BioShock should be the game of the year – easily. No game in the last year has combined amazing graphics, an engaging storyline and a feeling of tension in the same way, and very few possibly will. Compared to other first-person shooters or adventure games, the gameplay mechanics and the atmosphere and story put it into elite company in the history of gaming, and though the storyline may provide just 20 hours in a play-through, those hours are incredible.
2K Games’ masterpiece, available on the Xbox 360 and PC, throws you right into an Ayn Rand-inspired underwater utopia called Rapture. The city’s founder, Andrew Ryan, dares you to seize the world as your own from the beginning – “Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?” he says as you enter the now-dilapidated dream world. What the game gets so very right is the atmosphere. BioShock is set in 1960 in a world that hasn’t shifted much since the late ’40s, and it feels like it, from the haunting strings during tense scenes to the art deco details in the game’s menus and all the small items that you run across.
The atmosphere and gorgeous graphics in BioShock help to drive forward the thrilling action and storyline that 2K constructed. The ambience created by the decaying underwater utopia is perfect to provide frights, and BioShock delivers – in ways both pre-planned (bloodstains all around in some areas, boss fights, frightening audio diaries that add to the game’s background story) and unplanned (enemies who can literally materialize from thin air managing to sneak up on you).
BioShock’s roaming mini-bosses, giants in dive suits known as Big Daddies, encompass both the frights and the game’s amazing open-ended combat. Wandering around the levels, the Big Daddies protect twisted-looking little girls named Little Sisters who harvest energy from deceased residents of Rapture. How you deal with the girls provides the game’s moral crux – the question is, do you want to save those little girls or sacrifice them for greater power?
Either way, the Big Daddies must fall, but how that happens is up to you. Besides traditional gunplay (with weapons that can be upgraded throughout the game) the game uses “Plasmids,” DNA-altering tonics that allow the player to do many feats, from lighting objects on fire, zapping them with lightning, averting the attention of security robots, or setting out a personal army of bees.
And this is where the frights come in – hearing a Big Daddy lumber around a level sends a shiver up your spine, figuring out how to initiate combat and attack the brute adds tension, trying to survive and take them down makes your heart race, but seeing them fall after protecting the little girl can be heartbreaking.
Any game that can be so moving – with a haunting storyline, wonderful visual presentation, creative world and memorable characters – deserves the highest praise possible.
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