*Spoilers Alert!*
Bioshock is considered to be a spiritual successor of the System Shock series, one which I had not played before. But if they were anywhere similar to Bioshock in terms of the gameplay and atmosphere it creates, I would be really keen to try them out.
Bioshock takes place in the 1960s, and the player (as Jack) starts off on the dark vast ocean, after surviving a plane crash which left everyone, save for the player, dead. Jack's forced to take cover at a what looks like to be a light house, only to discover a bathysphere within, which eventually leads him to Rapture, an underwater utopia built by Andrew Ryan. Or should I say, Andrew Ryan had hoped that Rapture would be an utopia, which turned out to be the total opposite by the time Jack discovered its existence.
As soon as he stepped out of the bathysphere, Jack's greeted by a guy named Atlas through an intercom, after witnessing a brutal murder by a splicer (I'll get to the meaning of that term later). As the game proceeds, Atlas starts to fill in details on how Rapture became what it was, and how people started to mutate after injecting themselves with enhancement plasmids, turning them into splicers in the end. The goal of Jack was to locate Atlas' family and rescue them, and at the same time get rid of now insane Andrew Ryan and get out of Rapture for good. Things start to complicate as the player plays further into the game, which I will not divulge.
Bioshock is a mixture of first person shooting and some role-playing elements. At the start the player will start to come across some plasmids which will enhance Jack's power, at the expense of consuming EVE (think mana). Throughout the game, plasmids can be found lying around or purchased through vending machines. Weapons are upgradable, and ammunitions can be invented using raw materials found from loots, using the Invent machines. The wide variety of plasmids and weapons allows more varieties when it comes to killing the enemies. Do you want to lure the splicers into the pool of water before electrocuting them? Do you want to incinerate them and watch they burst into flames and gradually die? Or do you want to use the good ol' way and blast them off to bits with your grenade launcher? You decide. I must admit it was fun to have to so many ways to defeat the enemies, which gradually gets tougher as the game proceeds. That's where ammunition comes in, where anti-armor bullets work well against armored splicers and turrets, and anti-personnel bullets work well against the less protected enemies.
It will not be long after the start before the player encounters their first fight with the toughest enemy in Bioshock; the Big Daddy. This enemy packs a lot of punch and a single hit by them is enough to reduce Jack's health to critical condition at the start of the game. But killing them is a necessity, if you want to harvest or rescue the Little Sisters they are escorting for ADAM (ADAM is needed to purchase new plasmids and their respective slots, and also to upgrade one's health and EVE). Luckily, with the wide variety of weapons at hand, these Big Daddies are not impossible to kill; in fact, you'll get the hang after killing a few of them.
The graphics and atmosphere in Bioshock is absolutely amazing. The game worked smoothly on my new rig, and the effects were pretty excellent. The atmosphere genuinely gives one a sense of helpless and loneliness in a world where everything has gone wrong, and horrors lurk in every dark corners. That, together with the occasional music coming out from the jukeboxes, really creates the setting for a horror sci-fi story in the 60s.
My only real gripe with Bioshock, is that the ending is way too short and anti-climatic for a game with such an epic plot. I was expecting something more when I finally killed the last boss; before I knew it, I was already brought back to the starting screen. But that should not deter anyone from trying out the game, as it is easily one of the better games that is out in the over-saturated first person shooting market. The last first person shooting game that leaves me with such deep impression would be Half Life 2. Being able to be compared with Half Life 2 is no small feat, and that's how good Bioshock is.
Score: 9.0/10
The good: the atmosphere, gameplay, plot
The bad: come on man.. the ending's waaaayyyy tooo short to do justice to such an epic game.
Feel the wrath of the Little Sisters
Guess who stuck that hockey stick into that guy's head?
Mannequins? Think again.
Apparently you can buy ammunitions from vending machines in Rapture.
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