I had tried to play Bioshock once a long time ago, around 6 months after it came out and I found it to be a boring, exhaustive game on the Xbox 360. No one told me at the time, but I was passing up on one of videogaming's masterpieces. They would tell me later, after I traded it in and my Xbox had red ringed. Several years later I bought it on sale, preparing for the day that would eventually come when I was ready to enjoy it properly. I just had a feeling. A whole year after that, was three days ago when I began a new game on Bioshock fully intent on completing it and finding out what the hell was so good about it, and why I hated it so much the first time around.
Spoilers ahead, assuming you can spoil a game as beloved as Bioshock 4 years after its release.
Introduction
First thing the game does is build a set piece, and does it well. A plane crashes in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and one man wades from the devastation into the certain death of the icy waters, when he sees a massive structure stabbing out of the ocean. This is Rapture. It is the impossible made possible by two colossal figures. Andrew Ryan and ADAM. Before the intro is over you are introduced to Andrew Ryan, to ADAM, to the plasmids and the splicers, the big daddy and the little sister, and of course the sorry state of affairs in the marvel at the bottom of the sea that is Rapture. There's almost so much information that you're likely to skim over the fact you haven't been introduced to your main character at all.
Characterization
The game has you playing as a mysterious man who's only hint of a past is the vaguely prisony tattoos on his wrists. I learned after playing that the complete lack of character development in the first act of the game was actually not a calculated move by the lead designer and writer Ken Levine. It was an accident. About half way done writing the game, he looked up from his writing table and said, "Whoops. I don't have a main character." But he turned this weakness into a strength and created the fascinating story of a brainwashed assassin from that. The main character is a perfect example of the versatility of storytelling in games. What other storytelling medium can tell as compelling a story with no character to speak of.
PLAY NOTES
At the risk of being less than thorough, I won't include my play notes for every level, but I will break each one down briefly and point out what they do right and what they do wrong. The game is divided into three acts. Act 1 is everything from the intro to the moment when Andrew Ryan crushes the submarine carrying Atlas's family. There is the intro level, and two other levels, the Medical Pavilion and Smuggler's Hideout. Throughout these levels the tape recordings that you can gather tell the story of Rapture. How it came to be, how it came to end. We also are introduced to some very interesting characters. Steinman, the lunatic doctor, and Peachy, the man who betrayed Fontaine to Ryan. These two figures are the boss encounters of each level and through them, the game tells us the story of how Rapture was ruined, and the battle that went down between the cities main titanic figures.
This first act is the most well structured part of the game. You start a level, you find some new tools, you have a few interesting encounters, you fight a boss, you move on to the next level all while being fed bits of story as you collect the tape recordings. The levels are capped off with an exciting battle and you feel like you did some good before moving on. I genuinely have no complaints about this entire portion of the game.
Act 2 is a different story. Act 2 covers the moment you enter Arcadia, to the moment you confront Andrew Ryan. This act not only has the worst level in the game, but showcases all the flaws the game has. Arcadia is an example of level design at its worst. It is big, almost as big as any other part of the game, but its also hard to navigate, and full of nooks and crannies and vines and foliage that obscure your vision. After act one so expertly trains you to look everywhere for tape recordings, they punish the player by making an entire portion of this level empty of them. Then they make a second area for this level to make it even bigger so they can send you on an inane collection quest. The cinematic event for this level is pretty great and the idea of a giant forest at the bottom of the ocean is cool, but the story moments here felt very artificial and the collection quest trope bogs down Bioshock for the rest of the game. And after all the crap this level puts you through, they don't even have the decency to throw a proper boss at you.
The next level, Fort Frolic does something very amazing. The boss of Fort Frolic, the homicidal artist Sander Cohen, sends you this way and that to assassinate his proteges. Instead of continuing to throw wave after wave of throw away splicers at you, they tone down the random enemies and begin developing these minor characters. They breath a little life into these three evil, sad men, and then it is that much more engaging when you come face to face with them. I would have liked to see this done more, but sadly there is no repeat performance.
Finally you are at Andrew Ryan's fortress. This level is a gorgeous tapestry of gargantuan machinery towering over your head in a hellish magma filled cavern, where you perform another collection quest. This feels almost tossed off so soon after the last one, and really makes no sense. Why is there even a half finished bomb laying around in some crawlspace? Wouldn't the narrative have been better served if you had to hunker down and battle waves of enemies as you charged forward and destroyed some heavily armored power core? The tape recordings all talk about how incredibly well defended this place is, but you only kill a few dozen men and walk around like its any other place. If it weren't for how stunningly great this level looks and Andrew Ryan babbling his objectivist nonsense over your short wave, this level would be unplayable and a completely anticlimactic end to act 2.
My main problem with Act 2 is that they abandoned the boss fight structure of Act 1. There is only one boss in Act 2 and you are rewarded in Act 3 for skipping it entirely. There's just no closure in any of these levels.
Act 3 was the most enjoyable for me. In Olympus Heights you get to see the homes of every major player in the city of Rapture, and thanks to the way Bioshock tells its story through the environment, every character you've met up till now is able to tell you how they feel about the fall of Rapture and declare their views all at once. Its a beautifully designed level and the effect of hearing everyone's final say one after the other is pretty special. I also enjoyed the goal of this level. While it is basically just another collection quest, this time you are collecting a cure for your waning maximum health and malfunctioning plasmids. This goal changes the game play and forces the player to engage the story and experiment with different tools. I wish they had done something like this earlier in the game to make you try out everything; instead I went through the game cycling through the machine gun and shotgun.
Then you are in Point Prometheus. Some people feel the story lags a bit here, but I think the tension of just you, Fontaine and Tenenbaum is excellently played. Tenenbaum may not be totally trustworthy and Fontaine knows her well, he almost had me convinced that I was just being tricked again, especially since she basically slipped right into Atlas's shoes after he stopped pulling the strings. And of course the process of transforming yourself into a big daddy is a collection quest. The trope actually makes the most sense here, and if they had done it only once this whole game, here would have been the place to do it. It's a shame they don't change the game play in anyway once you become a big daddy. A high powered rivet gun would have been nice for the next section of the game.
The next and final section, The Proving Grounds is an escort mission, which is normally a very bad thing, somehow, it works here. In other areas where they tried to inject challenges into the game they usually design what are basically traps that seem tailored to frustrate you, but here it works well. When the little sister stops to gather ADAM, you defend her from two sides. Other than the way she walks very slowly and constantly tells you to "Hurry up Mr. B. Angels don't wait for slowpokes." when you're way ahead of her, this is a fun way to end the game.
Finally, the last boss of the game. It's very fun and exciting, and my only complaint against it is that it is broken. If you use the decoy plasmid, everyone will start shooting it, including Fontaine. This gives you ample time to unload your grenades or crossbow bolts into him, making short work of the climactic finale. If you want to enjoy the challenge of the final boss, don't use the decoy. How did they not catch something like that in testing?
Okay, it looks like I kinda did just type up my play notes.
Whoops.
Well, now that I've gone through every level, I'll talk about what the game did right.
What BioShock Does Right
The first and foremost innovative and impressive thing that the game does is deliver its narrative through the game world, rather than cut scenes. While you do get a few cut scenes to start the game, end the game, top off acts 1 and 2, introduce bosses and murder a couple interesting characters, for the most part there are no cut scenes. The story is delivered in a fashion that doesn't hinder play at all. The story of Rapture is told through collectibles that you can play while you run and gun. The plot involving you, Ryan, and Fontaine is all delivered through automatic radio transmissions that can easily be ignored. Most importantly, every little detail of the world of Rapture has a story to tell you, but those can all easily be overlooked or ignored by someone who just wants to throw exploding canisters with the telekinesis plasmid at disfigured masquerade ball-goers.
Ken Levine has a lot to say about this method of storytelling. He says you have to understand that most gamers aren't going to care about the intricate details of the plot you been writing since high school. In an interview where he discusses the game's story he said that the original plot had love triangles, and betrayals, and redemption, etc. but all that had to get cut down and made palatable to the gamer who doesn't really give a shit. To be honest, I think he made the right choice. There is still a lot of detail in there, but not so much you'd get lost in the convoluted story (like in any final fantasy game for instance) and you feel all the more clever because you took the time to seek the story out, rather than be spoon fed.
And it deserves to be mentioned again the way they designed Fort Frolic and Olympus Heights. Characterizing minor enemies to make the encounters more engaging is a brilliant idea and can do a lot to break up the monotony of killing truckloads of stock baddies through an entire game and just to make an area of the game more interesting. For instance, imagine a dungeon in Zelda where a Lizfos who works for some evil boss monster stalks you through the entire dungeon delivering some comedic lines and scurrying away every time you send him packing, coming back with a different interesting strategy (and more snappy one liners) later in the dungeon. Would you prefer that over some random mini boss who's name you never even bother to learn?
And in Olympus Heights, making your goal a cure for some ailment to your game play was a great idea that made the player engage in both the story and the game play more than they would otherwise have to. This kind of mechanic is best utilized at a point when the player has enough variety in his tool set to make it interesting, but not too late that they cant use what they learned from the experience to enhance the rest of the game. Making the story and the goal the same thing makes the game better.
What Bioshock Does Wrong
Where the game let me down most was how it allowed itself to bebogged down by tired video game tropes. In 7 levels we have 3 quests to collect materials to build something. Its monotonous at best and lazy at worst. Any of these quests could have been replaced with an intense action sequence or some kind of involved puzzle to make them more engaging and less like each other, so the player doesn't feel like he's doing the same thing over and over just to progress. That's called grinding.
There also weren't enough bosses or boss like events. There were 4 bosses by my count, mostly clustered in the first half of the game, and one of them rewards you for skipping past it. This leaves some levels of the game feeling a little open ended. You don't want your player to get to the door leading to the next area of the game and thinking to himself, "So soon? That was all?"
The moral choice in Bioshock was frankly just a bunch of malarky. You are asked to choose between being a cruel man with plenty of ADAM or a benevolent man who risks being unprepared in Rapture to help a small child. Except that you still receive the same amount of ADAM when Tenenbaum gifts you the teddy bears for saving enough little sisters. The "moral" choice here is more like a choose your own ending, which feels more like artificially adding to replay value.
And lastly, a small gripe. I felt like anytime the game tried to create a challenge area, like the beehives in the farmer's market for instance, they designed them a bit poorly and leave the player feeling more frustrated than empowered. But really, this is a small gripe, because these challenge areas are spares and usually over before they can drive you to pulling your own hair out.
In Review
What Bioshock does well, it does better than anybody. The story of Rapture is a story well told, and Bioshock uses every storytelling tool available to deliver an excellent and unique narrative that still distinguishes it self from anything in video games available 4 years later. Rapture is a robust world packed with details you wont want to miss, but that won't hinder the player from shooting creeps crawling along the ceiling with hooks. The level design can make the game a bit hard to play at times and allows itself to be bogged down with tired tropes that nobody liked when they were new, but letting those stop you from getting through this game will be a big loss. Bioshock was an innovative title that did things I've never seen anywhere else and would certainly like to see incorporated into more games. After all this time, it still stands with the best of them. If you can ignore a few minor flaws you will be treated to a brilliant experience that you will be all the richer for.
