement of genetic modification in the world of Rapture, there are clone chambers everywhere so if you “die,” you can respawn right out of a cloning facility. There is controversy in the decision the designers made to allow for the world to stay the same when you respawn at a cloning facility, as it made many of the challenges considerably easier. For example, if you took a Big Daddy down to half his life and he killed you, you could respawn at the nearest cloning chamber and he’d still be at half his life. People felt that this made the game too easy, but others argued that it allowed for everyone a chance to enjoy the game. I welcomed this clone chamber, as it allowed me to enjoy the game without feeling frustrated. I recommend playing the game on hard, since you’ll walk right out of a clone chamber anyway when you die – might as well experience it on its most challenging setting.

If a Big Daddy is looking at you and you see red, you’re in trouble.

Game Mechanics
At its core, Bioshock is a FPS game. You play it in first person, you find several different firearms, and you can simply blast your way through the game. But BioShock adds many RPG layers of game play to its FPS skeleton, giving the player several options in how he wants to go through the game.

The Winter Blast combat plasmid allows you to free foes in place and shatter them.

The introduction of plasmids to the game adds a level of development and growth to the game that is generally not present in typical FPS games. Plasmids are special skills and abilities that you can inject into yourself. Some plasmids allow you to use combat-based skills such as the ability to light enemies on fire with your arm, conjure a target dummy to distract enemies, and use telekinesis to pick up an object and throw it at an enemy without even touching it. Combat skill plasmids tend to remind me of magic spells used in the typical fantasy-RPG games. Then there are passive plasmids that you can equip that allow various bonuses such as increased health gain when using first aid kits, turning invisible when not moving, life leech on melee attacks, etc.

Each plasmid type can have a maximum of six slots that you unlock with the purchase of ADAM.

You start the game with one plasmid slot for each of the four plasmid types: Combat, Engineering, Active, and Physical. There are about 10-15 of each of the four types, although some replace others since they are upgrades that are the more powerful version (kind of like Fire1, Fire2, Fire3 in typical RPG games). Throughout the game, you can find more plasmids of each type, but you are limited in which ones to equip based on the number of slots you have. Each plasmid type can max out at 6 slots each, for a total of 24 plasmids being equipped. In order to increase the number of plasmid slots you have, you need to buy them with Adam.

The most prominent RPG element in the game is currency. There are two types of currency in the game, Dollars and ADAM. Dollars can be found throughout the game world – on enemies, in furniture, on corpses, etc. There are several machines throughout the world of Rapture that take dollars. You can buy various items such as Med Kits (to fill your life bar), Hypos (to fill your EVE bar), various ammo for your guns, etc. ADAM is tougher to find; it can only be gathered from the Little Sisters that are protected by Big Daddies. By killing or saving a Little Sister you gain ADAM and ADAM is used to augment your own body. You can spend ADAM to buy more plasmid slots, certain plasmid skills that you cannot find elsewhere in the game, and even buy increases to your health and EVE bars.

The weapons are pretty typical in the game, ranging from guns to grenade launchers and flamethrowers. You can upgrade the weapons at upgrade machines throughout the game. Each weapon is allowed two upgrades, one consisting of more damage, and a second one unique to the weapon. For example, the second handgun upgrade allows for a bigger clip size, while the second grenade launcher upgrade allows for you to not take any damage from your own grenades.

Each gun also has several types of ammo that can be used. There is the default ammo but there is also variant ammo that can be found or created. For example, with the shotgun, the default ammo is the shotgun round. But you can also find, make, or buy two other shotgun round types – an electric shotgun round that electrocutes and stuns an enemy when you shoot him with it, or an explosive round that not only performs a small area effect damage around the enemy, but also sets it on fire. After discovering an invention machine a few hours into the game, you will be allowed to pick up spare parts throughout the game like rubber hoses and empty shell casings. These raw materials will allow you to build ammo at the invention stations based on specific recipes.

The hacking mini-game consists of swapping pipe pieces to guide the liquid from one point to another.

Hacking is also big part of the game as there are doors, safes, security cameras, turrets, drones, etc. that you have to deal with throughout the game. Hacking enemy cameras, turrets, and drones allows them to switch to your side, so that when they detect enemies they will attack them instead of you. The hacking has its own mini-game similar to Pipe Dream, where you need to swap pipe pieces to guide the flow of liquid from the entrance to the exit. It’s interesting and innovative the first few times you do it, but it does gets boring eventually. Fortunately, the developers realized this and allow you two ways to skip the hacking. You can either “buyout” the hack using cash to skip the mini-game or use an automatic hacking tool that you can find or build. There are also engineering plasmids that you can pick up which allow you to hack easier, such as a slower liquid speed and less alarm pieces (if the liquid hits an alarm piece, the alarm goes off and drones attack you).

Taking pictures of enemies allow you to research them and do more damage to them

The camera is the last main “gameplay” element of the game. After getting the camera, you can start taking pictures of enemies in the game for research purposes. There are three research levels for each enemy type and each research level is gained through good photos. Each photo you take of an enemy will give you a grade of an A, B, C, or nothing. The better the grade, the more “experience points” you get for researching the enemy. The grade is determined by how good the shot is (is the enemy centered, is it an action shot, etc.) as well as deductions for taking a picture of the same enemy (duplicate photos of the same enemy reduce the photo grade considerably). Basically, you can’t keep taking a shot of the same enemy to level up. Leveling up each time allows you to do more damage against a particular enemy type, for a total of three damage upgrades for the three research levels. Photo research is optional, but it helps make enemies considerably easier as you play through the game.

Next to your life and EVE bar is a number, which tells you how many med kits and hypos you have remaining that you can use.

Achievement System
Initially when I first looked at the Achievements, I believed that they were very thoughtful and I would enjoy them. To a degree, I like how there were a lot of Achievements, but I am disappointed that they were not very creative.

First of all, they had one interesting Achievement that required you to electrocute enemies in the water. That was cool, since it made you aware of a gameplay element that you may not have thought of otherwise. Unfortunately, the developers didn’t put any other interesting Achievements in the game, as the rest of the Achievements were basically gained from simply playing through the game. Why weren’t there Achievements for doing more interesting or notable stuff? Using telekinesis to throw a corpse at an enemy, taking down a Big Daddy without being hurt, killing an enemy by getting him to activate one of your trip wires, etc. With so many different ways to play through the game, I wish the developers devoted some Achievements to highlight the more skillful actions you could do.

Second of all, there are no Achievements devoted to replay value. I was able to go through the game once and get all 1000 Achievement points. If the developers were more thoughtful, they could have encouraged multiple play-throughs of the game, doubling or tripling its length. Having beaten it, I can say that the initial ride is amazing, but there is little to no replay value. For example, one of the Achievements is related to dealing with every Little Sister in the game, whether it’s harvesting them or saving them. There’s also a separate Achievement to save every Little Sister. Thus, to get both of these Achievements, you simply save every Little Sister. There’s no Achievement for harvesting every Little Sister, which made me sad since that would have led to the more “evil” second ending. I expected to beat it once playing as a good guy, and then a second time as a bad guy. But it’s hard to want to sit down and play through it again without any Achievements for taking the evil path.

Before the game was launched, someone said that one of the mystery Achievements was to go through the game with your plasmid powers and wrench only (no firearms). This was a great idea, and I was disappointed to see that such an Achievement did not make it into the game. I would have gladly played through the game a second or third time with this handicap if there was an Achievement related to it. I myself would have loved for there to be an Achievement to beat the game on Hard without using any of the respawn chambers, as that would have been a challenge and it would have made this game last much longer.

Many of the psychos remaining in Rapture wear masks to hide their distorted faces from the abuse of ADAM.

Final Thoughts
Besides the unimaginative Achievement system, there are some other minor issues I have with the game. The first is that I didn’t like that your cash cap was at $500 – throughout the game I probably missed thousands of dollars just because I was capped at $500 and could not spend it on anything. A second minor issue I had is that the button for hacking a turret or drone was the same button assigned to using a Hypo, which would fill your EVE bar. It was frustrating when I wanted to hack something only to see myself using these disposable items instead.

Finally, the last minor issue I have with the game is its weak use of moral choice considering how much hype it got. In BioShock, a moral choice of whether to harvest or to save a Little Sister is made because by killing one and harvesting it, you get 160 ADAM but if you save it you only get 80. The issue here is that for every 3 Little Sisters you save you are rewarded with an extra 200 ADAM anyway. For example, if you harvested 3 Little Sisters you’d get 480 ADAM, but if you saved 3 you’d get 440. There’s practically no difference. If you got far less ADAM for saving the Little Sisters, it would demonstrate how much tougher it was to play on the “good path.” Then you could play it through on the “evil path” a second time much easier with all the extra ADAM you gained from killing.

Even though I had issues with the Achievement system and the minor issues I mentioned above, the 25 hours that it took me to go through the game were among the most enjoyable gaming hours I’ve had in a very long time. The gameplay was innovative and fun, the storyline was immersive and interesting, and the production values were top notch. I give the game an A – probably the best single player 360 game I’ve played so far, but still not a perfect game. If the game designers had actually designed the game such that there was more of a different between going good or evil, I would have probably given the game a perfect A+ score. Unfortunately, the designers just decided that playing through as good would give you all the Achievements and basically provide you with the same amount of ADAM as if you were to play through it as evil making the choice obvious how you should play it.

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