Bioshock

The deeply enticing trailers of an equally disturbing game started to appear when the Xbox 360 was about to launch and it sent shockwaves through the gaming community - "was this a pre-rendered movie", "will it look anything like this" and "what on earth is going on?" were some of the questions flying around.

Well, almost a year on and it has finally surfaced and has been very well received by every magazine that has covered it....maybe even some that don't cover games have covered Bioshock at some point.  I played (and completed) the PC version in all its DirectX10 glory and the jury is still out.

The game is set in an underwater city called Rapture, set up during the 2nd world war by a visionary who wanted somewhere for the rich, famous or excessively intelligent to live away from the riff-raff associated with a normal society.  Unfortunately they stumbled on a substance called ADAM which would enable them to do some wonderful things to their bodies....and it was good....until it turned all of the inhabitants mad with overuse.

The story starts with you on a plane, smoking a cigarette and looking at photo's until the plane goes down and you find yourself in the Atlantic surrounded by wreckage and burning jet fuel.  The flames conveniently guide you to a nearby lighthouse and an open door.  This is where life gets that little bit more complicated.  You get into a biosphere which takes you to Rapture.  The ride down allows you to take in the sights, almost like downtown New York but with much more water.  Fish swimming past casino's and bars, whales swimming where roads should be and an it all seems like a great laugh. 

Unfortunately, it wouldn't be much of a game if everything was rosy in Rapture.  Your first experience of the world within is of a Splicer attacking one of the few civilised people who had come to greet you.  This pretty much sets the tone for the rest of the game.  You leave the biosphere and are guided out by a man named Atlas using a radio you've just picked up.  This forms the basis of nearly all the conversations you have right through the game.  Nearly all the people you meet in person are trying to kill you.  What a town.

Rapture today is a ruined maze of underwater tunnels, standing water and psychotic inhabitants called Splicers.  These people are almost ghosts of their former self but with a physical presence and an unhinged hostility towards any outsider - namely you.  They roam around mumbling about things they do - some female splicers talk of acting and being in a play, others make comments about their patients (they're doctors gone wrong) until they see you and then they will unleash their rage on you.  They take on a variety of forms depending on what they were, some carry hooks and look like farm workers, others wear lab coats, it matters little, they all want to hurt you.  Some will carry machine guns, others just a steel pipe.  The most annoying ones hurl moltov cocktails at you, but if you have the telekinesis plasmid you can catch them in mid air and hurl them right back at him.

Plasmids

Once you've dried off you immediately get your first experience of a plasmid.  These are chemicals you inject into your left arm which allow you to wreak havoc on the citizens of Rapture.  Plasmids vary from bolts of electricity to swarms of bees and everything in between.  You get more powers by collecting the coloured vials scattered around the city and the variety of different powers lends itself to different situations - for instance if you have an enemy in a pool of water, fire a bolt of electricity into  the water and fry whoever is unlucky enough to be paddling.  A fireball is a good way of dispatching an enemy quickly but careful not to use it when there's water nearby - they'll dive into it and put themselves out.

Unfortunately plasmids aren't free ammo and you need to collect syringes of EVE just to keep your powers up.  These are scattered around randomly, either on dead bodies, on shelves or in vending machines.  You can carry up to 9 vials of EVE at once, so use it wisely.  You are also limited by how many plasmids you can add to your armoury at one time.  Scattered around Rapture are plasmid banks - here you can store different types of plasmids for use later if you don't need them immediately and as luck would have it, these banks tend to be sited where you may need a change.  You can add more slots but these requires collecting ADAM and the only source of this is the little girls you see walking around being followed by a hulking great monster in a diving suit and a big bellowing voice.  You have to take out the big daddy (as they're called) before you can get to the ADAM in the child.  The big daddy is heavily armoured and suprisingly light on his feet so they're a real task to take down.  Fortunately they won't attack you unless provoked, so you don't have to take them on until you are suitably equipped to do so.  Its best to wait until you have a decent supply of armour piercing rounds before even trying.  When you finally do take one down you're confronted with a choice.  You can either harvest all of the ADAM and kill the little girl or you can take some of it and save her.  What you do here will determine the ending of the game I'm told.  I chose to save them all and was left gifts of more ADAM and other treats, but its up to you how you want to play it.

There are other types of plasmids too, but these fit into different slots, be it body related or engineering or combat.  The former could give you more resiliance to attack, the engineering one may make the security cameras react slower to your presence and the latter could make your enemies freeze when you hit them with a wrench.  Hours or fun for all the family.

Death

Its surprisingly easy to die in Rapture.  Your body is quite frail and there are no armour pickups to collect.  There are armour plasmids you can collect but these don't help a great deal.  Luckily in every section there is a chamber that you emerge from when you die.  You are resurrected with all your weapons and plasmids as they were when you died and it takes next to no time to be resurrected and continue on your merry way.  This was necessary to make the game playable as people would have become frustrated with it, but I think its actually its greatest flaw.

I don't think I've played a game where I died quite so much.  Taking on a big daddy you may die two or three times.  Take on a room full of splicers and you'll be emerging from that tube at least 3 or 4 times and you quickly become immune to it.  Death is no longer a problem and the fear of what may be lurking around the next corner is gone.  If you clear a room, chances are within 5 minutes there are splicers in there again - its a never ending stream of enemies and a frankly pitiful supply of ammo for any weapons you've picked up.  Sure you can buy ammo at a vending machine but you'll never earn enough money to afford to keep your guns remotely filled up, not when you have to buy life and other bits and pieces to complete your quests.  Luckily you have your trusty wrench which can be powered up with plasmids that cause your enemies to freeze, making them easy targets, so you'll be wrenching splicers to death for most of the time.

Hacking

Most of the machines in Rapture be it a health station, a security droid or a vending machine can be hacked.  If you have an auto hacking tool this makes things easier but if you don't you can enter a dangerous game of Pipe Mania - remember that game on the Sinclair Spectrum?  You basically have to reveal squares on a board to find the right pieces to extend a pipeline that is quickly filling with water from one side of the board to the other.  If you hack a health station it'll actually hurt enemies when they try to use it and it'll also improve your own health on the cheap.  Hack a security droid and it'll follow you around shooting any splicer that attacks you.  Groovy eh.

Unreal3

The new Unreal3 engine provides the guts behind this game, the same engine that brought Gears of War to Xbox 360 owners and will bring Unreal Tournament to the PS3 and PC.  Its a great engine that can use Directx10 features as well as DirectX9 and it has been tuned quite well for this game.  The developers actually brought in people especially to do the water effects and they did a stunning job.  There's water everywhere and it looks great.  The whole game is set in 1950's art deco and it looks glorious in places.  I'm pleased to say that it doesn't kill your framerates either.  DirectX10 graphics on an 8800GTS and I'm frequently getting over 60 frames per second on a 22" (1680x1050) monitor, which is remarkable when you compare it to Company of Heroes where I'd be lucky to get 35FPS.  Ironically its the system requirements of this game that have caused the most controversy.  Its one of the first games to refuse to run on a PC with a shader model 2 graphics card - anything older than a Geforce 6600 and you're not going to be playing this game.  In all fairness the oldest shader model 3 cards are over 3 years old now so if you don't have one you probably shouldn't be buying brand new PC games in the first place.

Its not a perfect engine though.  What it gives in terms of efficiency and texture quality it takes away with jagged lines - there's no anti-aliasing with DirectX10 textures on.  You can force it to run in DirectX9 mode and force anti-aliasing on through your graphics driver's control panel but that's it.  Jaggies it is then.

Buy or rent?

Initially I was playing this game more out of duty than enjoyment.  I really didn't get on with it.  I really didn't like the constant stream of enemies into areas I'd already cleared and the story wasn't really pulling me in.  The constant dying was getting boring and I felt gutted for PC gaming as one of its brightest stars turned out to be a huge disappointment.  But then, something happened - I can't say what - but it made it better somehow.  I started to care about Rapture's future and wanted to get to the bottom of what was going on so I kept going and finally finished after 14 hours.  I'll probably not play it again for a while, if ever, but I'm pleased I did.

The graphics are great, the AI is pretty good and the story whilst slow to get started is quite a good one.  I think its more of a technical exercise and a demonstration of the unreal3 engine than a great game in its own right, but it made a weekend go by quite quickly at the very least.  Imagine an aquatic "Condemned" and you're halfway there.

You can either buy it on disc in normal packaging, in a steel box (no extra's, just a steel box) or on Steam.  There is also another limited edition set with a Big Daddy figurine, but I've not yet seen one available over in the UK.