Bioshock Review

Spliced to meet you…

Bioshock begins heavily scripted, guiding you down corridor after corridor into the underwater hell that was once the glorious city of Rapture. Take time to soak in the atmosphere and appreciate the rich world created by Irrational 2K Boston/2K Australia, and you’ll be heavily rewarded.

This is a world crafted with love. Clearly, meticulous effort has gone into designing each room, into selecting and creating the soundtrack. It’s quite simply beautiful, while avoiding stale, conventional settings. It all adds up to a wonderfully immersive experience. So let the game take over.

For my tastes, the combat is a bit twitchy and frenetic. But the plasmids and other genetic modifications that are revealed over the course of the game make it open to far more experimentation and therefore more rewarding. Do you freeze your enemies and then hack them into little chunks of ice, or set them ablaze and throw their dead friends’ corpses at them? There is no “right” approach in Bioshock.

Together, these are the ingredients for a great game. But the story that wraps them together takes Bioshock to another level, offering genuine emotional impact and never straining credibility within the game’s world. As well, the choice to tell most of the story through audio diaries that you can listen to at your own leisure rather than through cutscenes is surprisingly effective – immersive and enjoyable – it’s amazing what an excellent script can do.

A fantastic premise, a beautiful world and a great story. Bioshock sets a new bar for this generation as a story and as an interactive experience.

5/5

~ by 6outof5 on September 4, 2007.