Review – Bioshock

About halfway through Bioshock, I had concocted three different introductions to use in a review.

Then I lost my saves.

Word to the wise; don’t transfer your offline gamertag onto Xbox Live at 2 in the morning. Bad things will happen. They did to me, and I had to play the entire first half all over again. Doing this was a blessing in disguise, as it showed me a few things about the game that were not evident the first time around. Then the second half taught me even more. Let’s get right to the point; this is a good game. Is it a great game? Some will feel it is not, as there are most certainly a few problems here. Is it a work of art? This is an even tougher question to answer. Not because the game fails, but because it challenges the medium like few before. There are going to be dozens of articles about the dynamics between the Big Daddies and Little Sisters. We are going to read many essays that look at every square inch of Rapture’s design. But I’m here to tell you that Bioshock proves, for now, that Roger Ebert is right about modern videogames. And in demonstrating this, it also shows just how powerful games can and will be when we really figure this medium out.

Bioshock is certainly a gorgeous game, chock full of high poly models and the whole spectrum of graphical filters. That’s great, but it means little if the environments are not interesting. Bioshock also has the usual amount of crazy physics and movable objects, though every so often you will still find a box of bibles or a table that just won’t budge. Like any 3d game, at times Bioshock just cannot avoid feeling like a Disney ride. Yet Rapture ends up being one of the most beautiful and convincing worlds ever ever put into a game.

Bioshock brings attention to detail to a level not previously seen. Rarely is there a hallway that looks the same as the last, except for when they need to be, like in an underwater tube between buildings. Each area has been gone over with a fine toothed comb, everything designed and placed with meticulous care. We are accustomed to seeing such attention given to a handful of setpieces in a short action game. The fact that Bioshock puts it into such a massive gameworld is more than impressive.

I wouldn’t say it feels “lived in”, because the city isn’t all residential. Let’s just say that Bioshock creates an underwater city built by a 1950’s industrialist, where grenades are made from tin cans and gene splicing tonics can be found in vending machines, and somehow the whole thing makes sense. It may be little more than a magic trick and a whole lot of polish, but Bioshock makes you forget about its limitations in order to show you its strengths, and that’s a lot more than can be said of other games. Rapture alone is worth the price of admission.

Still, this is a game, and while in Rapture there are plenty of things to do besides sight see. Between your arsenal of weapons and plasmids, there are a lot of different ways to take out your foes. The AI is clever enough to make enemy Splicers do everything from squabble and fight each other to ambush you outside of a door, which makes combat mostly interesting throughout. There are a lot of ways to tackle any given situation, and I’ve already heard of some things that I didn’t know I could (or should) do to a mob of enemies. I’m not sure about the “no two games play alike” stuff, but there’s more variety than you would think from a game with only six enemy types.

It does fall apart sometimes.. The wrench becomes far too powerful by the end of the game, meaning you can be very well armed throughout, even after leveling a couple Big Daddies. Hacking becomes a chore, and while there are ways around it, they should have made the whole process harder, hard enough to make the act high risk and high reward. The fact that you can’t really die makes kamikaze tactics valid. Certain sections call for more focused enemy placement. Having random Splicers spawn throughout each level helps boost the image of a living, breathing world, but a concentrated assault with machine guns or a shelling from a balcony above would have added even more tension. Finally, the very tail end of the game runs out of steam and utilizes some very predictable gaming cliches that don’t mesh well with the rest of the journey. How much this will bother you depends on what you are looking for in the game. These problems are not that offensive compared to what you will find in most shooters, but if you expect this to be the second coming, I’m not sure what to tell you.

But don’t give up on it yet. This game begs for us to dig deeper. Let us look how it ties into Ebert criticisms. The prolific film critic believes that the interactive nature of games causes a problem. If games are art, then giving the player control can destroy that art. It can change the intended meaning of a scene. The very nature of games guarantees that things can go wrong. In a film, the action scene is the action scene. In a game, a beautifully scripted action sequence can go awry thanks to a glitch. A cutscene can accidentally be skipped. No matter what failsafes a developer tries to implement, unforeseen things can happen.

This fundamental problem with interactivity was revealed to me in Bioshock after losing my saves. Facing the task of replaying everything I just completed, I felt a wave of dread. This game was on rental, and it was due back on Monday. I had a deadline to finish this game, and not only was I uncertain if I could do it in time, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to go through it again. With beer in hand I restarted on Easy. Two and a half hours later I was done with the Farmer’s Market. By my estimation, this area is roughly halfway through the game.

Let me say that again – I went through nine hours of previous play in about a fourth of the time. I played it like a speedrun, blazing through every location as quickly as possible. I didn’t bother to re-explore Rapture, to look for things I might have missed. I didn’t stop to re-admire the beauty of the structures. I knew what I had to do, and nothing else got in my way. On my first playthrough I savored everything Irrational worked so hard to show me.

On the second time, I gave it the finger. Many of the most potent scenes and revelations in Bioshock can be bypassed or ignored. Those that cannot become nothing more than a nuisance when you are running through the game like a bat out of hell. And while I took this route after taking my time initially, I could have played like this from the very start. I could have thrown all the meaning away. Hell, I made one of the game’s big moral decisions based on earning an Achievement. Is that really powerful? Some of my favorite films only get better after each viewing. I can’t see Bioshock holding up very well on subsequent playthroughs. If I bludgeon the game over the head with my wrench, is it still art?

I am reminded of Ebert yet again when looking back at Bioshock’s major twists. They are stunning and powerful, and it just so happens that the most powerful moment in the game takes place in a cutscene. The best part in the game comes when you have no control. I know that every time I watch an RPG cutscene from now on I am going to be sad, not only because they won’t be nearly as good, but becauseI’ve realized that the way most games attempt to be “moving” and “emotional” is by imitating movies. Think about it. We use cutscenes and scripted sequences, fully orchestrated soundtracks and Hollywood actors all in the name of making things more “cinematic”. Have no designers stopped and thought about how a “cinematic game” is an oxymoron ?

There’s more. There is a moment in Bioshock where you’ll add something into your inventory the size of a small nuke, and you will go on glorified fetch quests. It isn’t anything you haven’t done before, but when placed into a world that is as convincing as Rapture, it helps bring to light just how stupid most gaming cliches are. Let me put it this way; when a film does something ridiculous, it isn’t because “that’s just the way it is in this genre”.

You can’t blame Bioshock for these revelations. They exist because of its nature as a videogame. The fact that it brings them to light at all makes it more important than any game that revels in schlock. What is important, however, is that Bioshock tries to do something about this. Not by asking “How can we fix this?”, but by saying “Can we do better? Fuck yes.”

Just in time for the release of Bioshock, 1Up has an interview with Irrational’s Grand Poobah, Ken Levine. This, I feel, is required reading. While Bioshock is certainly not his first great game, it is the one that will make him an industry celebrity. Like Jaffe, Kojima or Molyneux, everything he says from now on will be heard. That is, if he says anything. Levine is the type of person we need to see more of in the games industry. When 1Up asks him about industry trends, he mostly replies with his own experiences. One moment he lambasts the censorship of Manhunt 2, and the next he’s criticizing developers for acting like seventh graders. When asked about the potential of a PS3 port of Bioshock, he doesn’t dance around and string us along like Kojima is with Metal Gear Solid 4. He just says no. This is a a man who doesn’t care about industry drama or arguing with the public or making a name for himself. He is just a guy who once tried to get into Hollywood, and instead found himself expressing his creativity in games (a twist that Ebert would relish). David Jaffe will tell you he will make you cry, but Levine has a better chance of actually doing it.

If I learned anything from the 1Up feature, it is that Levine and Irrational have a simple goal – make a game filled with awesome things. As Ken states in the interview, a ten minute tutorial that teaches a Marine years worth of combat info is not awesome. Excessive cutscenes are not awesome. Just like a piece of literature, a story driven game needs a good initial hook, and since it is a game, the story should never take over the experience. Levine brings his know-how as a writer to his games, but he never forgets that they are games in the first place. They are different, and he treats them as such.

This is why Bioshock works. Near the end of the game, I found myself growing tired. I didn’t want to find clever ways to kill enemies, and I didn’t want to explore. There are only so many ways to dress up an apartment complex, and that stupid map wasn’t helping much. The game didn’t give a shit what I wanted to do. There are times when it has to nudge you forward, but it also let me ignore huge chunks of each environment without making me feel guilty.

But I kept exploring, and I kept cursing myself for doing it. Could they have trimmed down the size of each level? I suppose so, but it never struck me as lazy filler. It was all part of their vision. If Bioshock was turning a bit sour, it was because of my own tendencies as a gamer. It was my fault for playing it like an obsessive compulsive. My choice. And the game was showing me just how conditioned I had become. Why was I making this game into work? Because I had been taught to do so.

Furthermore, while the twists could be done in a film, they wouldn’t be nearly as potent. They work because you are in control. Even the cutscenes work because you were in control. Bioshock challenges our notions of how we interact with video games. It acts as both commentary and revelation. Like Metal Gear Solid 2, it needed to be an interactive experience in order to convey its messages. The twists in Bioshock are as powerful as anything I have seen in a film, and it isn’t because it tries to emulate film. Instead it uses its own strengths to try to tell us something.

In the end, it doesn’t matter if you want to ignore Rapture. It doesn’t matter that we can gain control. All Bioshock wants to do is let you do awesome things. That might mean following the story, and that might mean picking fights and rampaging through each level. Bioshock wants you to feel something, whether it is high emotion or just an adrenaline rush. Quite frankly, this is something movies cannot always do. Sometimes we can make our own meaning. But sometimes we are going to leave confused or unimpressed. We might have wanted more action or more comedy.

The same things can happen in a game, but they don’t have to. A game can give choice. It is a powerful and special aspect of games, and we can and must learn to wield it effectively. There are some things that film will always do better than games. Just accept that. But there are some things that games can do that films simply cannot, and that is a great strength. These forms are not enemies, nor are they two sides of the same coin. A game is not a film, which is not a book, which is not a piece of music. By recognizing this, Bioshock tries to be worthy of the same consideration as these other forms of media we so often call art . Does it succeed? That is for you to decide, but few games get this close. At the very least it shows us what we need to do.

Grab that damn wrench, and let’s get to work.