Voor wie geinteresseerd is in de PC Gamer review. Dit is alleen de tekst. Voor de plaatjes zul je het blad moeten kopen.
Waarschuwing: de review is lang, maar liefst zes pagina's in het blad. Het aantal spoilers is beperkt, maar lees hem niet als je helemaal verrast wilt worden.
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This review is a strictly enforced spoiler-free zone. It's *vital* that you don't let anyone spoil BioShock for you, and three words would ruin it.
So kindly refrain from reading any forums and the like until you've bought, played, and completed the game. Which is something you should do as quickly as possible. Partly because it's an unbelievably fine game, but also because I'm not sure how long I can go without talking about the bit where (spoiler deleted. Sigh. - Ed).
Some of the things that make it so extraordinary are things I can't tell you about without spoiling them, so this review is going to be about the ones that I can. All I'll say about the premise is what they say on the back of the box: it's 1960, you're on a plane, and it explodes over the ocean in the middle of the night. It's a spectacularly beautiful opening, from the moment your head breaks the flame-glinting surface of the oil-black water with a spluttering gasp, to when crackly violas groan out a quietly mournful fanfare to your first glimpse of Rapture, Bioshock's underwater metropolis.
It was supposed to be a refuge, where brilliant minds could free themselves of the burden of lesser ones. But geniuses are not well-known for their psychological stability, and the extensive self-modification possibilities of their stem-cell technology - 'Adam' - freed them to inflict their delusions and neuroses on themselves. What's left of their utopia is a dripping ghost city of mutilated, murderous freaks. It's one of the most extraordinary places I've ever explored in a videogame.
Once there, you're led through the game's unusual fundamentals: a wrench to hit people with - familiar enough - and a Plasmid. Plasmids are Rapture's technomagic, and they tend to immobilise, weaken or trick enemies rather than kill them directly. Mixing them with the game's more conventional weapons is a magnificently creative and violent process.
You're also introduced to hacking, the system by which you can befriend any turret, drone or security camera by, er, playing a minigame identical to Pipe Mania (snipr.com/pipem). Whatever the logic may be, it works: it's tense, stressful, and fun. I had my dictaphone recording as I played and at one point you can hear me saying the word "Fuck!" 26 times during a single hacking op.
One of the game's more radical quirks, however, isn't obvious until you die. You can't. When you run out of health, you emerge from a regeneration chamber with the game world exactly as you left it.
If you're not dying, fighting, taking pictures (see 'The Money Shot') or playing Pipe Mania, you're probably shopping. BioShock deploys almost all RPG elements through vending machines, as odd as that sounds. From them you buy Plasmids, their passive cousins, Tonics, and extra slots for each. Plasmids are essentially spells, so more of them means more options in combat. Tonics are as near as BioShock gets to attribute boosts, in that they improve your character's capabilities, so a few more of these essentially constitutes a level-up.
But one of the reasons this system is so smart is that it's not as simple as that. For one thing, you can switch your choices out freely at Gene Banks all over Rapture, so there's masses of room for experimentation and variety. And because Tonics aren't restricted to dry numerical increments, they get wonderfully exotic. To give you some idea of how distinctive you can make your character with these, I focused my character so tightly on hitting things with a wrench that by the end of the game, I could brain any unsuspecting enemy with a single swipe.
In addition to learning these strange new skills, the main thing you discover during the early sections of the game is Rapture itself. It's an incredible experience, and the first of three big reasons why BioShock is very special indeed.
The sound designers deserve a huge chunk of the credit for this. Think of the first time you set eyes on a game like Far Cry, and imagine the audio equivalent. It's exquisite, not just in setting the powerful ambience of Rapture, but in evoking the crackling, fizzling smack of combat. And as if for an encore, the acting is *perfect* - sometimes uncomfortably so, given the gruelling themes. There's even a plot twist that hinges on one voice actor sounding natural when saying something very deliberate, and they pull it off. It's hard to imagine another game being able to trust their talent with a trick like that.
Despite what you'd assume to be a limited visual palette, Rapture's districts manage to be sumptuously diverse. I found myself dreading to leave each area because the next couldn't possiby be as gorgeous - and I was wrong almost every time. You'll trudge through bristling green gardens, rusty wharfs, frosty white ice halls and infernal factories choked with amber smog.
And yet every scene in Rapture has the same three clashing forces. Firstly: the water. It drips from cracks, seeps through ruptures, gushes out of burst pipes, washes in swells across the floor, crashes down stairwells in a flurry of spume. A city under the sea is a defiance of nature, and nature's encroaching response is rendered beautifully.
Then there's the sheer sense of hubris: the neon optimism, the cheery posters and glib commericals. "My daddy's *smarter* than Einstein," a child's voice chirps from a Plasmid vending machine. "And *stronger* than Hercules! And he lights flame with a snap of his fingers! Are you as good as *my* daddy? Not unless you visit the Gatherer's Garden!"
And lastly there's reality: the pain, horror and psychosis of the people who actually tried to live there. Audio diaries recorded on the verge of tears, desperate words scratched in blood on the wall, and disfigured bodies, travesties of the people they once were. Those that still live are no less corpse-like, but they roam the halls nonetheless, mumbling insanities. "I found her like that!" a Splicer protests to an empty room. "I can control myself, I swear I can!"
Splicers are what Rapture's citizens became, once the things they'd done to their own bodies had finally driven them mad. The alarming words they ramble, to themselves and to you, are the centrepiece of Rapture's heavy atmosphere of horror, discord and suffering. Many are unique to the lunatics of a particular area, and you rarely hear the same line twice.
A doctor in the Medical Wing with one blank eye beat me to death with a rake, shouting "It's JUST... a STANDARD... PROCEDURE!", then made a verbal note of my time of death. "You're just jealous!" a hideous debutante screamed as she clawed at my face with a meathook. "Run!" bellowed a matronly snob with a bouffant hairdo and a rusty machete. "That's all your kind is good for!" A weaselly looking man with blood on his lips smacked me with a three-foot Maglite then shouted "Oh just fucking REPORT me then!" These people *hate* you, for no good reason, and it's horrible.
Don't hold your breath for the Splicers you're fighting to escalate into Trigens or the like; BioShock isn't game-like in that way. You're in Rapture, so you're fighting Rapture's erstwhile citizens. It doesnt' feel the need to up the stakes or the scale because it's telling a story, not wowing schoolkids. Splicers are far from uniform in appearence or ability in any case, as are your methods of dealing with them.
Your skirmishes take place in an environment bristling with manipulable elements. Drones, turrets and security cameras are the most obvious, but there are also fuel puddles that can catch fire, and water that any burning Splicer can be counted on to run towards - which can then be electrified. Detritus, grenades, missiles and even fireballs can be sucked up and flung, and your enemies themselves can be subverted to do your work - directly or otherwise.
Only a handful of the standard weapons are really interesting or satisfying when used alone, but mix them with a generous menu of Plasmids in an environment like this and they become spectacular. Even with an element as familiar as the grenade launcher's proximity mine, the scope for impishly inventive violence is overwhelming. Clump five on a barrel and propel the resulting super-bomb at a crowd of victims with Telekinesis. Chuck one in the nearest pool of water then set your prey alight. Stick one on the ceiling directly above a Cyclone Trap - an invisible springboard that catapults unsuspecting enemies hilariously in the air. The AI for a befriending drone even has some ideas of its own: bolt a proximity charge to the little guy and he'll divebomb the next enemy he sees.
It's the same for the Decoy Plasmid - an ability we've seen in plenty of other games. But here you can place it on a barrel to trick melee Splicers into beating their way to a fiery death. If they're packing heat, set it in front of a Big Daddy and see what happens. My favourite was to place it just before vanishing with an Invisibility Tonic, then get bonus Research points for all the multiple-subject action shots I take of them beating the holographic hell out of my creepy doppelganger.
The richness of simulation is continually surprising, and the variety of absurd brutality that emerges from it is one of the three big reasons that BioShock is essential. Even when you're not carefully tinkering with it to create deathtraps, it serves as a catalyst for the screeching, brutal choas of combat. These are gallingly visceral fights. There's something tangibly unkind about setting somone alight, then clotheslining them with a five-kilo bloodstained wrench as they scream past you towards water.
If you're worried about the dreaded taint of consolification, by the way, don't. It's clear that the PC team at Irrational are every bit as platform-snobbish as us. There's a PC-only options menu that lets you turn off the quest compass guiding you to your next objective, disable the golden sheen on mission-critical items, and as for auto-aiming, it isn't even an *option* unless you plug in a 360 pad.
Also exclusive to this edition as a magnificently intricate PC-only quick-switch menu. Because you can have 19 different weapon ammo types on top of your six Plasmids at any given time, using the mouse wheel can get fiddly. So there's also a key you can hold down to pause the
game and pick any one of those 25 modes of attack with a single click. Hacking, too, has been designed differently for the PC to make best use of the mouse - it's quicker, slicker and less frustrating than the sluggish Xbox controls.
The final geekily gratifying thing about the PC version is how well it runs. It was dazzlingly beautiful and hitchlessly smooth on a machine with an £80 processor (an Athlon X2 5200) and a single entry-level GeForce 8800 - running DirectX 9. And this was at 1600x900 on max settings.
But you don't care about that. You want to know about the Big Daddies. Those diving-suited ogres have become the poster-boys of BioShock, but they're less central to the game than we've been led to believe. You could complete it without ever attacking one. Each Big Daddy guards one Little Sister - a family tree only MC Escher could draw - and their relationship is bizarre and compelling to watch. Sometimes the girl will turn sulkily away from her giant friend; he'll nudge her gently a few times for forgiveness, then offer her his enormous metal hand. She'll turn and take it gently, bowing a little, and he pats her tiny head very, very carefully.
There are two or three Daddy/Sister partnerships trudging and pattering around each of Rapture's seven districts, and attacking them is more of a profitable hobby than the objective of the game. Your motive to do so - and it's a compelling one - is that the Sisters are the only source of Adam in the game, the currency you need to buy new Plasmids, Tonics and slots. And so, inevitably, you'll do it.
I shot my first from 30 feet away, figuring that he was tough and powerful but essentially a big ball of metal, and therefore slow. I can now report that Big Daddies are not slow. The instant - the *INSTANT* - you become a threat to the Little Sister, you're smashed to the floor by their vast bulk, their face-lights flaring a livid red. This thing closed the distance between us in a fraction of a second, floored me so suddenly that I thought I'd died, then impaled me on a four-foot drill bit before I could get up. They *hammer* you; the disorientation effects are nauseatingly good, and you can't walk or shoot straight even if you do manage to escape their raging metal fists for a minute. The Splicers are certainly fierce, but I've never
seen anything in a game look so *angry* as a Big Daddy when provoked.
Controlling, containing and defeating that explosion of rage within these volatile environments makes for some of the best boss fights in gaming. But because Big Daddies aren't immediately hostile, you instinctively clear the whole area before taking them on. You're then left with three to take down one after the other, and the prospect is daunting. Plenty of different ways exist to do so, but any fight with one of these things exhausts: you don't feel like going two more rounds immediately afterwards. It's a minor complaint - you can take them on as you find them, come back later, or leave them in peace - but it's still an odd decision to pack in so many. One per area would have been just right.
The Big Daddy dealt with, there's the much-previewed dilemma of whether to 'Harvest' or 'Save' his Little Sister- there's a dedicated key for each choice. With the former you get more Adam, with the latter the girl survives. And yet surprisingly, the decision is hardly relevant. You don't see what it is you do to the poor child either way (this has changed since the preview demo Tim described in PCG 177), and the material reward is ultimately almost the same.
[[[FD's note: No, it wasn't me that previewed it. With that, "harvesting" them was really, really brutal; they're moved off-screen slightly in your hands, there's a sickening crunch as you see your arms twist, and then you've got the Adam in one hand and the corpse in the other. You devour the Adam, and the broken body is tossed aside without another thought.]]]
I didn't *ask* for a game that lets you kill children, but if you're going to make one, I think you have a duty to make the player face the grisly reality of his choice. Glossing over the consequences seems almost to condone the act. But I'm not here to preach, and the truth is that it couldn't be less important - the game would be exactly as good if the choice was removed entirely. I just want to make sure you don't play BioShock expecting a game about tough moral choices, because it's not and it doesn't need to be.
A lot of fuss has been made over the fact that you can't just shoot the Little Sisters - the sea-slug parasite inside them heals the damage instantly, says the game fiction. But in practice, you get used to the idea very quickly. I mean, hopefully your desire to headshot a toddler is fairly low to begin with, so discovering you can't do it anyway is not exactly the end of the world.
The choice that really *is* emotionally affecting comes before this. Do you kill the Big Daddy? You're usually desperate for Adam, but these gentle giants are the only things in the game that mean you no harm. Once you've watched them hammer a few Splicers, you develop a real fondness for the big guys, and their death is far more disturbing than the mysterious vanishing act a harvested Little Sister pulls. Their tiny charge patters barefoot over to the enormous dead hulk, wailing and sobbing. "Mr Bubbles!" she cries, "Please get up! Please!"
BioShock's main plot isn't about the Little Sisters, but it does have a sequence that gave me a Schindler's List pang of guilty for killing
them all (what? I needed the Adam). And Schindler's List isn't a cultural touchstone that comes up a lot when talking about games. There's a richness to BioShock's fiction, a conflictyed complexity to its characters, and a humanity in its themes that we're wholly unaccustomed to in gaming.
But it *is* uniquely a game: its most powerful moments play directly on the conceits of gaming itself. Where others try to contort film scripts around interactive shoots, BioShock uses violence as a bloody foundation for its real stories. While the relentless onslaught of the murderously insane continually rams home the horrific nature of what Rapture has become, two other threads tell the story of its past and future.
The story of its past is something you have to investigate: it's in the audio diaries left by Rapture's citizens when they still had some marbles to lose. They tell their personal stories in instalments scattered throughout the game, so if you actively hunt them out, you end up following each person's story to its (usually sticky) conclusion. Most of these are grim, some are achingly sad, and one or two are utterly nuts (look out for The Wild Rabbit). And one contains a harrowing twist to the main plot that's revealed nowhere else.
As for what's *going* to happen to Rapture, that story is the propulsive force of the game, and it comes to you over the wireless. Irrational don't like to let you meet sane people in person - they can't be simulated realistically - so don't expect any Black Mesa East chapters. But there is one moment, in dealing with the few still-vaguely-cogent people of Rapture, that's simply staggering to experience.
BioShock had already made me physically gape several times but this stage, but here my mouth fell open ands tayed open, only widening further as the scene became more extraordinary with every passing second. I'm going to suggest to Irrational that they patch the game to activate the player's webcam at this moment, because the gormless visages it elicits must be hilarious.
Again, it's BioShock smartly exploiting its status as a game for a psychological sting. That single scene casts the whole game in a new light, even your own actions within it. Irrational have somehow become such masters of game storytelling that they can *toy* with the very process, mock it, and bend it to their will.
So that moment, the dark contortions of the plot at large, is the third and final triumph that makes BioShock an instant classic. But it also precedes the third and final problem. This is a short sequence, and not a very difficult one, but its mediocrity is hard to stomach because of when it occurs. It's the end. After a game so singularly smart and beautiful that it makes others seem laughable, we get a final level that could have been pulled straight from the tripe BioShock puts to shame elsewhere. Imagine Citizen Kane ending, after you find out what 'Rosebud' means, with zombie Orson Welles fighting a giant Agent Smith made of smaller Agent Smiths. It doesn't negate how wonderful the preceding experience has been, but it does rather spoil the mood.
Regardless, BioShock is a dark and astonishing masterpiece. It might not be as flawless as Half-Life 2, but it bites off so much more and accomplishes it all magnificiently. Even if you've soaked up every preview and trailer with relish, you haven't scratched the surface of how deep this unsettling meditation on hubris and insanity actually goes. If it were just a thrilling ride through a twisted and remarkable plot, BioShock would eventually get old. But there's a physicality and openness to its richly systematic combat that suggest it'll stay fresh for a very long time.
This is the really bewildering thing about it: it succeeds so stunningly on three fronts. Not esoteric ones, either, these are the big challenges developers have been struggling to master for decades: narrative, emergence, a sense of place. If another game did just one of these as well as BioShock, it would immediately qualify as a classic. When a game comes along that does all three, we can only be baffled and thankful.
I spend my career, and my gaming life, waiting for a moment when a game just astonishes me, when I can't believe what I'm seeing, what I'm *doing*. BioShock has five.
SUMMARY: Distrubing and spectacular.
IT'S: A horror game. A long game. A Shock game.
IT'S NOT: Bugged. Demanding. About killing kids.
ONE WORD SUMMARY: Sublime.
95%
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[[[FD's note: Was going to throw in some more of the little
asides, but one is kinda funny and relies on pictures, one just
describes the Plasmids, and a few others are a bit pointless, so I'll
only add in one...]]]
Ol' Red Eyes: When horror reaches fever pitch.
At one stage, you're at the mercy of a delicious deranged Sinatra character: Sander Cohen. His realm, Fort Frolic, is decorated with people posed with statues, mummified alive in plaster then slit from ear to ear. The art direction is so brilliantly dark that at several points you physically jump at the scenes you find. Meanwhile the writing - not to mention the voice acting - brings to life one of the most magnificently unhinged characters in gaming. When one of Cohen's victims begs him to "Just let me go, you sick fuck!", there's desperation to that venomous plea that's truly wrenching.
At first, the things Cohen makes you do are unsettling. But by the time he locked me in a theatre, blasted Tchaikovsky at full volume from the sound system and sent dozens of homicidal ballerinas dancing towards me, I was up for it. Each went down with a single, brutal wrench-blow to the skull, and as I twisted aside to dodge lunges from every angle, I realised I was dancing. Not just dancing, but *ballet*. I was doing twirls and flourishes between beating as my assailants cartwheeled around me. Eventually I had to pause the game because I was laughing too much at how beautifully mad it was. I'd unwittingly collaborated with Cohen to create a work of cinematically macabre performance art. I had, I realised, lost it.
Feeling that at last someone had made a level to rival The Cradle in Thief 3, I complimented Ken Levine on the section. "Oh yeah, that was made by Jordan Thomas," he said. "He did that level in Thief 3, what was it called... The Cradle?"
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Ik kan wel zeggen dat dit echt fantastisch klinkt. Vermaak voor volwassenen. Helemaal een game die ik zoek. 
Laatst bewerkt: 10 aug 2007
