Bioshock is one of the most
celebrated games released for the Xbox 360. It a recent poll, in certain
circles, it was even voted Game of the Generation – quite a title to live up
to. I started playing the game around its release in August 2007 before I had
internet access as none of my achievements have time stamps. There was one DLC
achievement which I didn’t bother with until recently, hence the review.
The basic story of Bioshock follows ‘Jack,’ a guy whose plane crashes
next to a lighthouse in the middle of the ocean. He survives the crash and goes
into the lighthouse where he finds an underwater submarine which takes him to
the underwater metropolis of Rapture. He meets a friendly Irish guy over a
radio and proceeds to explore the city, assumingly to look for a way out alive.
However, his very first action contradicts his want of survival. The first time
he comes across a syringe filled with blue glowing liquid, he injects himself
with it, no questions asked.
This kind of behaviour is bizarre. Mind you, Jack will also instantly
consume any food item, alcohol item and cigarettes that you click on, even if
you are searching a dead enemy so he clearly has no willpower either.
Once Jack gets settled in to the Rapture experience, the game
essentially boils down to walking around an underwater city touching little
girls. There is a moral choice system built in and you can either touch them in
a good way or bad way with varying rewards for both. Giving a girl a bad touch
results in a higher immediate reward but you will get the bad ending, however
touching them real nice will cause them to like you and bring you cuddly toys
filled with weapons and other stuff to help prevent your death. Essentially, it
pays to touch little girls in a good way.
Gameplay wise, after returning to this game from the likes of Destiny, I found it very strange to switch
to a first-person shooter without a manual aim function. This was especially
problematic for me because the left trigger, my usual go-to aim button, is
actually the plasmid-use button. This meant that every time I wanted to take
aim at an enemy I would simply raise my glowing left hand – not good when
trying to survive.
That said, the gameplay is where Bioshock
scores all of its points. It is clean and well thought out. I did not
experience any crashes. I did not get stuck on any scenery and the gameplay
always flowed. The action isn’t going one-hundred miles an hour but it also
didn’t suffer from Dead Space’s severe
lack of pace. All in all, it is solid, balanced and well-rounded.
Achievements – 1,100 Points – 51
Achievements
Generally speaking, Bioshock’s achievements
are relatively straight forward. As mentioned above, it has a moral choice
built in to the story and a missable achievement relating to the touching of
little girls (Little Sister Saviour). You have to touch all the little girls in
a good way to get the missable achievement but by doing this, you won’t be able
to collect the maximum amount of upgrade points needed to fully upgrade your
stuff. This can cause problems if you are playing on hard mode and are not very
good at shooters, like me.
However, two playthoughs isn’t a problem for a game like Bioshock. It is good enough to have
replay value and while I had to run through the entire game again to get the
last achievement, it was enjoyable. The game is not unnecessarily long or slow
(Dead Space).
Aside from the Little Sister Saviour Achievement there are 11 other
missables, including some of my favourite types – secret missables! You have to
take picture of Sander Cohen’s corpse after you kill him and also find his
secret room. The second one isn’t a real problem as you should get that through
exploring anyway but the first one is a load of cack. I don’t see how this
would be apparent unless it was advertised and it isn’t covering any storyline
issues so why the hell is it a secret?
There are also collectible achievements and as you cannot revisit
previous areas of the game, these are missable by default so it makes sense to
do two playthroughs anyway.
Downloadable Content
This is probably the most infuriating DLC in history. It was released
in December 2007, not actually that long after Bioshock, but I had already got the 1,000 Points by the point. My
lack of internet didn’t help either. Also despite being described in certain
places as a title update, I can assure you it is not. A title update is one
that is automatically applied or triggered when playing the game with an
internet connection. You have to actually go into the Xbox Market Place and
download the Ryan Industries Plasmids and Gene Tonics expansion pack in order to
be able to disable the Vita-Chambers and Unlock the Brass Balls achievement –
this certainly does not qualify as a ‘title update.’
Getting the achievement itself it fairly straight forward. You don’t
have to play on hard mode unless you really want to. Instead you can play the
game through on ‘easy’ and change the difficulty to ‘hard’ at the end of the
final battle and the achievement will unlock.
Bioshock remains one of the
best shooting games on Xbox today. I doubt there will be a more original idea
released again especially with the ever-soaring popularity of shooting games
like Call of Duty and Battlefield. Developers will more than likely
clone these two instead of coming up with anything new.
