Well, what can I say? The past few weeks (More like, month(s)) have been a blitz of gaming and all sorts of stuff. Stuff like the Orange Box (Damn Portal and it’s damn addictingness, also damn it’s impossible achievements) and, well, Bioshock.

Now, having not played the System Shock series by the same developers, I wasn’t exactly very sure what to expect. The initial parts of the game were doable but tended to be a little draggy, with the whole trouble you go through just to fulfill a simple objective such as “Go and enter yonder door.” As the game went on, however, it got strangely interesting and caught my attention in a manner similar to a steel-jawed bear trap. True, my initial guesses of what the game was about didn’t exactly ring true, but what I got was an engaging little FPS with a nice system and doable story and progression. Very atmospheric, and it can also be creepy, especially during a certain side-story part in the Fort Frolic area which I will not discuss because you should just activate that scene for yourself.

Truth be told, for the individual parts, Bioshock isn’t terribly groundbreaking. The Plasmid/Tonic system has been done better in other games, and many other games have a more engaging story, for example. It’s the sum of its parts that really brings Bioshock up above the rest. Furthermore, Bioshock has a terribly flawed inventory system, or rather, a lack of one – The only way you can check your currently equipped tonics are to run up to the nearest Gene Bank. Seriously. A Key Item numerator -occasionally- appears in the Objectives menu, but that’s about it – A game as immersive as this should HAVE a proper method to keep track of your items at hand. There is also the lack of proper RPG elements – The game is actually very linear, and you hardly have a choice to make at all, save if you want to save the Little Sisters or not. The only time when we have multiple objectives are for items requiring multiple ingredients… Which is really not the point at all.

If any of you know me well enough, you’d know that the game I hold in highest honour for an FPS would be Deus Ex. – A game that was not afraid to tackle every single little thing and is a FPS/RPG of its own class, with a simply superb and over-the-top character customization system as well as brilliant storytelling and RPG elements – And Bioshock is most certainly no Deus Ex. The only thing Bioshock has that is superior to Deus Ex, literally, would be its graphics. Maybe the AI as well, but that’s just nitpicking in general – It’s the other thing aside from graphics that gets improved with time. [A funny note - I got put off from playing much of the sequel to Deus Ex because, frankly, it was rather disappointing compared to its predecessor.]

I guess in a way it’s reminiscent of the .hack series – Only average grade anime and games, but the grand scheme of things is what makes it a cult hit. Still, I enjoy playing this thing, and am on my second playthrough right now – I guess that should be a testament to how engaging the dang thing is.

Final Impressions: Looking back, it’s rather sobering to see how much more this game could have been. I mean, perhaps it’s unfair to compare it to the likes of Deus Ex, but if they had given us a better inventory system, and worked on the characterisation a tad more, maybe it would have been a nominee for my personal Best-of-all-time list. As is, it’s just a fairly addicting, pretty and atmospheric game, but not that much more.

Final Grade: Ten out of Thirteen Plasmids.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 18th, 2008 at 9:52 am and is filed under Articles, Games, Reviews.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.