Bioshock

I finally finished Bioshock today. It took some time because of two things. First, Michelle gave me Batman: Arkham Asylum for my birthday just as I was about to start. I’m a Batman fan. So it was no contest.

The other reason is that the game is so frustratingly difficult. And it has no checkpoint system common to newer games. There’s a resurrection mechanism called “vita-chambers” but it leaves you with less than what you started with. I had to resort to save-play-die-reload cycle so many times. In the more difficult sections, I was seeing the load screen more than actually playing. It didn’t help that the saved games take so long to load!

The difficulty almost ruined the whole game for me. Thankfully, as your character becomes more powerful, it tapers off to the point where the final boss was quite easy. Still fun, but anticlimactic.

Then there’s the quirky graphics: It’s rather cartoony. Though its supposed to be part of its style and it is actually good in that respect. However, it just doesn’t work for me. I want my games to have reasonably realistic graphics like Metal Gear Solid 4 or Assassin’s Creed II. Even something like that of Batman: Arkham Asylum, which is already cartoony to me, would have been better.

But I pushed through. And I was glad I did because beneath the extreme difficulty and artsy graphics is a quite intricately woven story with a few surprising twists. That you have completely no idea what’s going on and you have to uncover and piece things together as you go along makes it even more compelling.

In the game, you are a survivor of a plane crash who stumbled upon a vast seemingly abandoned and broken-down underwater city. It quickly became clear that the city is far from abandoned when you are attacked by mutated people called “splicers” and unmanned security bots.

Thrown into the mix are diving suit-clad hulks called “big daddies” who are protecting creepy little girls aptly called “little sisters” who gather a material called ADAM. This ADAM is used to genetically-enhance or “splice” yourself. But wait, there’s more! To fuel your genetic enhancements, you need to have a material called EVE.

And of course there’s your usual mix bag of weapons such as a wrench, a pistol, a shotgun, a tommy gun, a grenade launcher, a crossbow, and a chemical launcher. All these require ammunition with the crossbow being unique in that you can sometimes pick up and reuse the bolts.

Put everything together and you have a pretty sophisticated game that is ultimately satisfying to finish and has reasonably good replay value due to all the variables available. Worthy of being 2007’s game of the year? Maybe not.

Rating: 4/5